Top Ten Tidying & Decluttering Tips.

Happy Saturday my lovelies! I hope you’ve had a good week and are as happy as I am that payday has finally come for most of us! It’s this time of the month that I decide to do a bit of tidying up and get my space in order ready for the next month ahead.

I think we all have that one chair in our rooms that is the dumping ground for clothes and other things we can’t be bothered to put away during the week, and I am certainly no exception! At the start of the month my room is nice and tidy, but by the end of it it’s a complete mess and I’ll be feeling more stressed because of it.

This is why I’ve started tidying up every two weeks and decluttering at least once every two to three months to make sure I’m not gathering up unneeded clutter. (I struggle with OCD so I struggle to throw things away sometimes but it’s got better over the years).

So, today I figured I’d share with you my ten tips for tidying up your space so it’s actually liveable, rather than an instagram/pinterest bedroom because let’s face it, those are ridiculously unattainable in reality.

What I will say though, is that before you start decluttering and tidying your space, it’s actually a good idea to have a look on Pinterest for room inspiration which will make you much more motivated to start cleaning up your space!

Here’s my Pinterest board of room inspo:

So, onto my ten tips for a tidy space!

1 . Dedicate a specific date or time to tidy up and declutter. This can be once a month, every three months, even every week if you want; by decluttering regularly you’ll make sure you’ve got the space for the things you really need.

2 . Really take a look at what’s in your wardrobe and organise what you have by item. And try on everything you own and decide what actually makes you feel good.

Here you can see my wardrobe before and after decluttering and organising:

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3 . Get yourself some smart storage solutions. If you have loads of hair and beauty products and heat styling tools then I highly recommend picking yourself up a utility trolley! They’re great for holding all of the products and tools you need in one nicely organised place.

4 . Bookcases are great for storing more than books! If you have loads of shoes, using a bookcase for storage is a great solution to display your shoe collection and it makes deciding what shoes to wear so much easier because you can see all of your options!

Here’s my shoe collection! Safe to say I may have a bit of a shoe addiction!

5 . Give every item you own its own home. Whether it’s books, makeup, your glasses, everything in your room should have it’s own designated space.

6 . Try going minimalist for a few weeks. This may seem drastic, but if you box up all of your belongings only leaving out the bare essentials, you might find that you’re pretty content with what you’ve got and are feeling less stressed. And when you need something that you’ve put away in the box, you can get it out and find it it’s home.

I have done this twice now and it’s amazing what you can collect over time that you realise you never actually use. After a month or two of being minimalist, I often donate some of the things I don’t use and keep the sentimental items in their own box for safe keeping.

7 . Make your bed! We are a nation divided into ‘bed makers’ and ‘I’ll just be getting messing it up again later’ people. I am a firm believer of making your bed every morning, it just make your room look so much neater and cleaner.

8 . Get rid of unnecessary furniture. Have you got that one table that never gets used? What about a chair? I had a small coffee table that I couldn’t bear letting my mum get rid of but I never actually needed it, so that one had to go. And just like that, my room looked loads bigger already.

9 . Set aside a few moments at the end of the day to tidy away small items. This way the clutter and untidiness won’t creep back in!

10 . Finally, put on some music or a film whilst you declutter! It’s always much more fun when you can sing and dance along to some tunes whilst you get down to tidying!

And those are my top ten tips for decluttering and tidying up your space! Having a clean and decluttered room always makes me feel relaxed and calm. How do you like your space to look? Have you got a particular aesthetic that you like? Let me know in the comments!

Have a great weekend my lovelies!

Love,

Easy Elf On The Shelf Ideas.

Hello my lovelies! It’s the most wonderful time of the year! (Well, it nearly is.. it’s pretty much December in my eyes). Have you got your tree up yet? If you know me and my family well then you’ll know that my Christmas tree is up straight after Halloween! We love Christmas so much and my house pretty much becomes Santa’s grotto for the festive season.

With December is just a few days away, lots of elves will start to appear on shelves very soon; and with that, lot’s of parents are going to need to have a whole host of ideas to keep their elf busy whilst the kids are asleep.

That’s where this post comes in, to help you all out with some ideas for when you’re stuck, I’ve put together a list of easy ideas that’ll only take a few minutes to do with a few games from last years edition of elf games thrown in!

So without any further ado, here’s some elf on the shelf ideas!

1. His or Her arrival!

2 . Zip line fun!

3 . Hanging out with Santa.

