On my way to work on Wednesday I made a de-tour via the post office to pick up this:

Lavish Alice

Isn’t she a beaut? The ‘retro patterned dress’ as she is better known, was my first ever purchase from online boutique Lavish Alice. I first read about Lavish Alice on fashion blog IfeelLikeIDreamtIt a few months ago and have been wanting to snap up some of their clothes ever since.

On the website they describe their brand like this:

Alice is all of us, and the magic of fast-moving fashion allows us to be everyone we want to be. Most of all fashion brings out our LAVISH side. Lavish Alice is the party, she is the pivot of the scene, she’s the one we’re all waiting for.

Sounds pretty good right? And the clothes on the website totally seem to live up to the expectation, without breaking the bank, which in austere times such as ours, is always a good thing.

Prettiness in a parcel

My dress was a bargain £8 and fits like an absolute dream. I’m hoping I can dress it up for work and dress it down for coffees and lunches and things.

And there are so many things on the website which I am loving at the moment like this cream print bird top , this beautiful mint lace dress and this coral lace shift dress. 

The press section on the website shows how it’s been getting picked up loads by the girly gossip mags like Love It and Reveal since December and it’s a great (and cheaper) alternative to the Topshops and Miss Selfridges of the world but just as pretty.

Lace, glitter and bird prints – it’s got it all. And, if nothing else, it’s always fun to be a bit lavish. 

According to the Urban Dictionary, the online home of slang definitions, to be a Gleek is to a) love the television show Glee and b) be in a Glee club.

Having been a fan of the hit American comedy since it toe-tapped its way to the UK it seemed only right to complete the definition – and to get my groove on at a Glee club.

Glee <3

With previous experience of singing in the shower and competing with the family dog to see who is more tuneful, I enrolled myself into the first-ever session of the Twyford Glee Club.

The club is one of several which have sprung up over the county thanks to Richard Whennell – a real life Mr Schu – who founded the Bracknell choir after being inspired by his wife’s high school experiences of Glee clubs in the United States.

With a Britain’s Got Talent audition already in the bag and a place on the bill next to pop star Lemar at the Bracknell Christmas lights switch on, the Bracknell club has brought a good helping of Glee to the area.

Glee Club UK

Replacing the stuffy choral choirs of posh English schools or churches, Glee Club is all about the excitement, the energy and well, the glee.

“The whole idea of glee is that we help you through the course of the evening, we get you through the songs and by the end we know you will sound amazing,” explains Twyford Glee captain Sabrina Findlay, who – for fans of the show – has the vocal talents of Rachel Berry and the niceness of Emma Pillsbury.

Dotted around Loddon Hall in Twyford for the first night were handfuls of experienced Glee members, in black T-shirts emblazoned with the swirling and twirling words of Glee Club UK, and around 18 newcomers with jazz hands at the ready.

The sessions began with a quick warm up, shaking and stretching to get us ready to sing, before we launched into musical classic Mamma Mia.

With my last experience of singing – and by singing I mean miming – being at the back of a gospel choir at university I wasn’t exactly sure whether I’d be the one screeching out of tune.

And as we all know from The X Factor, that show of musical, erm, talent, there is always guaranteed to be one who reckons they’re hitting the notes when actually they’re more ‘help us’ than Elvis.

“It’s all very easy and you don’t need to be able to read music,” explains Sabrina at the beginning of the night, along with telling us that you don’t need to audition – no scary Simon Cowells here, thank you very much.

“It is such a lovely atmosphere,” says Sabrina. “It’s very friendly and there’s no-one there who is going to think you are a bad singer or anything. Just go and have fun, that’s what Glee is all about.”

The fun part is what underpins Glee, there’s no solos, no competition, just a chance for people with a love of all things musical to get together and sing some tunes.

Soon we were up on our feet singing out “Mamma Mia, here I go again, my, my, how can I resist you,” and throwing in a few dance moves along the way.

“The richness and sound quality that comes out is great,” says Sabrina, whose enthusiasm and encouragement helped dissipate any nerves within about the first three minutes.

“They are really good and they’ve even been laughing at my bad jokes and singing along really well,” she beams. “There is a lot of potential there for the future.”

After a quick break to get to know everyone a bit we started on Glee classic Don’t Stop Believing and, by that point it became a conscious effort not to tap my toes and wiggle my hips a bit.

Having channelled my inner Britney Spears/Madonna/Rachel from Glee, I was well away, forgetting my musical inhibitions and the fear that I was X Factor Elvis.

