7 Favourite Affordable Homeware Pieces

I thought that it would be nice to share some of my favourite homeware pieces at the moment - most of which were picked up recently. I'm also a massive bargain hunter when it comes to homeware shopping so most of these items were picked up for under £10. 

1. Glass candlestick holder - TK Maxx, £6.99 (buy similar here)

2. Silver skeleton hand (I use this as a ring holder) - TK Maxx, £6.99 

3. Glass jewellery box - Urban Outfitters (sale), £10 (buy similar here)

4. Tortoise shell glass tea light holder - Tesco, £3.99 (buy here)

5. Decorative glass bottle - TK Maxx, £4.99 

6. Gold crackle effect glass tea light holder - TK Maxx, £3.99

7. Copper/rose gold fairy lights - Primark, £6

I think that little things like this really make a difference when it comes to making a room more cosy and homely. The copper fairy lights from Primark have got to be one of my favourite items, I currently have them hanging around my mirror - they are also a lovely autumnal colour. 

My Seven Year Chronic Illness Anniversary

Photo credit: Pinterest

For months now I've had an abundance of ideas for blog posts on chronic illness. For some reason I've just found myself reluctant to write about any of them, as much as I've been enthusiastic about the topics when they first sprang to mind. I can't really say why I've felt so opposed to writing anything on the matter, maybe I have just felt the need to escape something that is currently controlling my everyday life. Last night this unwillingness to write about anything chronic illness related finally dissolved. I felt an impetuous urge to write about something that I hadn't even thought about before.

That something was brought to light by the fact that this weekend happens to be the annual weekend of a fair night in a local town. The realisation came to me that this weekend seven years ago was the weekend that I had attended the fair with my friends for the first time, at the age of fourteen. Believe it or not, this was the first fair I had been to and I absolutely loved it, however, towards the end of the night I began to feel very unwell. I was staying at one of my friends houses that night and after complaining to her that I was feeling ill and wished I was going home to my own bed, she had told me not to worry and had made me a special camp bed. The following day (Sunday) I was still feeling unwell, I had a sore throat and generally felt exhausted and like I had a virus. Of course I had done the classic leave my homework until the day before it's due in and ended up sitting up quite late attempting to do some folder work for textiles. I eventually shared my homework woes with my mum, saying that I had to get it done but just felt so ill that I could barely do anything - her response was that if I really was that unwell I wouldn't be able to go to school the following day anyway. I remember feeling relief at this and feeling glad that my mum could actually see how ill I was - as her response was usually 'well go in and if you're feeling that ill I will pick you up'. This relief at my poor homework organisation skills being saved by a virus would probably not have existed if I had known that I would soon be diagnosed with glandular fever and then CFS/ME and not return to school properly for another two years. As it turns out my textiles coursework was never completed as I ended up having to drop all of my GCSE's but four.

Seven years on and my life is still being severely effected by catching that virus and as a result developing CFS/ME. I had no idea that in seven years time my day to day life would be dominated by crippling exhaustion and pain, I would need a wheelchair for anything that involved more than five minutes of walking or standing and would genuinely be jealous of elderly peoples social lives. I've never really stopped and thought about how my life changed so much over one weekend. In all honesty I do feel incredibly lucky for how much I have achieved and recovered despite being diagnosed with a chronic illness. Up until just over a year ago I had managed to recover to a point where I had almost forgotten about being ill. I went to University, I could occasionally exercise, I could socialise and go on nights out with friends, I could walk long distances and I could concentrate for much longer periods of time. I no longer had to think about the consequences of doing things before I had done them or say 'no' to things because of my illness. My illness no longer controlled me or my life.

