Dresses.......... a girl's best friend

Dresses....... a girl's best friend

The beauty of a dress is that you have one base from which to work your outfit. Whether it is patterned or plain, one colour or more, it will be a central part of what you wear and can be dressed up or down depending on your mood and what you are doing.

A fun and flowery dress can be dressed up with a smart jacket and heels or dressed down with a soft cardigan and flats. If you change to delicate sandals and a floaty wrap the outfit will take you into evening.

On the other hand a smart work dress can be worn with a jacket for business or dressed down with strappy heels and chunky jewellery for going out.

A well fitting dress gives you confidence. You can walk into a room and own it as you know you look amazing.  

My favourite shape of dress is a fitted mock wrap dress. They are perfect for my figure and hide a lot of sins

Wearing nice clothes makes you feel good; it makes you feel feminine and more confident in your physical appearance.  I am the first to admit that a good dress can make an amazing difference.

Dresses are my favourite item of clothing and teamed with the right accessories, a simple dress can be a brilliant statement piece.  A dress can be a splash of colour teamed with black tights, shoes or boots and a little cardigan or jacket. (my standard for work). I have an hour glass figure and find that the right dress can accentuate in all the right places.

Short dresses of the right style can be teamed with leggings and this makes them far more accessible for people who may be conscious of their legs. (Definitely me). Jumper dresses with leggings and a pair of nice boots is always nice for autumn and winter when you need more layers but don’t want to ditch the dresses.  Putting a long sleeved top under a dress with short sleeves can also make them far more versatile. I find a plain, black long sleeved top and a pair of black leggings and boots can really add mileage to your favourite dresses through the winter. Floaty dresses, however, should be kept for summer and jumper dresses for winter unless you are particularly inclined to be either hot or cold all year round.

The picture at the top of the page is a selection of my dresses. They don't photo that well on hangers so I have added some pics here of me in some of them. (apologies in advance for the model)

There are a lot of blogs devoted entirely to dresses and fashion in general and I love to do an on-line search and sit and read through them. Some are relevant to me  and some are not but it is very interesting to see other people's points of view and it is a good way to get ideas for outfits and styles.

Billie and Blossom at Dorothy Perkins has been a source of some of favourite dresses and more recently Mela Loves London at New Look, Next and House of Fraser.

 One of my favourite dresses is orange and purple and was £20 at  Camden Market. I have had loads of use out of it and it seems to have grown and shrunk with me :-) The shrug was a charity shop buy and matches perfectly.

 I could spend hours just adding pictures of my favourite dresses but that could get a little boring for everyone so I shall go and look at some fantastic dress blogs like A Million Dresses, and see what everyone else is wearing.  :-)

Blog news 28.06.2015

Just a quick post to explain that I am back!!!

Personal commitments and moving house have kept me very busy the last few months but I will be back writing about various things very soon.

Very happy to have downsized to a gorgeous little one bedroom flat and I will be writing about that and a few other interesting things. ( well, I hope they are interesting anyway.)

Bye for now

xx

Second hand, not second rate.

I have come to the conclusion that I love clothes but hate shopping. Well, I have always known I hate shopping apart from buying books, stationery and, weirdly, charity shop shopping. There is no pressure with charity shop shopping because if they have not got something in your size then you don’t get it, if they do not have it in a colour you like, you don’t buy it. There are no expectations and no disappointment.

These days the charity shops are mainly run by one professional manager and a group of volunteer staff. The products are usually clean and smell fine. (I still always wash things as soon as I get them home)

One woman’s rubbish/ bad buy/ wrong size purchase is sometimes exactly what you are looking for. For example, the colour orange was in a lot last year and is still going strong. Not all women can wear it but will have bought it because it is “on trend”. When they realise it looks hideous they will donate it to the charity shop. I am very lucky and can wear orange and have found some lovely pieces this year. ( I cannot wear yellow, beige or cerise pink so have learned to avoid it. Luckily for me there are many women who are slaves to fashion.)

Weight loss or gain is another reason that nice pieces of clothes end up in the charity shops. We have all had that post diet clear out or that sudden realisation that all the clothes we were keeping “in case” will never fit and we have donated to the charity shop of our choice. It is not uncommon to find pieces with labels still attached which have clearly never been worn. (I tend to avoid the items which have been well loved). The average things I buy in the charity shops do not look second hand but can be exactly what I am looking for.