At the end of the night, I said farewell to my fellow singers, clambered into my car and belted out Mamma Mia all the way home.

My warbling may have startled a chap at the traffic lights who got a snippet of my slightly-too-loud singing, but – well, what can I say – I’m a Gleek and proud.

The same goes for cocktails. A martini glass is nice, a champagne flute is charming, but the best box for a cocktail is without doubt, a tea pot.

I’ve been meaning to blog about cocktails and tea cups since New Year’s – an Alice in Wonderland themed extravaganza at Sakura in Reading – when they were serving tea pot cocktails with these tied around the handle:

"This time she found a little bottle on it, ('which certainly was not here before,' said Alice,) and round the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words 'DRINK ME' beautifully printed on it in large letters."

There is something just delightful about cocktails in tea pots - Alice in Wonderland meets Breakfast at Tiffanys meets Sex and the City – and nowhere does it better than Foundation Bar in Covent Garden.

It was a balmy July night last summer when we visited Foundation for @CallMeJosephine ‘s birthday and it was the perfect birthday treat. Their cocktails come on tea trays, in tea pots, with jam jar glasses and – the chic little touch – tea biscuits.

"Alice ventured to taste it, and finding it very nice, (it had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast,) she very soon finished it off. "

The High Tea is £16.50 for two people sharing, £24 for three and £31.50 for four, which considering its London prices isn’t a bad deal for such beautiful drinks.

The mix of Bombay Saffire Gin, peach, lemon and Earl Grey tea is as tasty as Alice’s shrinking potion, but really it’s all about the novelty. As it was a birthday we also paid £5 each for a table and got cupcakes with glitter and sweets on the table – so cute!

The bar itself is full of little nooks and bare brick walls with a dance floor and a good mix of music as well. I’d definitely recommend falling down the rabbit hole and going for a gorgeous cocktail filled cup of tea.

The whole “just for men” concept is a tried and tested formula and one that seems to have huge success as a marketing tool – you just need to look at the Yorkie  ”It’s not for Girls” campaign to get a hint of that.

Someone get me a Yorkie...

So when Windsor-based @ManBuysPresent added me on Twitter earlier this week I, being a girl, obviously had to go and have a look.

The concept is simple. (And one I imagine must have been dreamt up by a man. If nothing else but for the use of the word legend on their homepage.)

• They offer three gifts.
• Man – who may or may not be a) half watching football b) drinking a beer c) checking football scores on his i-phone – clicks which one he likes the look of most.
• Said gift is wrapped on his behalf and sent to a lady friend.
• It arrives all beautiful looking.
• He gets good boyfriend points for not many effort points. Win win all round.

OK so men aren’t actually meant to skip corners and get you an easy present, but I bet there are whole lot of them who pounce on Man Buys Present quicker than you can say Match of the Day.

Now the feminist in me should be outraged. Like the year I woke up on Valentines Day to find a trail of paper hearts going out into the garden to a picnic. Romantic? Yes. Until I found out he hadn’t painstakingly cut every single heart out of paper but in fact had bought a “ready made valentines day” in a box. Yup.

But in reality, with it’s cheeky charm, ManBuysPresent is a get out clause for the hours of trauma spent standing in a shop trying to find something she’s going to love. And boys, we do that too. Although the feminist in us may be going oh my god-I-cannot-believe-he-didn’t-cut-out-every-single-one-of-those-hearts-with-his-bare-hands, actually we kind of think it’s pretty clever that you found a nifty way to still impress us.

So when, not if, ManBuysPresent takes off you can bet there will be hundreds of beautifully wrapped presents pinging their way to the doorsteps all over the country. And hundreds of guys, sitting back in their arm chairs, tucking into a Yorkie and feeling like men. Rawr.

Twitter is a little like Marmite. You either love it – and think in 140 characters every now and again – or you hate it and complain about people posting what they have for tea. But for the last week it’s proven its worth for me as a journalist.

All modern journalist know the virtues of Twitter. It’s fast, it reveals breaking news right from the centre of where it is happening and for the showbiz among us it gives a gateway to the celebs like never before.

But it should also come with a massive health warning. Having been burnt by Twitter myself last year – by someone pretending to be someone they weren’t in a story – I’ve learnt the lesson first hand. Now I double check, no,  triple check,  everything that comes off Twitter because you just never know.

But as much as it can be a questionable source a lot of the time, every now and again it throws up a gem.

The first one this week was this story about a school in my patch. I’m still getting to the bottom of things so I won’t discuss this in too much detail. But it started with a tweet then, after being confirmed by official sources, became a breaking news story before any other news outlet had it. And as with breaking news it got some good hits on the website.