Unfortunately it's safe to say that for the mean time, those days are over. Over the past month I have begun to slowly make progress and improve the amount of time I am able to be out for, the distance I am able to walk, and the times per week I am able to leave the house but I am still mostly housebound, unable to shower daily and unable to walk unaided for more than about five minutes. Leaving the house is precarious and I have to make plans with designated days before and after to rest and recover, I have to take painkillers and heat or ice packs wherever I go and am only able to hold conversation with people for a limited time before it leaves me exhausted. I don't want this to be a negative post or something that leaves me feeling depressed. One thing that living with an unpredictable and often debilitating illness has taught me is that despite how bad one day may be, you never know what you will be doing or achieving in a month or year's time. When I first became ill and had to drop my GCSE's to four I never would have imagined that I would achieve an A* in art at A level or be at university and living on my own one day. It has also taught me to be grateful for every little thing that I am able to do. A few weeks ago I couldn't even handle sitting in a car, but this week I have been out of the house three times (the most in months) and been able to be in the company of my friends for more than an hour. I may be unable to leave the house today or at some points even stand up, but I have had an amazing week and am grateful for what I have been able to do. I am also grateful that today I don't need to be in a dark room and am able to sit in the lounge rather than my bedroom and have felt well enough to go downstairs and make myself food.

I think that when it comes to chronic illness, something very important not to forget is your worst point. Don't forget how far you have come and that you are able to do things today that at one point may have seemed impossible. I feel strongly that no ones problems are irrelevant and am not a fan of the saying 'there is always someone worse off'. Not allowing yourself to feel upset isn't healthy, but once I'm finished feeling upset I'm going to remind myself of what I can do and how the way I feel today isn't permanent. I am also never going to take for granted anything I can do on my 'better' days.

Makeup Revolution Mini Haul & Review

This little Makeup Revolution shop all began when I came across the blush palette in Golden Sugar. I have a slight obsession with anything marbled, so the moment my eyes fell on the eight glorious circles of colour I fell in love. I had already assumed that it would be far out of my current budget, but when I saw that it was only £6! I couldn't put it in my basket fast enough. Yes, for £6 it was bound to be not great but I decided the beautiful marbled colours were worth the risk. I also thought why not try out a few of their other products while I was at it. These 6 items came to the grand total of £17.47!

Blush palette in 'Golden Sugar'

This palette consists of three bronzers, three blushers and two highlighters. These colours really are beautiful together. All except one of the bronzing shades are shimmery and give your face an instant glow and flawless finish. My favourites are the white highlighter and the blush shades. I love how you can blend the edges of the dusty pink blush shades with the bronzer and illuminate your whole face with a healthy golden glow. As I'm quite pale the bottom two bronzer shades can appear a little dark and orange against my skin so I tend to use those very sparingly with thin dustings on my temples and the tops of my cheek bones. The top bronzer shade works well as a contour shade and I use this on my cheek bones, temples, nose, chin and jawline. The white highlighter is so pretty on the skin and I use it down my nose, the very tops of my cheekbones and on my cupids bow. The bottom highlighting shade is a more subtle highlight and works well for an everyday makeup look whereas the white highlighter can be used to create a more flawless and sculpted evening look. Obviously the palette is very inexpensive so the colours aren't extremely pigmented, for the blush especially this is the case and you have to build the colour a bit. The bronzers and highlighters aren't too bad pigment wise. I wear primer when using this palette to ensure the colour stays as long as possible and have never had a problem with the colour wearing off or fading. The only thing I will say is that the entire palette is pretty shimmery and if you're not careful your entire face can end up looking metallic - so I try to use the most shimmery shades sparingly and not cover my entire face with them. Other than that, this is £6 well spent and a palette that I now use as part of my daily make-up routine. I would definitely recommend giving it a try, especially if you're new to contouring/highlighting. 

Baked Merged Eyeshadow in 'Starburst'

This is a baked eyeshadow, black with streaks of gold and flecks of shimmer. In all honesty this product isn't the most pigmented and would probably be best used with a primer - but you can hardly complain for £1.50! It doesn't come out black but comes out a dark charcoal colour with pretty flecks of golden shimmer throughout. This works well used to create a subtle smokey eye or placed lightly above liquid liner to soften yet dramatise a cat eye. 

