AN EVENING IN PARIS

A few days ago I hopped on the Eurostar for a very quick trip to Paris. I'm in love with the city! I regret not going there more in the past few years as it's so incredibly easy and quick from London. You travel comfortably on a train from the centre of London for 2.5 hours after which you arrive in the centre of Paris. Super convenient in comparison to flying.

I got there on the evening of a beautiful day.

"Look through the little hole and turn the camera like this."

"Remember to focus before pressing! On me, not the background! And please don't cut my feet off."

Oh well... At least Arc de Triomphe is in focus and feet are in! 

I love my camera (Canon 5D Mark II in case anyone is interested) but it's not always easy to explain to others how to use it. You also get really fussy with your pictures and feel like a right nag when asking your friends to kneel down to get the whole view, not to cut off body parts etc. etc. 

A little evening walk down the very busy Champs-Elysees.

One of the things I will miss about London is the easy access to rest of the Europe. What a special, beautiful, culture rich part of the world it is! Have a fun Friday everyone!

Minna x

BEAUTIFUL HELSINKI

Photos: Elina Manninen



I wanted to show you these last few pictures of our wedding night. How beautiful does Helsinki look from the heights of Savoy Restaurant?






Oh and here's one of the more "official" wedding pictures (the cheesiest one!) that very much fits the title of this post... The rest will remain in our private album :-)



Minna x

WHAT I WORE: TO MARRY

Photos: Elina Manninen

So here we go... First pictures of our wedding, in the format of an outfit post ;-) As you might already know I didn't go for an actual wedding dress. I was looking for a white or an off-white dress, jumpsuit or a two-piece but as soon as I saw this I had to have it. 

Even though my aim was not to look very much like a bride I still wanted to have flowers. It was never going to be anything but plain white roses though. I thought they looked lovely and simple.

After I had found the dress the shoes and the bag were easy. I didn't want them to be something I'd never wear again and I'm not one for the satin stuff... So I knew what I was looking for and luckily finding them wasn't hard. Let's see if finding an outfit will be that stress free next year too if / when we have a bigger wedding party!

Dress: Valentino

Shoes: Gianvito Rossi (nearly the same here)

Cuff: Valentino

Bag: Sophie Hulme

Ring: Something old!

If anyone is looking for a Photographer for any occasion I can't recommend Elina enough. I love our pictures and she was an absolute pleasure to work with. By the way I found her thanks to reading blogs... I remembered that I had seen and liked Photographer Niki Strbian's work on Strictly Style blog so I contacted her. She wasn't available on the date but was more than helpful and I found Elina through her recommendation. So thank you everyone involved in the process! :-)

Minna x

PERSONALISED CARDS

Anyone who knows me personally knows that I take a lot of pictures. Like, a lot of pictures. I rarely leave the house without a camera and some of my friends don't even bother taking theirs along when I'm around! A while back I thought that I should really put all those pictures in good use. I already told you about my birthday gift to my man this year but what I've also started doing is ordering my friends and family personalised birthday cards using those photographs I've taken along the years. It obviously takes a bit of time to go through all your pictures and to select the best ones but it's all worth it. Sentimental gifts (or cards in this case) mean something to people and I love giving them. This card here was one that my grandparents received from us recently. I use Moonpig. They have some seriously cheesy options but also a few great ones. (This is their product no PUE153.)

By the way I was looking back my posts in the last couple of weeks and against all my intentions it looks like I've become a "Mum Blogger"(oh dear...). My kids seems to be included in most of my posts. I planned to blog mainly about other things but I just can't help it. So I've decided to give into it. I'll certainly still mix it up and post about absolutely everything and anything that comes to mind but there will be times kids are the only thing I'll have something to post about. Hope that's okay with you guys! Have a great Thursday evening!

Minna x

BARBADOS PHOTO DIARY

Hi guys! As I mentioned in my quick post the other day I just spent a few days in Barbados. I have been there a few times now and would definitely love to go back again. It's a beautiful island, the locals are friendly, service is great, weather never fails, the sea is incredibly warm and getting there is easy with direct, daily flights from London with BA and Virgin. The atmosphere is nice and relaxed however should you want a bit of a buzz and to get glammed up in the evenings there are some great restaurants too. It's also meant to be a good place to play golf although I'm the last person to ask anything about it... (Tried it once at least 15 years ago, didn't even manage to hit the ball and gave up there and then.) Anyway here are some pictures that I snapped during our trip. 