The second Twitter success of the week turned out to have something to do with these fellows – and for posting a photo of them on here, please forgive me….

I've said this band name far too many times today....

Great journalists have shown how they have used Twitter to catch massive breaking news, earthquakes, or Michael Jackson’s death, or London riots. This might not exactly have the same profound roots but it does show how keeping an eye on the social networking site is the modern equivalent of the journalist wandering around their news patch, and it really works.

At around midday the Wokingham search column on my Tweetdeck started coming up with people tweeting various members of the X Factor band One Direction. Normally when someone tweets a celeb asking them to a) come to Wokingham b) confirm if they are in Wokingham c) marry them in Wokingham you generally don’t give it a second glance.

But then as more people started tweeting them you begin to think there might be a bit more to the rumour. Our first thought was that they might be visiting a local school and as people had tweeted the area they were in we called the only school in the patch but all we got was a slightly amused receptionist.

Gradually the search column went even more nuts so I started clicking on some of the people tweeting to see if there was any clue and came up with the name of a charity who it appeared the band were doing some work with.

I rang the charity’s media team, and the band’s PR and eventually got it confirmed that they were in the area. Having that we put this article up on our website, and as with the nature of breaking news, it started to get hits as the entire teen female population of Wokingham went nuts. Call it Beatle Mania or something.

So it might not be the biggest news Wokingham has ever had but you still get that adrenaline rush when the tweets are flooding through and you gradually start to put the pieces together. Then when the jigsaw is complete and you’ve put the pieces together you become the source that can put out the final tweet, quashing false rumours and letting people know the truth. And that, ladies and gents, is what journalism is all about.

I’ve never made anything before without following a pattern whether bought from John Lewis or printed off Burdastyle. But after Googling aprons, pretty aprons, tie-back aprons, and every other apron related keyword you can think of, and not coming up with what I wanted,  I decided to go it alone.

Popping home for dinner one winter evening I crept into the kitchen when no-one was looking and had a peak at my Mum’s existing aprons to get an idea of the shape and pieces. And then it was pretty much a case of here goes nothing….

I started by measuring a piece of fabric for the main body of the apron and hemming it on the machine like so:

Stitching the hem on the machine

Then I made the tie backs by cutting a long rectangle of the material (which by the way is the gorgeous flowery stuff I used for the vintage coat hanger project) and sewing down the long edge and turning through to make a tube. Sort of like this:

Tie-backs ready for sewing

I’d decided I wanted a lace trim for the apron to make it look vintage and pretty so I pinned a strip of lace underneath the tie-backs before I stitched them onto the main bit of the apron. That all sounds a bit complicated but really it was just a case of holding it in one hand and pinning in the other before hand sewing to make sure all three layers stayed together.

Pretty lace

And then all that was left was to make a little pocket, which was the best bit, just because it was all cute and neat like this:

Little pocket

And then the apron was wrapped in paper and tied with ribbon and given to my Mum on Christmas day. In the end it was a little small but with two orders already in for more birthday aprons in March I think it was a present success.

My lovely Mum

Book Club

Lots of people start the New Year with bookish goals – to read more, to make it through the 100 books to read before you die list, to tackle War and Peace - and so it seems a good time to give a thumbs up to that old chestnut, the book club. Some of my best friends and I have started our own book club this year, a bit of a casual affair revolving around ordering the same book once a month and meeting in Starbucks for a latte and a novel-inspired chat. Our first book is Before I Go to Sleep by S J Watson. Let the bookishness commence.

Gigs

Mcfly Brighton 2007

With Florence and the Machine in March and Mcfly in April, 2012 is quickly becoming the year of the gig. Last year was amazing with Reading Festival and Bombay Bicycle Club in Ibiza  but this year, oh this year, is going to be immense. As well as seeing some of the best performers I’ve ever seen before (Hello Florence), I would love to catch some of the bands/singers I’m desperate to hear live –  Ed Sheeran and Adele I’m talking about you.  Nothing says happy times like bopping about in a crowd with a plastic cup filled with some sort of beverage in one hand and belting out the words to a song which you love. Yes Please.

Fancy Fruit

On Tuesday I spent the day chopping, slicing and dicing fruit with the lovely ladies from Fancy Fruit in Wokingham for a feature piece. They make gorgeous fruit bouquets and I haven’t stopped raving about them to everyone I’ve seen since visiting. I’ll do a proper post of the feature when it goes in the paper but for now take a look at their website here - guaranteed to make your mouth water a little bit. Yum.

