Ikea Sommar 2019 Bringing the Sunshine This Easter

£12.75 with Ikea Family Member Price £15 Regular

We took an early morning trip to Ikea this Easter Monday to pick up some Gardening bits and pieces. I ended up getting a couple of small house plants, colourful pots which were £1.25 each, and Smix got a mini aloe plant for his room.

I really wanted to get one of the Sommar 2019 picnic baskets, but couldn’t find one, and they said they were out of stock as it’s proving so popular and I can see why, it’s adorable! Hopefully I can find one next time I’m in store as I want to use it in the kitchen as storage as it’s so bright as cheerful.

The rest of the Sommar Collection has napkins from 85p, and sets of six glasses for £3.40. There’s a cute little teapot for £7.65 and glass bottles with stoppers for £2.13, and smaller sizes too. You can also get some very snazzy trays for £2.98 and £1.70.

There are lots more products in the collection like plastic cups, cutlery etc you can use over the spring and summer for picnics and BBQs, or to use in your caravan. I also love the retro floral door mat (bottom right above), it’s all so 1970s’ retro cool.  

Accidental Encounters With The Extinction Rebellion: Our Easter 2019 London Trip

You may be familiar here at The World of Kitsch with the little jaunts my son and I take over to London at least once a year, on my super-duper budgeting as featured in this previous blog post. I book Ryanair flights about six weeks out, and get a return trip to London for the pair of us all in for under £50, then I book an Easyhotel room for under £50, which means the bare bones of the overnight getaway costs less than a hundred for us both. 

The Easyhotel cheapest rooms that I book are basically a bed in a room the size of a bathroom, but we’ve stayed in their locations all over the city and each one has always been clean, safe, and we’ve found it satisfactory. When you are staying somewhere like London, when you are out the whole day and you really do only use the hotel for sleep, not to hang out in, somewhere like Easyhotel does the job.  

Anyway, back to our trip this past week. I wasn’t really going to blog about it, as we didn’t do that much this time. We hadn’t made many plans, we’ve done most of the major tourist attractions for families on our previous visits, and on top of that, my health isn’t so great right now, so we had to pace ourselves. So we took it as a shopping holiday, and we also had School of Rock booked to go see at the Gillian Lynne Theatre the evening of our stay. Click any image below to enlarge.

Sunday night as we were packing at home before we left, my Dad phoned me, warning me that there were some crazy protests organised in the city for the next day, Monday, while we were there. Oxford Circus, Piccadilly, all the places we would be to shop, Hamleys of course, our first stop! I wasn’t too worried as I hadn’t seen anything online myself, I mostly thought it was probably something Dad had seen in The Daily Mail that would come to nothing...

...2pm Monday we emerge from Oxford Circus tube station and the first thing I thing is, “wtf, is it Pride?” because number one, I see a giant hot pink boat, number two, there’s pumping rave music, and number three, there’s a man dressed as a centaur.

Looking at the Extinction Rebellion website, they closed Oxford Circus at around 11am, so we must have stumbled upon things near the beginning of what’s turning out to be a week long protest, so far. They’ve blocked bridges all over the city, roads, superglued themselves to trains and there have been hundreds of arrests. We were quite lucky that we were not disrupted by any of the protests the days we were there, and it was quite a sight to see Oxford Circus closed to traffic with hippies swarming all over dancing and doing yoga.

As for our trip, we enjoyed School of Rock, explored the Tower of London and Tower Bridge (one thing we hadn’t gotten around to visiting), and shopped Covent Garden and Spitalfields Markets.  We had some great crêpes at Crêpe Affair and shopped for snazzy sunglasses.

Hoping to fit in a return trip in the summer, but would love some new places to visit next time we are there. Quirky cafes or unusual shops. We’ve visited all the major tourist attractions but are there any hidden gems? We have the cat cafe on the list for next year, as it’s over 12s only. 

Let me know on Instagram if you have any suggestions for us! 

Problems With Modern Life - GET REAL: Magda Archer’s New Poster Art Show Opens in Firstsite Colchester TODAY!

Problems with Modern Life is a new poster exhibition by one of my favourite artists Magda Archer.

You may have seen me post her Post Brexit UK print on my Instagram this week, as I recently got around to purchasing a signed copy from Flying Leaps, and framing it handsomely with help from my Dad. It now hangs in my kitchen and brightens up my day more successfully than Brexit brightens up Britain’s financial forecasts. 

Anyway, back to Magda’s new show, which again are poster style works, in large formats. Archer’s kitsch artworks are both personal and socio-political, inspired by vintage advertising and British pop culture.

With tongue-in-cheek captions and visual humour, the artworks at first appear cheerful, but upon reflection suggest deeper meanings, hinting at themes of consumerism, social media and current politics. There’s also touches of internet culture and memes.

The show is taking place in Firstsite Colchester, and opens today, Friday 5th June 2019. Entrance is free, the gallery is open from 10am until 5pm, 7 days a week. The show runs until 23rd June.