I'm not particularly good at keeping up with trends; my music collection is comprised in the main of albums made before I was born and I have yet to don a skinny jean. There are however three interior trends this year to which I have pledged my most heartfelt allegiance: grey, geometric and copper.

Our spare room has been dedicated as a Mecca to all three.

I discovered some amazing solid copper wardrobe handles the Swedish shops Superfront and Berglund & Bäccman, but they were sadly too expensive.

Several hours of Internet searching later, I found two sites with fantastic value copper coated handles All Handles & Pulls and Quality Fittings. 

These guys are also Swedish, but offer good postage speed and prices - free for All Handles & Pulls and £5 for up to 2kg for Quality Fittings.

I fitted our simple IKEA wardrobes with flat round knob (2078) from All Handles priced at £4.29 each.  I fitted our Annie Sloan upcycled drawers with the Ronda globe handles, which are £2.55 each.  Both have a surprising and pleasing heaviness to them.

H&M has some really superb stuff at the minute and loads of yummy copper, so I've been indulging my copper habit a fair bit here.

My other go to shop for homewares is M&S. I was doing my usual skulk around their housey section when I should have been picking up groceries and found lots of goodies in a sale corner. Robbie found me with a full trolley and crazy look in my eyes!

As they were on sale, unfortunately most aren't available to buy online any more :(

Not content with my copper quota, I bought some spray paint and pimped up a candle lid, some photo frames.

I was very keen to paint one of our rooms with this colour, but I've actually ended up leaving the wall that isn't wallpapered in the spare room white.  I've been working on some song lyric prints and I think I'll use white frames, shiny copper lettering and this colour or other blush tones for the background. I'm on the look out for some nice cushions also, but fearful that I don't go down the eighties grey and pink route!

My name is Nadine and I'm a font addict.  Nice fonts make me happy and bad ones make me engage in embarrassing behaviour. 

Let me explain.  We moved house recently and had to complete a questionnaire for our mortgage advisor to show our monthly outgoings.  I always seem to start these types of chores in the small hours, so with my bed beckoning I needed to quickly complete it.  I opened the document and the whole form was formatted with Comic Sans font.  Shudder.

I make lots of t-shirts for friends' kids and end up spending an exorbitant amount of time trying to select the perfect font so I can customise designs with the kids' names. 

I've found a great website to cure my font paralysis : http://wordmark.it/ 

This website allows you to enter a phrase and preview it in each font that is installed on your computer.  Simply scroll through the fonts, and select the ones you like.  Filter the selected fonts, and you can compare your favourites side by side.  The site allows you to toggle between upper, lower and proper case, increase and decrease the font size and also switch between white on a black background and vice versa.

For fellow addicts here are some links to lovely typography articles.

Since moving house, I have been keeping my beady eye out for nice upcycle projects using retro furniture from Gumtree.  About a month ago, I spotted this lovely piece that was already completed for sale at a very reasonable price of £90.

We jumped into the car and collected the drawers from a lovely girl called Zoe in Falkirk.  Having previously worked painting furniture, this was her first foray into selecting and selling her own pieces.

Mála Furniture Facebook Site

We had a wee chin-wag about Annie Sloan versus other chalk brands and the paint she used for this piece, General Finishes Milk Paint, which I had previously never heard of.  This paint is made by a small American company in Wisconsin.  It does not contain milk and comes pre-mixed, so is not a true milk paint, but can be used to produce the same effects.  The paint doesn't need to be primed and offers a smoother, more durable finish than chalk paints. 

I feared that the colour, whilst beautiful, might be too blue for our bedroom.  Duck egg shades seem to have a lovely trait of changing from blue to green depending on what they are near.  I would never have chosen Persian Blue for our bedroom, but once we got the drawers home, I think that they fit in wonderfully.

Luckily, just a week later, I found this wee cracker for sale two streets away.  It was a steal at only £10, but we are the world's worst hagglers and so offered the lady £20!

Next, I needed to procure my supplies.  General Finishes paint is available online but I noticed that Acanthus in Bruntsfield are stockists, so decided to pop along.  The shop has just reopened following a revamp and the ladies are very friendly and knowledgeable with many hints and tips.  I picked up a tin of the Persian Blue, the High Performance matte topcoat and some 4 inch wide foam brushes.  The paint is pricey at £21.50 for a 473ml/ 1 pint tin, but I was assured that this would cover many projects.
Acanthus Interiors

You can also order this paint online, the cheapest I've found is Kast Services - they are on Ebay and have a web store and deliver for free.
Kast Services

Having learnt my lesson with an earlier project using Annie Sloan, I decided to spend a little prep time applying wood filler to divots, in particular where the handles on the bottom drawer had rotated and scored the wood.  I taped the sides for clean lines and then gave the whole piece a wee buff with a sanding sponge before starting.  

I was nervous that the foam brush would waste paint, but found that it seemed to apply a nice fine coat, and there were no problems with lap marks.  Zoe from Mála furniture said she completed the drawers with just one coat.  I definitely don't have her technique as my first coat applied really patchy!  I wasn't worried though as the ladies at Acanthus advised that this would likely be the case.  The paint was super fast drying, so by the time I had finished the legs, body and drawers I could start again.  I probably could have stopped at the second coat as it looked great,  but I'm a 'one for luck' type gal so did 3 coats and a sneaky 4th and final coat for the top :)  I struggled with the paint consistency of ASCP on previous projects- always adding either too much water or not enough.  The GF milk paint on the other hand is just right, I have finally found my paint goldilocks!  More than just consistency improvements though, I found GF very forgiving and easy to use for a novice like myself.

Whilst the paint dried, I started polishing up the handles.  In a whoopsie moment, I discovered that I had been a little too enthusiastic and actually wore away the gold coloured plating, revealing the base metal beneath!  I achieved a nice shine and thought the silver colour might be nicer anyway, so I set about completing the job.  I decided to also polish the handles on the chest of drawers so that both pieces match.  The quickest method I found is to simply use a fine grade sanding sponge - each handle took just a few minutes to polish up.

My handles for the chest of drawers were ready and so were the bottom pair for the dressing table, but it transpired that the small top ones were solid brass.  Not to be deterred, I ordered up some metallic silver spray paint from Amazon for £8
Plasti-kote Brilliant Metallic Silver Spray Paint

The Amazon packaging is perfect for spray painting as it has little wings to keep the paint from spraying outside the box.  To get better stability and access, I fed the screws from below the cardboard and then attached the knobs.  This was a stroke of accidental genius, as it was so windy that the whole box flew across the garden at one stage, but thanks to the screws my knobs weren't smudged.  I was however picking grass and mud out from the other items I was spraying at the same time! 

I applied the topcoat that evening and again the following day.  I then attached the handles and I was done - hurrah!