4 . Wanna decorate gingerbread?

5 . Reindeer food.

6 . Getting started on the Christmas dinner.

7 . Time to start writing those Christmas cards!

8 . S’ELF’care day!

9 . A bit of light reading.

10 . Marshmallow snowmen and women!

11 . Forget reindeer, we’ve got duckies!

12 . Snowelves.

13 . Spider-Elf.

14 . Toilet roll snowman.

15 . Candy cane noughts ad crosses.

16 . Ok.. I had to include this one because we were laughing so much at how much this pepper looked like a butt.. so, here we have ‘Keeping Up With The Elf-ians’.

17 . Where’s Elfie?

18 . Hot chocolate anyone?

19 . Candy cane hunt!

20 . Date night for Elfie. Do you like his bowtie?

21 . Pun/book hunt! (Have Elfie hide the books for everyone to find!)

22 . Which cup has the candy canes?

23 . Bedtime box!

24 . Melted snowman.

And of course for Christmas day you can have your elf with your presents! I love Christmas for so many reasons, food, family, feeling the festive spirits, the aesthetics and of course the memories.

Some people aren’t a fan of parts of Christmas like doing the elf of the shelf, but one reason why I love it is because it creates great memories for kids! They get to wake up each day seeing their elf doing something funny in the lead up to Christmas day and all of the people helping the elves get into position get to have a giggle doing it too!

If you’re after more elf ideas, you can check out more naughty Christmas elf ideas from last year here too! What’s you favourite elf idea? Let me know in the comments!

Have a great weekend my lovelies!

Love,

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Easy Halloween Brownies And Pumpkins.

Hello my lovelies! How’s your week been? We’re slowly getting further into October which means we’re beginning to see Halloween decorations everywhere! And it feels like we’ve got ages until it’s actually Halloween, but just like Christmas it’ll creep up on us and before we know it, it’ll be here.

So, I decided I’d show you some quick and easy Halloween decorations, in the form of pumpkin carving and some yummy brownies! And to prove these are actually quick and easy, I did these in the space of 4 hours!

First up we’ve got the brownies. These are something anyone can do when you’re short on time and they’re really easy to do with kids. You can make them from scratch, or just use a box mix from Tesco like I did; it saves time and money! After baking them, the decoration was simple, some melted white chocolate, a bit of chocolate buttercream and decorations you can pick up with the box mix!

One thing I did with my brownies is add some orange zest and extract to give them something a bit extra. Here’s what they look like, basically, just chuck a load of spooky decorations onto the brownies and you’re good to go!

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Here’s how I decorated them!

Now, onto the pumpkins!

These were super easy to make; you can do the classic face, cute face or you can use a stencil to do a more intricate design! And of course since stencilling makes it easier to do more complicated designs, I had to do my teacup!

And guess what, I’ve included two stencils for you to download and try for yourself!

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Cute huh? Who said Halloween had to be scary anyway?! Here’s how the octopus looks carved!

Another very quick way to jazz up your pumpkin is by adding costume accessories to them! Here I added a day of the dead hat and mask and used a melon baller to create eye’s. Top tip, for scooping out the middle of the pumpkin after getting rid of the seeds, I’d definitely recommend a melon baller, I found it surprisingly easier than a spoon! And it’s great for getting perfectly circular eyes!

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And voila! You’ve got yourself some cool pumpkins that’ll impress and some yummy spooky brownies! What’s your favourite way to decorate pumpkins? Last year I painted mine! (You can take a look at them here.) Let me know in the comments!

Have a great rest of your weekend my lovelies!

Love,

DIY Embroidered Fashion.

Happy Saturday my lovelies! How’s everyone’s week been? Mine has just flown by, which I’m not mad at haha. Onto this weeks post! Well.. more like last weeks post to start this one. So, I had so many lovely comments on my last post and Insta about my Harry Potter House inspired outfits and my Unique Fashion post and I’ve had a few requests for a DIY for the embroidered Hogwarts tee I made, so.. of course I had to make you lovely people a tutorial!

P.S. I love getting requests for posts so please feel free to drop any of them in the comments so I know what you want to see from me!

Plus, it’s pretty easy to make! So don’t think you cant do something before you’ve tried it just because it looks hard or scary, because you’re so capable of doing everything you set your mind to! Alright, motivational pep talk over. Let’s get into it!

