Style your house

More fun than a picnic is how I'd describe having our house styled for a photo shoot by the glorious stylist Amanda Russell and her friend and photographer Nick Carter.  I was worried that our house was too messy and generally full of unstylish corners, but it turns out that it's only the square framed by the shot which needs to look amazing - outside that square roller skates and bicycle helmets, nerf gun collections, and ugly toasters, can be heaped, but because you look at the picture within the frame, you don't imagine piles of rubbish, but more of what the contents of the photograph describes.  So, for example, the picture I've used to illustrate this post, is of a corner of a shelf in our sitting room (this corner styled by Amanda this week.)  On the right is the window, through which, in real life, is Fabrizio's delivery van van, our wheelie bin, a pile of buckets belonging to Common Farm Flowers, a child's scooter.  On the left is the ultimate in ugliness, a television, its associated wires, an extension cord because none of the plugs in our house are in the right place.  But the serenity of the photograph makes you think of none of this.  I can't wait for this piece to come out.  I'm going to frame the photographs and hang them in the relevant rooms, and instead of seeing the perennial heaps of family life created detritus, I'm going to see how the room can be, could be, was, once, when clever Amanda and Nick applied their creative zest to turn our house into the sort that might be featured in a glossy antiquesy magazine.

Amanda will be holding one of her amazing, inspiring, and vision changing styling workshops here on Weds Feb 21st 2018.  Come along and re-educate your visionary mind: learn to see afresh, enjoy making a mood board to see what you want to say, and spend the afternoon playing with your camera, our studio, all sorts of styling goodies, and learn to tell stories through your pictures.  This is a great day if you're a blogger, an instagrammer, or love to style your house, other peoples' houses.  When Amanda taught this day earlier this year, I felt as though I'd had a day at a spa, therapy, visual treatments, and my story telling through my photographs has improved a hundred fold.