When I stepped off the plane on Sunday night and stepped through my kitchen door there was a large parcel waiting for me teasing with expectation, inside a beautiful red box containing a gorgeous table centre from The Flower Studio, it was exactly what I needed to make sure I didn't have post travel blue and by Monday morning I had thrown myself into Christmas decorating with aplomb.

I adore Christmas and I love to have my house looking as festive as possible but there never seems to be just the right decoration in the middle of the table, but the hot chilli festive candle table centre is just perfect, it's quirky (I never would have thought of chillies at Christmas) and different and I had the idea to add some sparkly beady Christmas lights underneath for a little extra sparkle, you know me by now, you can never have enough sparkle.  It's just perfect and looks lovely on my festive table, my kitchen tends to be the coolest place in my house due to no central heating in there so I have no doubt that this is going to last through the festive season.

When you buy it it comes without candles but that's perfect as you can add your own to compliment your festive colour scheme, I think it would look perfect with red candles as it would bring out the colour in the chillies.  I also love the smell of the fresh pine, I always feel a little wistful that I can't have a real tree because of too many animals but this is perfect and it definitely has that fragrance that signifies that the Christmas season is most definitely upon us.

All around my house Christmas has started to appear, we replaced our silver pop up tree in the kitchen with a beautiful illuminated twig tree complete with winter berries, I just need to find a few birds to sit on the branches and it will be complete.

Our upstairs tree has also been replaced this year, I adore it, it's the closest to a real tree I think you can get and it's filled with decorations I've bought over the years, some have travelled from afar whilst some were picked up from local shops, I even picked up a bauble in Palma de Mallorca on Saturday

I love Christmas, in fact I think I'm probably the queen of Christmas though this year I've actually denied the coming of the festive season until I got home from my european trip so now I'm kind of on catch up and it's good I suppose as I don't feel that I've peaked too early, I am though now starting to have a bit of a panic because other than picking up presents whilst I was away I haven't really started my Christmas shopping and I've just looked at my work calendar for the next few weeks, lets just say I am super thankful for Amazon and their special deals every 10 minutes I picked up lots of bargains yesterday and now all I need to do is wait for them to arrive and then find a helpful elf to wrap them up.

Christmas this year of course is open house at my house, if you don't have anyone to be with this Christmas Day or Boxing Day, rather than being on your own or just alone at home with your kids if you are a single parent you can come to our house and feast on festive goodies, just send me an email and as long as you're not a serial killer then you are absolutely welcome to come and join what I hope will be a houseful of jolly old elves and animals, friends new and old, we'll celebrate together, bring a bottle or a festive dish if you can but if you can't don't worry, I will make sure there's something for everyone.  Christmas shouldn't be lonely but for some it sadly is and whilst I'm only one woman and can't save the world I do feel this time more than any other is the time for being with people so please don't let pride stand it the way, get in the car and I'll be waiting with open arms with a glass of non alcoholic mulled wine (or alcoholic if you're not driving) and together we'll all have the best Christmas ever.

Faffing with flowers, in association with The Flower Studio

There's something amazingly uplifting about having beautiful flowers adoring the spaces and places in your home don't you think?  For many years I'd always bought the occasional bunch of flowers to cheer me up but since I've lived on my own I make an effort to always buy myself a bunch (even if they are reduced to 19p a bunch in the supermarket) at least once a week so when the wonderful people at The Flower Studio in Marlow Buckinghamshire asked me if they could send a beautiful luxury hand tied bouquet from their garden flowers range I was so excited!  I waited patiently and then last week one very early morning there was a knock at my door, now I should state this 7am door knocking reduced my beagle to some kind of bonkers puppy and we had quite an adventure whilst the post man and I chased her around the front of my house when she wandered off barking at his high visibility jacket!

The flowers arrived in their own little box to make sure they were safe and well travelled on their journey all the way from Buckinghamshire and I couldn't wait to unbox them any longer.

I couldn't believe the sight that greeted me as I peeked in the box, that Hydrangea, I really didn't want to put them in a vase or take them out of the packaging, I think if you are planning a wedding on a budget you could simply remove them from the cellophane and voila, a bouquet which looks like it's cost significantly more than £39.99 (use the code WELCOME) at the checkout and get an extra £5 off your first order.

Feel free to use any of the above as wallpaper for your desktop or smartphone, I know I have!  On Thursday morning I decided to have a go at changing them around and I sat in the garden for a couple of hours just faffing with flowers feeling the wonder of being so connected to nature, I used an old vintage jug that I found in a charity shop and it really shows off the glorious messy arrangement I made, let me at this point of course state that I am no florist, floristry is a form of art and takes years to learn, I would adore a trip to flower school at some point in the future but like many branches of art it's never going to be something I am an expert in.

I got to thinking that again if you are planning a wedding there are so many different ways you could use this one bouquet and came up with a couple of ideas for simple table arrangements which would cost very little to produce and would look amazing at any vintage style wedding.  I should also state that I'm writing this blog post a couple of days later and the flowers are still wonderfully fresh and adorning my hall console table cheering me up every time I see their pretty little heads smiling at me, I adore that the flowers in the garden flowers range are all ones you could grow yourself and in fact I am currently cultivating many of them in my small back garden.  One thing though is that I always remember a huge hydrangea in my grannys garden when I grew up and I never really could see the beauty in it but I have a whole new appreciation for the delicate flower heads of the hydrangea, I plan to grow a couple in pots (because of their need for special conditions so they don't all end up the same colour) my only fear is they'll never last very long in the garden because I'll be cutting them and putting them around the house.  maybe I should just treat myself to Flower Studio bouquets once a month?

I want to say a big thanks to the lovely people at The Flower Studio for sending me this beautiful bouquet, it's a very rare occurrence that someone sends me flowers, in fact I would say I could count on one hand the number of times I've had flowers sent, feel free to send me lots of bouquets in the future because they will certainly be appreciated, for one flowers connect you to nature in a way you can only understand when you handle them and point two is that as a photographer there's always a delight to photograph truly beautiful things.