Christmas on the Island.

I do love this time of year, it's such a great excuse to get together. It seems that heading to the Isle of Wight for Christmas has become somewhat of a tradition for Moon and I and I don't think I'd have it any other way.

It's pretty great to have friends that live in nice places to visit. Pip and Stacy are great hosts and we really made the most of our short trip, it was such a nice weekend.


Isn't their cat, Puss, lovely? She's so friendly but she used to be as aloof as Doll, still hoping.



We went to Arreton Barns to kill a bit of time before the rest of the guests arrived, it has not one but two(!) glass blowing workshops, a few cute gift shops, a farm shop and a pretty good penny arcade, as well as one hella sad snowman that we caught dragging his feet to an unknown location on the grounds...










After a beautiful walk up along the headland near Brighstone we headed into Brighstone village to catch their annual Christmas Tree festival, a kitsch celebration held across various locations featuring, you guessed it, a lot of Christmas trees. Each tree was sponsored by different businesses from across the Isle of Wight and they'd each decorated them in their own way. It was hard to pick a favourite but I think I liked Grange Farm's offering best, there were eggs and lots of lights! My picture doesn't really do it justice.






The tree on the left is from the Isle of Wight Donkey Sanctuary, which visited last time.



We exchanged our Secret Santa gifts before heading to a great restaurant called, The Coast Bar where I had my first Turducken and the best crab mousse.






For the rest of the evening we played games, sung along to Christmas songs and watched as much as we could of this video (you're welcome).

A slightly hungover early afternoon was spent in Sandown bowling on the pier and eating chips before it was time to head home.



I'm pretty excited that it's now less than two weeks until I see some of this lot again as usually we go for a few months. For New Year's Eve it will be our turn to entertain and the bar has been set pretty high(!) ♥

You can have a peek at the last two Wight Christmases here and here.

That's a Nice One.

I can't decide whether I feel bad that I'm a bit behind with my recent updates - so many photos, so few days in the week - or whether I'm pretty happy to have a little back log to refer back to when lacking inspiration. I'm pretty sure that I'm the latter, the weather has been so nice all week and I've been so sleepy (and grumpy) so would rather be in bed or enjoying the sunshine.

Rest assured that there's a pretty good amount of things to catch up on, but things are so satisfying when they're done in chronological order, so, and because I wanted to do a quick little post, I thought I'd share my Glastonbury Instax photos first.

I know I say this whenever I share photos from this camera with you, but I really love it and it's probably one of my favourite cameras that I own. As well as taking great photos - pretty superior to any Polaroids I've ever had, not to mention cheaper - I also feel like I total bigshot when I carry it around because people seem to be so intrigued by it, the amount of enquiries I got about it at Glastonbury were pretty fun. I feel like I should know more about it other than it being generally hard to find - really not bad for something left behind by one of my Mum's employees.


Leo and Mooney Moon brushing their teeth.


DtR killin' it.


Just happy to be there.


Flags, flags flags / Crowds, crowds, crowds.


From The Crow's Nest.


Arcadia Spider.


The Rolling Stones.


Glastonbury Tor in cardboard.


Kind of Mumford & Sons.


Campfire.

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I'm so pleased with these photos, given the phenomenal cock-up with my 35mm photos from Glastonbury, I'm glad I have these physical images worth keeping - again, a Glasto 2013 album is something I hope will materialise soon, although I've yet to finish my Turkey one and that's over a year ago now (omg, sadface!).

Film photographs, of almost any kind always make me want to take more as soon as I can, but then I lose steam and half a roll sits in my camera for another half a year - that's something I would really like to change. I'm so pleased that my blog gives me an outlet and a place to put all my photos because even though I'm not always printing off and making albums like I wish I had the time to do, I've still got something to look back on.
Cheesy bloggush over, what do you think of film photography, do you prefer to convenience of digital?

Cradle me, I'll cradle you...

As well as five whole 35mm disposable cameras I also brought my Instax 600AF with me to Reading. It was pretty easy to look after as it just went around my neck. I'm more pleased with some of the photos than others as the goddamn red-eye flash made it a little less than instant. It's nice to already hold some photos of such a nice weekend though.














This was meant to be a beautiful sunset, so much for 'red sky at night', the weather was terrible yesterday.