Inner Eye Brightener

This product was probably the most disappointing. I thought that it was a shimmery nude shade to be placed on the inner corners of the eyes in place of a highlighter or light eyeshadow. It's actually pretty much just a nude pencil eyeliner, when applied to the skin it doesn't work very well and goes waxy and lumpy. It can be used however on the waterline to open up your eyes a little - but to be honest it doesn't make a huge difference. I wouldn't recommend this. 

Pro F105 Contour Brush

For the price (£3.49) this is a pretty good little brush. So far I haven't had any fallout of the hairs (something I usually find and loathe with cheaper brushes) and it does blend well. Obviously this isn't great when compared to the Real Techniques brushes or any other more expensive brush but it does the job! I use this quite a lot with the Golden Sugar palette, to apply contour to my cheeks and also often use it with the highlighters on the tops of my cheeks. 

Pro E101 Eyeshadow Brush

Again, for this brush and the next eyeshadow brush - they aren't amazing but they do the job! They are quite good quality for the price and definitely work well with the eyeshadow. This is quite a small brush so I use this for applying lighter colour to the inner corner of my eyelids or to apply colour beneath my lower lashes.

Pro E102 Contour Eyeshadow Brush

This brush has a slight angle and works really well when it comes to applying a darker shade to the crease of your eye. It's really soft and buffs the colour out well making it easy to blend into other colours.

Overall I am impressed with Makeup Revolution. The packaging is beautiful and well designed and the products are good quality for the hugely inexpensive prices that they are available at. I will definitely be purchasing further products from them.

(Disclaimer: all of these products were bought with my own money and I have given my honest opinions)

My Story with M.E

Photo credit: Pinterest

It has now been just over six years since I was diagnosed with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. I was diagnosed at the age of fifteen after a bad case of glandular fever when I was fourteen, which lasted for nearly a year. At the time, being told that I have ME/CFS wasn’t something that daunted me, I was used to being ill, after being ill for so long with glandular fever. At such a young age I didn’t truly understand what it meant and definitely didn’t understand that it was something without a cure that may never go away. It’s safe to say that along with glandular fever it took quite a toll on my life, both social and educational.

Overall I ended up missing pretty much two years of school, occasionally attending for an hour. I was very lucky to attend a school that was so understanding of my condition without forcing me to retake anything. I was allowed to reduce my GCSE’s to four and attend sixth form to study for two A-levels. Although I continued to miss a considerable amount of school in sixth form, by the end of my last year my health had improved considerably and I was able to socialise with my friends properly again and take on a part-time job. By some miracle, despite my huge lack of attendance I achieved good grades and got a place at university to study illustration. I decided to defer my place in order to save some money and make sure my health was stable before attending the university the following year. 

My year off was one of the best years I’ve had so far, I learned to drive and gradually built up to working full time. My health was the best it had been in years and I felt almost back to normal. I still couldn’t properly exercise without having bad symptoms and if I pushed myself too much I had days where I was unwell, but other than that I was able to go out and do normal things, something that I was so grateful for as I had missed out on so much socially over the previous year's being ill.

I loved my first year of university and the course, I also got my illustrations published in a book which was amazing and a design sold by a t-shirt company for a short time. I think looking back I was a lot more ill than I let myself believe. I struggled a bit and on occasion I had to give going out a miss or leave early. In addition I suffered considerably with insomnia, a symptom of M.E., often not getting to sleep until around 3-4am which didn’t help my symptoms. I held out quite well throughout the year, regardless of the fact that I am naturally conscientious and worked hard, pushing myself quite a lot. Towards the end of the academic year I could feel my symptoms flaring up and the days that I felt unwell became more and more common. My health deteriorated quickly over that summer. I managed to attend work experience with a graphic design company and work full time for a while, but before long I had to reduce my hours to 2-3 days per week as I was struggling too much. Despite my decreasing health I volunteered at Reading festival in August, which was such a good experience but involved two twelve hour shifts and a lot of walking to and from the arena. Then it was time to go back to uni and begin my second year. As expected, it was a struggle. I think the fact that it was a creative course didn’t help as in order to keep up with the work load you had to be in university for pretty much 8-9 hours per day, as well as often working late into the evening. 

