Monday 4 April 2011

From Nicky with love



If, like us, you are passionate about supporting the very best of British, you may well be familiar with Nicky Sherwood's fantastic From Britain with Love website already. Packed with information and ideas on great local suppliers of quality produce of all kinds as well as special places to stay and visit, FBWL is a real favourite of ours.
So much so, that we invited Nicky, who lives in St Margaret's in Surrey, to write a guest blog and to share with us some of the things closest to her heart.

What’s your guilty pleasure?

NS: My guilty pleasure is... crochet! Ok, so it’s not exactly rock ‘n’ roll, but I did become slightly obsessed after learning how to do it for one of our Course Notes features last year. Before long, I was trawling YouTube for video tutorials and whipping up granny squares into the early hours – my husband said I was addicted to ‘crack crochet’. But with a 4 year old, a 12 week old baby and a business to run I don’t have a lot of spare time these days, so it does feel like a bit of an indulgence every time I reach for my bag of wool. Bring on the next fix...









Lasso the Moon favourites?

NS: I adore the ‘Buddy’ patchwork baby blanket by Smitten - I saw it in your latest newsletter and fell in love - definitely on my wish list for my new baby! I also love Maggie Williams’ glass cupcakes... I visited her studio in Cornwall last year and have a little collection of them displayed on a cake stand on my kitchen windowsill – they look so pretty with the sunlight shining through them.


Favourite UK place to eat?

NS: I’d have to say it’s British coffee shop Ginger & White in Hampstead, which my sister co-founded. They serve the best coffee in London (not that I’m biased of course!) and all their food is sourced from British farms and producers. It’s a wonderful place for brunch – they make their own granola and even homemade peanut butter, and it’s very child friendly too. They’re about to open a second shop in nearby Queen's Park – I just wish they’d open one a bit nearer to where I live!

Favourite UK place to stay?

NS: My mum lives on a farm in North Cornwall and I love that part of the world so we try to get down there as often as we can. My four year old son loves to feed the chickens and collect the eggs for breakfast, pick fresh veg for his dinner from the kitchen garden, see how honey is made from the bee hives, and bake treats with grandma in the Aga... it’s real ‘Good Life’ stuff! We also love to pop down to nearby Port Isaac on a Friday evening where you can stand on the beach with a drink and listen to the (now world-famous) Fisherman’s Friends singers perform traditional Cornish sea shanties as the sun sets over the harbour – that takes a lot of beating!


Most cherished possession?

NS: I’m rather fond of my collection of vintage children’s books. My husband is a keen (ok, obsessive!) antiquarian book collector, so realising I’d be spending quite a lot of my married life in dusty bookshops, it was a case of ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ and I started collecting these beautiful Victorian children’s books with decorative spines. I’ve got a few hundred of them now - they’re fun to collect as they usually cost under ten pounds, so you can snap them up without feeling too guilty. I still think it’s pretty amazing that you can buy something that’s over 100 years old for the same price as a modern paperback!

No comments:

Post a Comment