Latest Stand

Cavania has just finished exhibiting at the Autumn Fair, NEC Birmingham for four days.......now we are setting up at Top Drawer, Olympia London.......Oh the gang are so tied. But the stand looks fabulous guys, well done.

Chapman Valley fair

I visited the Chapman Valley Fair at the weekend and have a bundle of pictures to show you over the next week. I thought that the home grown flowers and arrangements would be a wonderful place to start.





Many of the flowers are new to me as they are native and I am slowly learning the names.

Shabby Chic Furniture

More of the furniture I have been collecting has been finished and now in the Beach House, I have given it all a shabby chic finish for that vintage effect.
Using different shades of white, cream or grey's for the finish colour makes them all tone and sit together nicely. If I had used all the same colour cream it may have been a little bland for such a large room.




I treated myself to this vintage wooden bobbin at an antique market, it came from an old weaving loom somewhere in Australia. I need to find some of my crochet laces and ribbons to wind on it, they are some where in a box here, I still have not unpacked everything I brought. But now I have some furniture to put things on I will have to sort through the boxes.






Little hand painted hearts.... Faye, Christian and Karen. Family Love.

A lovely old basket I found at a charity garage sale last weekend, perfect for my waste paper bin. It reminds me of my Great Aunts as a child I am sure one of my Nan's sisters had something like this.

Thank you

Just a quick post and a huge thank you to Torie Jayne, as I have just discovered I was the lucky winner of her recent giveaway.
I can't wait for the parcel to arrive.....I feel a photo shoot coming on.

Mirror mirror

Mirror mirror on the floor...........
oh my look at what treasure I have found, I saw this art deco inspired mirror in a secondhand store and instantly liked it. After contemplating for a few days and a lot of hints to Christian we finally went back and managed to get it for $100 with another picture frame. I cleaned it carefully with soapy water and the backing paper was torn so I was pulling out the loose papers to tidy it up and to my surprise the stuffing was an old newspaper. The mirror backing had been lined with the newspaper, Australian, and was dated was January 18th, 1916 so this gorgeous mirror is nearly 100 years old, it has worn patina on the mirror glass and chips on the gilt frame. I put the paper back and taped up the tears so as to keep its history intact.

'Dear mirror if only you could tell me where you have been hung and what you have seen. You are so grand you must have had pride of place in a beautiful home'

Crab Hunting

"Hey look here there's a hole ....... a crab hole", if Mina the poodle could talk thats exactly what she would be shouting at us.


"I know there's something in there" she is telling me.


"That's it I can't wait for you to put the camera down, I'm going in...... wish me luck!"

The very cute Mina belongs to Wendy my Sister-in-law, I so want a poodle of my own...... please Christian....pretty please.

Beach House Stylish Sofa

Project: Sofa makeover for the Beach House
Total spend : $326



I have finished the sofas and thought you might like to see the end results, I am very please with the way they have turned out. We stumbled upon this 3 piece suit in a second hand store and after sanding the frames back and giving them three coats of wood paint, I recovered the cushions with fabric I found for $1 a meter in the sale at Spotlight, which couldn't have been more perfect for the beach house look I wanted to achieve. Now I need to make some scatter cushions for some colour and frill.



Below are a few photos of some gorgeous fabrics and designs from the Ralph Lauren Home collections. This style and look was the inspiration behind the recovering of the sofas for the beach house.







Before the makeover-

Picnic on the Beach

Last weekend the weather was lovely here in Geraldton, WA, and we managed to spend the whole weekend on the beach, well 'Lucy's Beach' to be precise.

A charming hideaway just over the other side of town, it only took 15 minutes to get there and you would have thought you were on a private island all of your own. We had it to ourselves for the whole time, which is crazy as I am used to very crowed beaches back in the UK, if the weather is good the whole world and his wife turn up, but not here, it was idilic. Saturday we had a cream tea on the beach with scones, jam and hot tea it was perfect, even a table cloth was laid out, after all one does have standards.

Faye and her cousins played in the surf with their boards and the kayak.




4x4's were defiantly needed to get to Lucy's beach, first the dirt track and then it was sandy slopes to get to our little paradise strip.


To finish the day we just had to have a BBQ feast, and him upstairs put on the perfect sunset to end a perfect day.

Faye and I cant get enough of this country life and we certainly are settling in and getting used to this slower pace of things.