I struggled on, ignoring my health, but it was towards the end of November that my health deteriorated so significantly that I could no longer ignore it. Since then it has unfortunately continued to get worse. My health is now back to a point that it hasn’t been in nearly three years and has unfortunately left me with no choice but to suspend my final year of university. It got to the point where I had to get a taxi to and from lectures as I struggled to walk and sometimes would spend up to two weeks in bed without leaving the house. I struggled to make myself food, I couldn’t food shop, and I couldn’t even shower standing up and needed someone else to brush my hair. I ended up getting a wheelchair as I had no other way of getting out of the house and still use it quite regularly if I need to go out. I still have days where I have to lie in a dark room and don’t have the energy to lift my head but thankfully I occasionally have better days where I am able to go out for a short time or even just get ready without having immediate payback. Unfortunately lately ‘better days’ have grown more rare, but hopefully with pacing myself and the right mind set I can gradually improve over time. 

(I would love to hear other people's story with M.E. or chronic illness - so please feel free to comment if you want a chat!)

My Birthday & The Importance of Celebrating Small Milestones With a Chronic Illness

Photo credit: Pinterest

So this blogpost is pretty late considering my birthday was May 19th. I’ve been meaning to write about this for a long time but the past few months have been a complete whirlwind and a mixture of me being busy and then being completely wiped out from being so busy! I’m sure that if you also suffer from a chronic illness you can relate, as sometimes it can be pretty difficult when it comes to making plans and your body can end up choosing when and what you do! Excuses aside, I wanted to talk about my birthday this year and why it was one of the best so far. 

So this might just be me, but I always find birthdays a bit stressful, I hate the pressure that comes with them to have a good time and as this was my 21st I felt the pressure to do something ‘special’ even more so. A huge relapse of my health, taking me back to a state I hadn’t been in for over three years was not helpful whatsoever. It was around February, when my relapse had begun to get worse, that I truly started dreading my birthday. As a result of my bad health I hadn’t been ‘out out’ since October (and still haven’t) and even the idea of going out for dinner looked impossible, so it didn’t seem like there were going to be many options when it came to making plans. 

Despite my apprehension to even go out for dinner, about a month before my birthday I booked tickets to the Icebar London (pretty ambitious as at the time I needed a wheelchair to get around). I still have no idea what I was thinking. Obviously the added pressure of being well on my birthday so that I could go to the Icebar wasn’t helpful to my symptoms. I ended up cancelling it and rearranging it for a later date. In the end I managed to go to three meals for my birthday and survive. One with my uni friends, one with my home friends and then a family meal. I can’t tell you how happy I was to have survived it all, I hadn’t been well enough to go out for a meal in months and had managed to go to three without having much space in between the days to rest. Even though for each meal I went to I had been in bed ill the whole day and on one occasion I had been in tears a few hours before going as I felt so unwell, I managed to go to each. I had also already prepared myself for how awful I would feel after going and planned to rest so I think this helped a lot as I wasn’t shocked at how bad I felt or stressed, so didn’t aggravate my symptoms further. 

To be honest I had such a lovely time and was so unbelievably happy with how much I had managed that I sort of forgot about the Icebar and had already decided to maybe sell the tickets, as I knew realistically I wouldn’t be able to cope with it. However for some reason I didn’t cancel the tickets and on June 4th I pushed myself the most that I have in about 5 months. We left as late as we could so that there would be as little walking as possible (I didn’t feel confident enough to take my wheelchair on the trains with me, so didn’t take it despite the fact that I had even had to use it to go out on my actual birthday). I don’t know if anyone else is the same but even travelling can be exhausting at times as sitting up can be quite difficult, so I sort of expected to feel hideous by the time I was in London. By some miracle I managed the train journey and the short walk to the Icebar from the station, I also managed the meal (without a migraine happening, as that’s usually what happens when I’m out) and the 40 minute experience. I have no idea how my body managed to behave for so long, even up to when I was walking back to the train, but it did. The symptoms didn’t hit me until I was on the train on the way home (and yes they hit pretty hard when they did, making me bed bound for quite a few days after).