We all, from time to time, buy something we are not sure about, wear it once or maybe twice then never wear it again. These items are also ones that end up on the rails of the local hospice shop, or Oxfam or one of the many other deserving causes. Yet again, one person’s very bad purchase can end up as a well worn favourite for someone else.

Bags are something I buy from charity shops but I have had a couple of dodgy handles so need to be more careful. Filofaxes are the first thing I look for in a new charity shop and I have found some brilliant ones. I always like looking at any other stationery and, of course books.  There is a fantastic Woking hospice charity shop in Horsell in Woking where you can buy three paperbacks for £5. Every time you spend £5 you get your card stamped and when you have spent a total of £50 you get £5 off. This is a great way to buy books and so much cheaper than some of the other charity bookshops. Their hard backs and non-fiction books are individually, but very reasonably priced.

I think the days of smelly, tatty goods being sold in dingy, musty charity shops is, to a large degree, over. There will always be the odd one that thinks piling dirty old things into a small, mismanaged space, is the way to go but a majority of the charity shops are now well stocked with an interesting array of well organised products and very good displays.

There is a Phyllis Tuckwell charity shop in Quarry Street in Guildford which has better window displays in their small window than some of the large department stores with their visual merchandisers manage to produce. They either pick a theme, like Christmas, winter, Easter etc or a single colour for their display. Sometimes they have chosen pieces that go together and create their own theme like an African theme they had recently. This included ornaments, jewellery and animal print clothes as well as other pieces which matched together to make a well considered window display.

I know there are sometimes people who are snobby about buying second hand items and they are the people who miss out on amazing bargains which you can find while giving to deserving causes. There used to be a stigma about buying used items but I think the huge, worldwide Vintage market has helped raise the profile of all kind s of second hand purchasing.  (Charity shops, car boot sales, Ebay, etc)

Finally I have included a picture of all the orange pieces I have bought in charity shops recently.  (all orange, just different shades) The jacket was only £7 and is brilliant condition. The scarf was, in fact from my sister but she bought it in a charity shop anyway. The most expensive piece is the jacket at £7 and the cheapest is the patterned top at £4. 

Find a penny....

Find a penny, pick it up and all day long..........you have a penny!

I know, I know, I am far too cynical, but you would be too if you had to use the train to commute to and from work every day. Five days of anticipation, not knowing if the the wrong kind of weather is likely to jeopardise you getting to work  or if the train will be late because they just cannot be bothered to arrive on time. Admittedly that is not an excuse that you usually hear announced by the various voices that represent South West Trains over the ultra efficient tannoy system. I say ultra efficient but, as they only make announcements as the fast train thunders through the station like a deranged beast, it is hard to tell. 

I do think the most annoying, and probably most unintelligent announcement they make is “delayed due to awaiting a train crew at Portsmouth”. That is the tannoy announcement which is guaranteed to make the passengers blood boil. They may as well say “You will all be late for work today because Mr. Lay Zee Sod of Portsmouth cannot get his act together and arrive at work on time”. The train company management team do not seem to appreciate that this is not a good way to impress a crowd of tired, overworked people whom, quite frankly, are precariously near live rails, slippery steps, hot oil slick coffee and various other items they carry with them. (Don’t get me started on that subject) If a murder was to take place at a station would anyone be surprised? Would anyone be blamed? To be honest, would anyone care?

As for telling me how many coaches there are......... I seriously don’t care!  There is no reason I wish to know this. If you have to be at a certain place in the train then you ask the leg dragging, dribbling, overweight, put upon man wandering on the platform wearing his snazzy SWT uniform and hoping his day ends quickly. You may get the correct information but he will try his best with the total lack of resources at his disposal.

Cancelling trains is probably the most frustrating thing that SWT can do. It is never a good time to cancel a train but seven am when I need to get to work is most definitely the wrong time. This week we had a seven am battle to get on a train which goes to the next town which is, incidentally, seven miles away. So the signals had stopped working again and no one knew what to do about it, when they will be working again or how hundreds of commuters, who rely on the trains to get to work, will actually arrive at their destinations. I presume that SWT do not think the passengers travel with them because they want to, they travel with them because they have to or because it the lesser of several evils.