Celebrity Big Brother

Does anyone actually care about CBB any more? Last night another bunch of z-listers when into the house, oh and Frankie Cocozza who doesn’t even make it to the bottom of the alphabet celebrity list. I used to quite like a bit of Big Brother, I know it’s always been trash but it used to be good trash. But now after too many celebrities trying to boost their profile (Natasha Giggs – really???) it’s just become one big sham. Sorry Big Brother but I won’t be watching this year.

January blues

No more mince pies. No more fairy lights. No more excuses to drink wine in the day

Monty

just because it’s mulled. Christmas is over for another year which means back to normal life and making do with the January blues. And someone is also going to have to tell the dog that he can no longer where festive ear muffs. Alas.

Spiders

These could be a permanent feature on the cold list just because they are revolting little specimens. But the reason they get a special mention now is because when having a January clean-up after Christmas my housemate and I found a massive spider lurking inside a flower box. Cue the box being flung outside and lots of prodding and poking and box shaking to see if the spider was alive. And it was. Eventually we got the little blighter out but for the sheer spider trauma he gets added to the cold list. Gross.

• Marry Prince Harry

Usually I don’t really go in for the whole resolutions thing. Apparently only 12 per cent of people keep them and I know unless I’m really determined to do something then I’m going to be in that other 88 per cent.

Happy New Year x

But this year I’ve got a few things in mind that I want to do, to become a better person and whatnot, and so here’s a little run down:

• Learn a language – When we were out in Ibiza this year there were a group of Spanish boys giving it all the chat when one of my best friends, an English friend, turned round and chatted back, completly fluent in Spanish. The look on their faces was priceless and that was the point I decided I want to learn the language. I’ve enrolled on a taster Spanish course in February and we’ll see what happens. And obviously I will need to go to Spain to test it out.

• Get healthy – After running the Windsor Half Marathon in September I hung up my running shoes and they’ve barely been out since. And having stuffed my face with more Christmas food than you can shake a stick at it’s time to get back out there. So from tomorrow, when last nights cocktails are no longer such a fresh memory, I shall brave the winter weather and pound the pavements. And no cake rewards this time.

• Travel – Last year I had two amazing holidays and I want to travel as much as my bank balance will allow this year. Nothing feels as good as sitting on a beach somewhere you’ve never been before without Twitter buzzing away in the background or the blackberry beeping away. And of course you get cocktail-o-clock on holiday as well which is always a bonus.

• Cook – Living a busy lifestyle and working a job with evening meetings I tend to eat a lot of rushed meals in the week. You know the stuff that you eat because you have to eat but doesn’t exactly get the taste buds going. Well this year I am going to learn to make decent dishes, packed with flavours and colours and spices. Sort of Cook by name, Cook by nature if you will.

So there’s my little list. There are other things I want to do this year like save some money, carry on building my career, read good books, but if I can make a start on a few of the ones above then that’ll do me. And I’d still quite like to marry Prince Harry please.

Looking back on the last year, because New Year’s is always a time for nostalgia, for me the biggies are these:

• Running my first half marathon ever in February – 2 hours on the dot, hell yeh.
• Breaking my thumb! Total idiot moment and the start of a clumsy year…
• Dropping my blackberry down the drain. Continuing the clumsy….
• My twin niece and nephew being born. It was during that crazy heat wave and I rushed to the hospital in gladiator sandals in Spring and saw these two gorgeous little bundles.
• Going to Rhodes for a gorgeous luxury holiday with the girls. The first proper non-studenty holiday and it was lush.
• Royal Wedding madness. 13 street parties in one day, win.
• Devon with the Ranelagh girls for a weekend in the country. Gorgeous weather and a blissful break away from the city.
• Ibiza fun times with the Uni pals. Words cannot describe. Except maybe “pauer shower.” – (Don’t ask!)
• Having my short story published. And then actually getting royalties. Woop.
• Running my second half marathon in September – 2 hours 5 mins, I’ll take that.
• Moving out of home. Independence, hoorah.
• Passing my seniors exams. No more exams. Ever. Woop!

3,2,1....

I’m sure I’m forgetting more than that as well but those are a very brief run down of the highlights. It pretty much sums up an amazing year of friends, family, a job I love and just generally becoming a bit of a better person. I guess I have a few resolutions, or maybe wishes for next year, but if you say them out loud they won’t come true so you’ll have to keep guessing. But if it’s anything like this one, well, let’s just say I can’t wait.