I started reading Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn and it's totally grabbed me... I can't put it down!

Minna x

WHAT I WORE: IN IBIZA

Happy Wednesday! I’ve just returned from a short and sweet but oh such fun trip to Ibiza. I was well equipped with my cameras (SLR for day, compact for night) and lenses (a short, fixed one that’s easy to fit in a bag and a huge long one that takes amazing pictures but requires a bit of effort to carry around plus makes you look like a paparazzi, which is not always desirable) and my plan was to really concentrate on my photography and take some amazing (well, as amazing as one's abilities allow) landscape pictures and get (read: bribe or threaten) the other half to take outfit pictures but all of a sudden the weekend was over and none of this had happened… damn. I did however take a lot of fun pics of fun times with friends and I’ll be sharing some of those with you in the coming days.

This was my only attempt of those outfit pictures.

Think I better loose the wine glass and put my shoes on.. hang on.

Dress: Band of Outsiders / Belt: YSL (old) / Sandals: Michael Kors (old)

And then back to responding to all the comments I received in my first post, thank you so much for them! Some more Ibiza pictures to follow… :-)



Minna x

Ps. Not sure what’s going on with all those brackets in this post… I just read the text back and had a bit of a hard time following it myself, hope you managed to get through it!

SENTIMENTAL GIFTS

What to get as a birthday present for someone who doesn’t need or want anything? My other half’s birthdays are always a cause of cold sweat for me and so are Christmases… He is the most difficult person to buy for. This year it was the big four zero so it had to be something special. We need some new art on our walls, we even have a few picture lights installed but no pictures underneath them. So I decided that I’d look for pictures to fill those spaces. I’m into photography these days so I thought I’d look into some photographers’ work and try to find pictures that would mean something to him. Maybe of places that mean something to us to make the present about the sentiment more than anything else. I then realised that I have thousands of pictures on my laptop… so why not to use them? My own art, ha! (I’m so not arty or creative that the thought makes me smile.) So that’s what I did; I went through every single picture on my laptop and chose the ones that I thought would look good on our wall and in much larger size than your normal framed family pictures. I made them black and white and sent them off to be printed and framed. I was nervous about the result but they turned out okay. We now have pictures by my very own self to be hung on the walls. And best of all my other half was quite taken by his gift. If any of you have tips for presents with sentimental value please do share in the comment box, Christmas is coming up! ;-)

Minna x

I AM BACK!

Hello dear readers! I’m back! Back home in London after a long summer in France and also back blogging. I decided that Ellit, the Finnish website that I was blogging for wasn’t quite the right place for me plus I also wanted to move onto blogging only in English. You wouldn’t believe how time consuming it can be to write in two different languages even when there’s not that much text. Or maybe it’s just me… writing was never one of my strongest points! I also wanted to make my blog a bit more “lifestyle” and a bit less personal.

It's taken me a while to get this new blog going... Back in the day when I first started blogging there was no pressure. This time I wanted it all to look and be absolutely perfect but to get there I'd have to spend days with it still! Therefore visually it will still no doubt change and I'm yet to get my Facebook page and Twitter account going and linked but let's start like this or otherwise I'll never get the first post out!

Hope you all had an amazing summer. My summer was filled with kids, family, friends, fun, sun, sea and way too much good food and wine… (Hence it’s detox time now!) It’s really nice to be back home though and back in London. It's is such an amazing city and I always appreciate it even more when I’ve been away.

I have an exciting rest of the year coming up including a few weekend trips to some fun destinations. I’ll most certainly have my camera glued to me during them so that I can share some pics and tips with you. In general I will try to be a good blogger and post daily but sometimes life might come in the way… I have sooo much to post about after the long summer away so the blog might resemble a South of France travel guide in the coming weeks. It’s taken me ages to go through the thousands of photos that I took but I’m finally there. Nice to be back! I hope a few of you are still there after my blogging break! :-)

(Bloglovin will automatically be updated to the correct web address. On Blogilista the correct blog to follow is this. I will try to get the icons added in my side bar soon...)


Minna x