Firstly the brain boxes at Woking station decided to lay on ONE taxi that takes five passengers. With the heavy traffic in Guildford and the usual gridlock situation that occurs there, this would take more hours than I care to calculate just to get a fraction of the people to work. The next announcement was that a train had pulled in on platform two and the Guildford line had re-opened. A huge amount of people then surged up the stairs and over to platform two like a herd of wildebeest fleeing from a pack of hungry lions. After a ten minute wait on the train we were then informed that we had been misinformed in regard to the train and had to disembark and make our way back to platform five for our possible transport to work. The herd were up and running again in the vague hope that they may actually find a seat on a train that was truly planning on going to their chosen or necessary destination.

The aforementioned scenario is a normal part of train travel and everyday life and I should be used to it; however, I will still complain about it, I will still joke about it and I will still write about it.

My first 2 quotes of 2015

Both the following quotes make me laugh. They are both fashion related in a round about way.

"He looked like he had dressed in the dark after a scarecrows orgy." This is by the hilarious author Stephen Clarke and sums up a few people I see on my journey to work.

"You can't go shopping in a red plastic vest if you have a belly like a space hopper". A very accurate quote by the writer and presenter Jermy Clarkson. If only this was a law, it would prevent the hilarious, yet scary mistakes that are often made when people get dressed.

Service with, or without a smile.

Good service is something I am always surprised at and this is a sad indictment of our world today. We should be appalled by bad service, not expect it, but this is how life has become. Despite high standards being demanded by business proprietors, the staff on the ground just do not deliver.

After working in retail, catering and childcare before I decided that admin was a better path for me, I know the pressure put on staff, the bad conditions and the low wages. Having also worked in the personnel department of a large supermarket, I am well aware of the standards expected by the owners of businesses. They put pressure on the people below them and that goes all the way to the people on the ground. They, in turn, take it out on the customers with bad service and bad attitudes. The expectation of what each staff member can do will often be far more than is possible and this comes about by companies cutting staff budgets while trying to increase productivity and profits.

There will always be hard workers among the staff in an organisation and they tend to take up the slack of the people who don't care, can't be bothered or are so demoralized that they do the minimum they can. Sadly though I have found that doing any job, however bad, to the best of your ability, is ultimately far more rewarding than doing a job badly. Your sense of pride should make you want to do a good job and it also makes your working day go faster.  A good work ethic is always a good example to the people around you and your children too.

I am sure there are many people working in jobs they hate who have been ground down  by the day to day issues they face combined with problems which are not work related., however , that is not the fault of the customer. If you go into a business, whether it be a retail business, your doctors surgery or travelling on public transport, you expect to be treated decently. However badly my day is going I know that I have to slap on a smile and treat each patient in a decent manner. Being polite costs nothing, smiling costs nothing, treating people with respect also costs nothing. There are rewards for treating other people in a decent manner, knowing you have helped someone is a good feeling. I know it is hard when you are at work and someone decides to be rude to you because you cannot deliver the impossible or they had a bad day, but you have to rise above it.

I have had some fantastic service and always make a point of giving positive feedback. For example, Specsavers in Guildford always give good service and cannot do more to help the customer. When I broke my glasses leg in my lunch break, which was totally my own stupidity, they had four members of staff finding a leg that would fit and they did it free of charge. On another occasion I was given a free spray and cloth when I asked for advice on the why the coating needed so much cleaning. These little things mean that I always recommend them to people.

Boz's Fruit and Veg in Woking opened this year and their service is brilliant. The quality of stock, the prices and the service of every staff member is fantastic. it is a simple enterprise but it works as they concentrate on those three key elements. (A good product, a fair price and a very high level of service.)

The third example of a high standard of service was in fact in Ogilvy's in Woking. I went there for lunch with my Dad for my birthday. The food was delicious, there was a lovely atmosphere and, most importantly, the waitress was brilliant. They had one member of staff serving all the tables. She had to take the orders, deliver the food, deal with any queries, present the bill, clear the table and get the table ready for the next diners. She did this with speed, efficiency and a smile. There were no mistakes made and she was friendly and polite the whole time.

These examples do show that it is possible to deliver top level service in all jobs. You can rise above the rubbish that is thrown at you on a daily basis and treat people how you would like to be treated.

Quote 5

I am not sure who wrote this, but I like it.


"Somewhere someone dreams of your smile and finds your presence in life so worthwhile. Remember it's true that someone somewhere is thinking of you."