Here’s what you’ll need:

• An image you want to embroider (you can get this online or draw it yourself)
• Tracing paper or Baking paper
• A pencil
• A t-shirt or any other clothes you want to embroider
• Interfacing, enough for your design (You can find it on amazon cheap – here’s what I use, or you can use a scrap of fabric that’s fairly sturdy, linen or cotton I’d recommend!)
• Embroidery Thread (whatever colours you want!)
• Embroidery needle
• Scissors
• Embroider hoop the size of the design you want to embroider

Here’s the drawing I used for my tee, you can use it yourself if you want, and if you do, let me know how it turns out in the comments or tag me on insta @theweightofmyworlds !

Step 1 : Find or draw the image you want to embroider, then if you’re using an image your found online you can either print it out or place tracing paper over the screen and trace the image you want, or draw it free hand on the paper!

Step 2 : Cut out interfacing the size of your design. Then iron it (shiny side goes to the fabric) to the underneath of where you want your design.

Step 3 : Put your fabric in the embroidery hoop and make sure the fabric is pulled tight. (I wouldn’t recommend using super stretchy fabric because the embroidery will shrink once it’s taken out of the hoop and it’ll be harder to embroider).

Step 4 : Place the image on tracing paper over your hoop on your t-shirt. Then thread your needle with your chosen embroidery thread and make your first stitch through the paper, so the paper will no longer move when you’re sewing.

Step 5 : Using small stitches go over your line drawing, tracing your drawing with the stitches to complete your design.

Step 6 : Carefully tear away the paper (I used an unpicker to get under the tiny pieces of paper, you just need to be careful to not unpick your stitches!) to reveal your design!

Step 7 : Optional – if you’ve got a ring where your hoop was, you might need to iron it out!

Finally : Wear your creation with pride!!

And that’s it! Depending on the size of your design this can be a really quick DIY or it could be one you do over a longer period of time; I managed this DIY in 2-3hours on and off from start to finish.

I love being able to make clothes my own, and having that sense of pride and achievement wearing something you’ve made is amazing. Embroidery is also pretty therapeutic to do whilst watching the TV, so why not put on your favourite show of film and get creating! My next piece I’m customising is an old denim jacket which I can’t wait to show you when it’s done!

So.. what do you think? Are you inspired to make your own? Or do you already personalise your clothes with little touches? Let me know in the comments!

I’d love to see your creations so be sure to tag me in them on insta (@theweightofmyworlds)!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Love,

Easy Christmas Nails

Merry Christmas everyone! Christmas parties are in full swing and that means not only am I looking for outfit inspo on Pinterest and Instagram, but also Christmassy nails that you can actually do yourself at home. So I decided to try a few of the designs out for myself to see what ones are actually doable for all of us at home!

1 . Classic Red and Gold.

These were simplest to do, just paint your nails red, let them dry and then add a simple tree onto either your ring finger or any other finger you want to stand out! This one can be done with any colours too if you’re not into red nails!

2 . Candy Cane Stripes.

It’s impossible to mention Christmas nails and not add some candy cane stripes into the mix. I did these by painting my nails white, then adding on the stripes with a small brush, if you’re a bit shaky when doing your non-dominant hand, get someone else to paint the stripes for you!

3 . Christmas Puddings!

These went pretty well, I didn’t have a green nail polish so the holly leaves on these ended up being a gold shimmery colour, but I think the glittery look makes these even more festive.

4 . Snowmen.

Who doesn’t think of snowmen when they think about Christmas and Winter time? This are so easy to do and only require 2 nail polishes at the very least! A white for the base and another one for the snowmen faces, you can use a different colour for the carrot noses if you want too. These are a classic for Christmas nails!

5 . Blue and White Christmas.

I think these are my favourite out of all the designs because it’s something I haven’t really seen that much and because even though this is one of the more complicated designs, it can still be done at home. Also, these nails will look elegant in any colour! For these I painted all the nails white except for the navy glitter one and then added all of the designs on with a small brush (any kind of brush should do the trick as long as it’s small! I use a tiny acrylic paint brush.)

6 . Pinky Nude Snowflakes.

These are another favourite of mine, when I think of pinky nude colours I don’t really think of Christmas; and that is what makes these perfect for the person who wants a bit of festive cheer that isn’t screaming at you in the face. For these I used the same method as the above nails!

Which nails do you like best? I think I’ll be going with the blue and white or pinky nude designs, I love the different patterns on the nails with a bit of sparkle! Are you planning on having your nails done for a party? Let me know what you like for your Christmas nails in the comments below!