Payback aside, I feel like I need to celebrate this milestone as well as the milestone of going out for not one meal, but three, because even they were honestly something I couldn’t see myself doing. With M.E it’s so important not to push yourself as the after affects can last for weeks or months, but I think on the occasions when you are able do more than you usually could and survive, it’s well worth celebrating. I truly surprised myself at how much I was able to manage, I think that resting as much as possible beforehand and planning so that there was as little walking as possible really helped. I also think that preparing yourself in advance and accepting the fact that you are going to have payback is very helpful. It’s something that I still find hard at times but am slowly learning to accept. In my opinion celebrating milestones, even if they’re something like being able to brush your own hair or sitting up for longer than usual, is something really important and it helps you to be thankful and appreciate what you can do. Even though I couldn’t go out with my friends or have a party for my birthday, I still had an amazing time and as cheesy as it sounds, wouldn’t change anything about what I did. Hopefully next year things will be better, but I’m still thankful for what I was able to do this year.

Can a Teatox Improve ME/CFS Symptoms?

I did this teatox two summers ago, before my relapse. I recently remembered that among many other things, it had claimed to help with energy levels. After looking at the website again I saw that it said it would also help with digestion as well as bloating. I don't know if anyone else with ME/CFS is the same, but I have a lot of trouble with digestion and stomach pains/cramps. The pain can often be in combination with nausea and sometimes put me off eating (very unlike me). I remember from doing the teatox in the past that it had hugely helped me with bloating. At the time my symptoms were much less severe and I was working and doing normal things, so didn't take much notice of whether or not it helped with my energy. However, desperate times call for desperate measures so I decided to go for it and order some more to see if it would help - I ordered the 14 day 'tiny tea' teatox.

The verdict 

The teatox consisted of drinking three cups of tea per day, each should be 30 minutes before or after eating a meal and preferably be before 6pm for optimum results. In just the first few days the improvement with my digestion was noticeable and my bloating had reduced a lot. Although I still had slight nausea and pains occasionally they were much less severe than before and for many days I had no pain or nausea at all. If I'm honest I didn't see much improvement with my energy levels, I had a few days where my energy improved but I don't think that was necessarily down to the teatox. I would however recommend the teatox on the grounds of how much it improved my digestion and bloating - I would definitely do it again. 

Thank you for taking the time to read this and let me know your thoughts on the teatox if you've tried it! 

My First Post

I have honestly been meaning to start this blog for about four months now! It feels so good to be finally writing a post -  as well as slightly nerve-wracking! I started this blog off on Wordpress, but for some reason never really got on with it or liked the design, so I have decided to totally scrap that one and start fresh here.

After recently having no choice but to suspend my studies at university due to a rather large and untimely relapse in my health, I felt that there was no better time to start this blog. Being a full time ill person for a year with no job or degree is pretty terrifying but hopefully I can turn this into something positive and make the most out of my time out of education. I initially made this blog with the intention to write solely about chronic illness. I wanted to use it to document my journey with M.E and discuss things that I have found help me. I have always been quite private about dealing with my illness so the idea of sharing something so personal was pretty daunting to me. After coming to terms with the idea of writing about chronic illness and from the positive feedback that I received after posting on my old blog I now feel a lot more comfortable discussing it. However I have decided that I don't want this blog to be 100% about chronic illness, while I will talk about it on here from time to time I want to discuss a range of things including lifestyle, beauty and food.