Elevenses With Kirstie Allsopp

The week before last I was wrangling my toddler into the pram outside the supermarket when I received a call from a lovely girl at Persil informing me I'd won a years worth of Persil Small and Mighty and was being shortlisted to win a £1000 family holiday for 4 and could I manage down for a meet and greet with Kirstie Allsopp.

A nightmarish pose...but don't I look happy? bless.

5 mums across Britain were being chosen to win this treat for performing mini miracles every day. Some wee nominated by family and somehad entered themselves. From what I remember I'd written about how I like to have a project. That when we go out for the day  to the museum, park etc we use it as a theme back home, doing drawings, making things & singing songs.

I was so shocked, and distracted by Christopher, that I didn't have much of a chance to take it in but said yes, that would be no problem.
All weekend I couldn't relax , telling myself not to be stupid, of course I wasn't going to win.


Well, I didn't hear anything and got on with my week. This time I was trying to coax Christopher down from the top of a slide where he was refusing to move, hitting all other children who came near away! 
The call came and I was told I'd won and could I come down just a few days later.







Every time they called from then onwards I was either creeping out of his room while he slept, was in the middle of dealing with a tantrum or lost my signal. I must have come across as such a flake!


I spent the weekend preparing the boys with a vat of soup was feeling a bit less harrassed by the time tuesday came. After a slightly bumpy flight, which required me to drink a mini bottle of prosecco at 11am (don't judge!), I was safely at the hotel.


The pr girls would be a few hours and I had no idea who the other mums were, so had 5 hours to spare on my own before dinner at 7.30pm.


I napped, read, watched Jeremy Kyle and went for a walk on the beautiful Woodbury Common. I'd only managed 3 hours on my own and had no idea what to do next.

where I was 

wild berries

self portrait with Woodbury Common

gorse & heather

local fun

self portrait with log

I turned on the tv and there was Kirstie!

What a saddo!

A few hours of being crap at doing nothing and it was time for tea.


I had no reason to be nervous at all because all of the women, and their families, were lovely.
We soon got to know each other, enjoying a few bottles of wine over dinner and even made the party last longer by taking some rose back to my room!

The next morning I arose feeling a little fuzzy but soon fixed that with some red bush tea (a la Mme Ramotswe) and a cooked breakfast.
Then we were off in the taxi to Kirstie's house. 
We had a very lovely taxi driver who was an ex-chef with a very arty wife so we had some great chat on the way. We shared some conserve making tips and discussed ideas for making christmas hampers with lace topped jams and home-made sweets and our own limoncello recipes. 


Once we arrived we were greeted by the remaining Persil team, Kirstie, her dog Foxy and her lovely little boys.
The house is colossal. A proper stately home set back off a little lane with a long drive, big pond, sheep, a walled kitchen garden, arty hedges, crunchy gravel, I'm not sure how many bedrooms...8/10/12? And a lot of bathrooms.


In the hallway as you walk in there is a little kids bus (1.5m long and you can sit inside it!) a massive suspended mirrorball and a huge mirrored sideboard. The hallway leads onto a grand wood lined stairwell, guarded by a stuffed lion. There are doors off this hallway leading to large public rooms, then narrow passages to even more rooms and so on upwards, past the second floor into the attic space, complete with an old bell system in the run-down servants quarters.

Tea was made in the massive kitchen in front of an AGA the length of my entire kitchen. Of course the cups were vintage mismatched Coronation celebration ones (I will be blatantly copying most of her ideas across to my home)
We carried our cups of tea as we began the tour.
The house was bought by her husband some years ago before she moved in and had kids there herself so it very much had his style stamped all over it and they have sensibly assigned certain rooms to be ruled over by each other in order to not lose that individuality. It makes for a lovely mix of masculine and feminine with recurring favourite items scattered all over in the form of taxidermy, lace, vintage quilts, opulent coloured chandeliers, photos, silverware and pottery, little collections of items like toy planes/butterflies/buttons in Victorian display cases, old biscuit tins, hats & tin toys.

paper sculptures, silk scarf cushions and  modern & antique chairs

love logs

I particularly loved the personal touches such as the model airplane in the kitchen with streamers hung from the wings inscribed with the kids names, a clipping about Kirstie framed in her husband's bathroom, the childrens play room door painted red and scatttered with stickers decorated by the boys and Kirstie's lovely boudoir cushions monogrammed in blue.

vintage

The house is in no way 'finished' looking with little cracks, stains, mouse holes here and there, balanced by beautiful cornicing, original panelling etc

The mood changes from room to room. Some are vast, some are cozy. Mainly it's just a home....a really really massive, hard to keep home.

It's a very exciting space with no end of restoration being required and possibilities for new projects and makeovers.

Once the tour was over we went back into the kitchen and had more photos taken as a group and alone with Kirstie. I wish that someone would have told me that I was bending my neck like a freak, mutating my face to look like the mother alien from Alien...hello photographer!

After photos we sat down to a good old decoupage sesh.... like something from the WRI.

I loved every minute. It's about time I got back to doing more crafts. I was lovely to just sit there pasting bits of paper onto a papier mache dinosaur with not a care in the world, chatting away about motherhood, upcoming craft episodes & life in general.

Kirstie asked us several times if there wasn't something else we'd like to ask her and that usually people wanted to know all about Phil. Perhaps we weren't the usual superfan sort.

She's just a lovely girl and we all got on. I think that everyone was a bit of a fan, having at least seen the homemade christmas show and we were delighted to to see some cute little hand embroidered Christmas tree napkins made by the embroiderers guild (I think!).


A beautiful lunch of sandwiches and fresh fruit was laid out for us in the dining room. 

They had even made sure I had gluten free bread and cakes. I was gutted to have eaten so much as breakfast as I could only manage one french fancy! 

wow!

For the gluten lovers there were some delicious looking cheese scones, served with salsa and soured cream, a great savoury cream tea alternative.

Everything was made by Toast in Honiton and was decorated with seasonal flowers.

After lunch some of the taxis arrived. We asked them to wait a further 10 mins while we had another cup of tea in the kitchen.
Our lovely taxi driver arrived with his wifes copy of Kirstie's Homemade Home to be signed. He'd clearly requested to be put on the return journey for this specific reason.


We were each given a floral Cath Kidston Bag, a little blue flower pot plant and our decoupage project with some extra materials, and glue, to complete our work at home.

Mwah mwahs at the door and we were off!

I had a really lovely day and would like to thank Kirstie, Persil, the girls at Golin Harris and the other lovely ladies I sent the day with. It was great!

x