A Summer Garden Party to Float Your Boat?

When summer favours us with its glorious sunshine there is nothing like a garden party to share quality time with friends, but how do you create a memorable event that everyone can participate in and enjoy without exhausting yourself or your budget?

Summer Gift Guide

For many of us summer is a busy, busy time. With the end of school term, people jetting off on holidays, weddings, summer barbeques and parties as well as the usual birthdays and anniversaries there is so much to think about. For all these occasions, the perfect gift is required. Today we’re sharing some of our favorite gift ideas to give you some inspiration for the months ahead.

How to throw a great kids party

Children’s birthday parties can be tough to plan and to pull off. The pressure to be perfect is real and every parent wants to make sure their child has a great time on their birthday. We’re here to take the worry away with our simple guide to throwing a great children’s party.

Five Ways to Celebrate Easter

Easter is just around the corner and we’re starting to plan our celebrations. As well as the religious celebrations of Easter, for many people this particular holiday is also a time to celebrate with chocolate, sweets and baked treats. For many, Easter is also a time to celebrate with family and friends, and enjoy a traditional dinner together.

For this month’s blog we’re counting down five great ways that you can celebrate the Easter holiday, some traditional, some not so much!

How to be the Perfect Holiday Season Host

If you are opening up your home to friends and family over the festive season you are no doubt having kittens about all of the things you need to prepare to ensure everyone has a great time. The holidays can be exceedingly stressful, even for the most practiced host.

There is a multitude of advice available on how to be the perfect host, host the best party, and generally make sure your guests are happy and well catered for. Much of it involves home, facility and food preparation and, while that is certainly key, there is more to being a good host than providing accommodation in keeping with a 5 star hotel, fine dining to rival a Michelin chef and access to your Wi-Fi.

Don’t get us wrong, there is nothing wrong with creating the perfect venue however, the most important aspect of being the perfect host for us involves consideration of your guests needs. If everyone feels welcome and included, who really cares if you deep cleaned your spare bedrooms and laid out guest cards at the table?

Ultimately you will choose the level of hosting you wish to provide for your guests; however we hope our simplified and alternative suggestions appeal.

Prepare for Christmas

The Christmas festivities are one of the most exciting and exhausting times of the year for many of us. We want to have fun but there is just so much to do! So we thought it may be useful for us to share some tips to make it all a lot more enjoyable.

The most useful tip we have ever come across for Christmas is ‘be prepared’! That doesn’t mean start buying next year’s gifts in the sales, it means establishing a timeframe that suits YOU to allow you to complete everything before the ‘silly season’ really kicks in.

Creating a simple plan that takes into account your availability, finances, and avoiding the Christmas rush should result in you completing everything you need to on time while still enjoying the season in full.

The following steps do assume you have chosen your venue for the festivities although we appreciate there may be some last minute travel arrangements to be made when visiting friends and family.

5 Ways to Celebrate Halloween

Halloween is an annual celebration, with its roots firmly placed in our history and cultural developments, that focuses on both the future and the past. It originates from an ancient Celtic tradition from Ireland and was one of four fire festivals held each year.

How to Create a Photo Gift

Giving photos to friends and family is a wonderful way to share a memory that they may or may not have been part of creating. However, there is now a huge diversity of ways to share photos and make the gift more personal for the recipient.

For a relatively small cost photos can be printed onto mugs, cushions, tiles and placemats. You can create calendars or photo books which can be edited prior to printing to include relevant text or complimentary backgrounds. Nowadays if you can buy it as a gift, you can pretty much have a photo printed onto it first. It’s a wonderful way to share images of friends or family, and ensure no one misses out on those exceptional moments in time.

What to Buy for the Person who has Everything?

There are quite a few punchlines in response to that question, but we are not making a joke this time. Most of us will have encountered this problem as there comes a time in every relationship, friend or family, where you start to exhaust gift ideas and finding true inspiration can be a challenge.

As such we have put our thinking caps on to aid you in your search. Here are some of the stranger things we found!