Merry Christmas lovelies!

Love,

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Easy Naughty Christmas Elf Ideas

It’s that time of year again!! And for loads of parents, this means not only Christmas shopping but also their ‘Naughty Elf’ will be making an appearance soon. Now, when it comes to said elf or elves, remembering to actually have them do something overnight can be a bit tricky.. especially when the Christmas drinks are flowing! So this year, I’ve put together 25 quick and easy ‘Naughty Elf’ ideas for you to do when you’ve simply forgot or haven’t got much time.

So, here we go!!

I had so much fun doing these and I’m sure you will too! My personal favourites out of these are:

At the end of the day it doesn’t matter how inventive your ideas for the elves are because the whole idea behind the elves is to have fun at Christmas and to make your kids laugh.

It’s a short and sweet post this week, but I hope you enjoyed it! And feel free to use the ideas for your own elf/elves; let me know which ones are your favourites in the comments below!

Have a great weekend everyone and stay tuned for my Christmas Gift Guide next weekend! Love,

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Easy Halloween Pumpkins And Snacks

Hello lovelies! Halloween is fast approaching; which means we’re all thinking of cool decorations and snacks that we don’t see everyday! And this often means searching the depths of Pinterest for hours on end finding some pins which don’t look impossible to do at home.

So I’ve decided that I’ll put together some pumpkin decorating ideas along with two quick and easy things you can do for Halloween snacks!

Let’s get into it!

Snack first; and because it’s Halloween, that means sweet treats! So I decided to make some cute mini shortbread skeletons and mini meringue eyeballs! They’re pretty quick and easy to make and only took me about 30 minutes from start to finish.

How cute are these am I right?!

On to making them! You can buy a simple shortbread mix from most supermarket nowadays so that’s what I did as I was short on time.

Here’s the steps:

1 . Make the biscuit dough (you can use any biscuits you like).

2 . Roll out the dough out on a lightly floured surface, making the dough roughly 5mm thick.

3 .  Using a cookie cutter the shape of a person (pick whatever size you want!) cut out as many people as you can. You can always use any small pieces of dough left to make an extra biscuit for when you have a cuppa later!

4 . Bake the biscuits for however long your biscuit recipe requires and leave to cool.

5 . Once the biscuits are cool, using whatever colour icing you want, pipe on a smile, or funny face (it is Halloween aft0er all!) and the rest of the skeleton bodies!

6 . Once the icing is dry. Eat!

For the meringue eye balls:

1 . Buy some meringue kisses and some googly eye cake decorations.

2 . Make up a slightly on the thicker side icing with just water and icing sugar.

3 . Dip the googly eyes into the icing and stick on top of the meringue peaks! Done! Nice and simple.

Now, when it comes to Halloween, one of the first things we think about is sweets, costumes and of course, pumpkins. And I don’t know about you, but I love picking and carving pumpkins.. however, I’m not a massive fan of the mess that comes with it.

So this year I decided I would look into some other ways I can decorate some pumpkins, without all of the mess from carving huge ones.

Here’s my pumpkin display:

These didn’t take very long to do which I was quite surprised about! The pumpkins that took the longest were the ones that required paint, but even then they didn’t take very long.

For the painted pumpkins I used cheap Tesco water based paint as a bottle of these are £1 each which is a bargain! I also used a sharpie for the calligraphy on the large pumpkin, that one is my favourite.

Decorating the painted pumpkins were my favourite to do overall, because I love to paint anyway. The multi coloured pumpkin was decorated by squeezing paint over the top of it, a bit like how you would chocolate drips on a cake, and I simply layered up the different colours until the top of the pumpkin was covered and the paint were dripping down the sides. I suggest doing this over newspaper or some kind of wipeable surface as it gets pretty messy! I left mine to dry over a few days and the paint ran down to the bottom leaving a cool pattern.

For the biggest pumpkin, I mixed a mint green colour because I wanted the calligraphy to really stand out against the paint. Because pumpkins are pretty shiny, I ended up applying three layers of paint, but it didn’t take very long as I used my hairdryer to speed up the drying process a bit! Once I was happy with the colour of the pumpkin, I lightly drew out the ‘trick or treat’ and then filled it in with a sharpie!

The last pumpkin I painted was a tiny one, and I realised that I like the simple look of the painted pumpkins so I painted this one black and then splattered white paint on it which I think looks pretty elegant.. especially considering it’s a pumpkin!

