Back to uni and moving into our new house...

This summer has been one of those peculiar ones which seems to have lasted forever, yet simultaneously flown by. Sometimes I actually feel as though I haven't been to university at all - summer has been so long that I feel like I've never been away from home!

But today I've been busy moving into our new student house, ready to begin our second (eek!) year. We're officially fully fledged students now, which is exciting and a little bit terrifying in equal measure. I'm very excited to have a kitchen of my own (well, we have two and they are shared between the six of us, but you know what I mean), so that I might be able to learn to cook some Grown Up Food rather than just cakes!

I thought that it might be a nice way to integrate my blog with Round 2 of my student life by showing you around our new home. As it's a student property, there isn't bound to be much in the way of decoration provided in our rooms, so another thing I'm really enjoying is making my humble abode seem a little more homely. In preparation for this, I've brought with me all of my posters, lots of books, some lovely handmade bits and pieces, and a couple of vintage and retro trinkets too. 

As a sort of leaving present, my sister made me a pom pom 'bunting' string, which is very cute; I've hung it around my noticeboard, where I've pinned some pretty vintage-style postcards that I found in my scrapbook box. (In other woolly news, I eventually succeeded in making a giant pom pom to hang in my window as well. It's all good). 

My pink bunting came from a Crikey It's Vintage fair in Exeter last September, so I'm rather late to the bunting party, but I think it's very pretty all the same. The ceilings in the new house are very high, though, so I needed a little assistance to put it up on the picture rail! 

At the moment, I appear to be having a small candle phase. For my new room, I bought an oil burner and vanilla-scented wax from a local craft fair - I'd had my eye on the fork-and-spoon oil burner for a couple of months after seeing it at the previous fair, so I thought that I would finally treat myself. The wax 'clam' comes from Sara's Waxworks, a Plymouth-based business which sells lovely scented wax in all sorts of fragrances - from perfumes like Chanel No. 5 to a fresh and simple 'clean linen' scent. I've not melted any of my wax yet, but it still smells amazing even though it's still in its packaging.

Sticking with the candle theme, I've brought with me the teacup candle that you might have seen in a previous blogpost, and thankfully, it's made it up to Exeter in one piece! Another craft-ish piece resulting from trip to Hobbycraft is my desk tidy. It was essentially six plain cardboard tubes in a shallow base and the idea is that you use pretty découpage paper to stick on and make it look nice. It's my first go at découpage, but I don't think it's too awful.

These retro advertisements and railway posters are from calendars that I cut up to make a collage for my room in halls last year and I thought I'd reinstate them this year because having things up on the walls makes everything a bit more interesting and homely.

The lavendar Jan Constantine loveheart was a generous gift from Vintage Life magazine and my many and various cushions have also travelled with me Up North. I'm amassing quite a collection now, with three rather patriotic, retro ones from Past Times (before it very sadly disappeared from our high streets), a handmade owl from the same Crikey It's Vintage fair as the bunting and a pretty cake draft-excluder-style cushion, which I might use to avoid falling down the gap between the bed and the wall.

The two posters above were made by teachers at my secondary school; they read Keep Calm and Enjoy German and Spanish! 

You may or may not know that I'm studying Modern Languages, meaning that most of the books I've brought with me to uni are either textbooks or not in English. I did, though, bring my Bake Off Everyday and a couple of Mary Berry's recipe books, and we currently have three copies of Nosh For Students by Joy May, so I think we're well covered in the cookbook department. In terms of more leisurely reading material (you mean you're not satisfied with looking at pictures of cakes for fun?!), one of the reading-for-fun books I've brought along is Letters Between Six Sisters. It's a volume of the collected letters sent to and by the Mitford sisters - again, if you follow my blog at all, you'll probably know that I have at least a passing interest in them.

I hope you enjoyed the brief tour of my new room; it still needs to be tidied up a little, but most things are sorted now and I'm looking forward to beginning my second year of university properly!

(: xx