I bought a bag of cobwebs and spiders which I used for the only pumpkin I fully carved, and I think it worked quite nicely. I actually carved this pumpkin from the bottom, because I think it looks nicer than the open top, and you can hide your carving marks. I also found a cool tip for making your carved pumpkins last longer, which is by brushing the carved areas with vegetable oil! I also stuck some spiders on the top for eyes, because I hadn’t seen anything like that done before and just thought why not.

I will admit, I think I like these two pumpkins nearly as much as the painted ones; not because they’re elegant, because they certainly aren’t that! But they are cute and pretty funny. I recommend that you have a sharp knife for cutting a mouth for these because these small pumpkin/squashes are very hard to cut! I bought some cheap vampire fangs and used peppercorns for eyes on these, all I had to do was cut a section large enough for the fangs and made some indents for the eyes and tadaa! Mini silly pumpkins!

What are your favourite ways to carve and decorate pumpkins? And what are your favourite sweet treats to make at Halloween? Let me know in the comments!

And lastly, Happy Halloween lovelies!

Love,

Easy DIY Chocolate Truffles

I had a long look on the web at loads of different chocolate truffle recipes, and when I came across this one from BBC Good Food, it looked so simple I had to give it a try. And I found this one easy..ish. So here’s the thing, I thought I could get these made after work one day in a few hours, oh boy was I wrong! You definitely need an entire day to make these in my opinion, or maybe I over estimated my chocolatier skills haha. Either way, I’d recommend doing these on a day where you’ve not got much planned. Basically I made all the mistakes possible so you don’t have to.

So here’s what happened when I tried making these. I thought it’d be a good idea to try this using less than 70% cocoa chocolate as its cheaper, 70% cocoa chocolate is pretty expensive!! And I thought that if these go horribly wrong then at least I haven’t wasted a load of money, and good chocolate. Instead of making just dark chocolate truffles, I also tried this recipe with milk and white chocolate, now I know what you’re thinking, milk and white chocolate haven’t got as much cocoa in it as the dark, especially cheap chocolate! But I thought that if there’s any chance of making a few flavours then i’ll just give it a go now so you don’t have to.

Well, what worked? The dark chocolate truffles turned out fairly well considering I’ve never made truffles before, and the milk and white chocolates well.. the were a disaster! On the plus side, I did find that using this recipe but with milk chocolate does create a fairly yummy chocolate sauce, just not truffles. I might have worked if I had picked milk chocolate with more cocoa in it, but never mind!

I will say that I found shaping my truffles hard, I think I left my mix in the fridge a little too long! So I’d certainly call my truffles rustic looking.. You’ll probably have more luck than me!!

Here’s the recipe –

You will need:
300g good quality chocolate – dark (70% cocoa solids)
300ml double cream
50g unsalted butter

1. Chop the chocolate and tip into a large bowl. Put the cream and butter into a saucepan and heat gently until the butter melts and the cream reaches simmering point. Remove from heat, then pour over the chocolate. Stir the chocolate and cream together until you have a smooth mixture. You can add any flavourings at this point. Cool and chill for at least 4 hrs.

Melting the butter and simmering the cream

Broken up chocolate

Pouring the hot butter/cream combo over the chocolate

Mix until it’s all smooth!

2. To shape the truffles, dip a melon baller or teaspoon in hot water and scoop up balls of the mixture, then drop the truffles onto greaseproof paper. Or lightly coat your hands in flavourless oil (such as sunflower) and roll the truffles between your palms. You could also use a piping bag to pipe rounds onto greaseproof paper.

(Forgot to take photos of this bit! Sorry!)

3. Coat your truffles immediately after shaping. To coat in chocolate, line a baking tray with greaseproof paper. Melt 100g milk, dark or white chocolate for 10 truffles. Allow chocolate to cool slightly. With a fork, pick up one truffle at a time and hold over the bowl of melted chocolate. Spoon the chocolate over the truffle until well-coated. Place on the baking tray, then chill.

Pouring over the chocolate and adding stripes!

Into the fridge to cool

4.Store in the fridge in an airtight container for 3 days, or freeze for up to a month. Defrost in the fridge overnight. Keep in the fridge until you’re ready to give them.

Here’s what mine looked like! They tasted pretty good even if they did look ‘rustic’ haha!!

These chocolates are great for presents, if you’re better at shaping and covering them than me! They’re good even for events or just as a treat whilst you’re watching a film. I hope you enjoy!! Let me know how yours turn out in the comments below!

Love,