Retro Christmas Pressies from Spoilt Rotten Gifts!

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Since featuring Spoilt Rotten Gifts this time last year, I’m so pleased to see this fabulous website has gone from strength to strength. Owner Nichola is just about the nicest person in the small business world and I simply love her collection of vintage, retro and intrinsically British gifts. Her handpicked selection has now grown to include some of my favourite designers including Sass Belle, Anorak, Orla Kiely and Nicky James! It perfectly suits Nichola’s eclectic style and is testament to her background in buying for the likes of John Lewis.

Spoilt Rotten Gifts is the perfect destination for unusual stocking fillers that will transport someone back to their childhood, offer a solution to something they’ve often whinged about, or for children’s gifts that are sure to be coveted well beyond the excitement of Christmas. Here are just a few of my favourite things:

Spoilt Rotten Gifts
Clockwise (left to right): VW Campervan Shaped Mug £5.99 each / Kate Garey Sausage Dog Day Bag was £55.00 now £49.50 / Wall’s Ice Cream Satchel £25.99 / Nicky James Blue Owl Satchel £25.99 / Rusty And Friends Set Of Three Suitcases £20.99 / Magpie Birdy Robin Cushion £16.99 / Disaster Designs Beatles Alarm Clock was £15.99 now £8.99 / Orla Kiely Gardening Gloves £12.99 / Sass Belle Baby Fox Cushion was £15.99 now £12.79

I was literally spoilt for choice when choosing something to review this time around. As my Craigy is a bit of geek, he’d be happy with absolutely everything on the site, and there are also some seriously scrummy baby outfits that Heidi would have looked gorgeous in. But given I’m a selfish mare, I actually treated myself. This seems to be happening far too often at the moment - the kids faces are a real sight when the postman coming knocking with parcels for mummy and not them!

Sass Belle Owl Doorstop

I plumped for this adorable Sass Belle owl doorstop in pretty green, pink and white printed fabrics. Given everyone is so ill at the moment (I’m actually writing this very post from a stuffy room on the children’s ward at the Royal Berkshire Hospital - poor Dex has been struck with bronchitis) Craig is sat at home with Heidi helping her get over her latest tooth, and airing out all the rooms. Rose the owl has therefore been tasked with the very important job of stopping doors from slamming and frightening Heidi. In fact, Heidi seems quite enamoured with Rose and loves babbling away to her.

Rose is nice and heavy and carries all her weight in her bum (don’t we all!) so sits up against doors perfectly (no laying down on the job!). The hand-stitched felt appliqué eyes, wings and feet are such a sweet little detail, and the fabrics all go together beautifully.

Rose is also performing night duties at our house and propping open the lounge stair gate at night to save mummy and daddy from nightly meltdowns. At £9.96 (reduced from £12.45) she’s a fab little Christmas gift for a vintage interior addict.

Birdy Twin bag

I also ordered a gorgeous wash bag and make-up bag from the retro Wren Birdy range. In sky blue and lemon shades and featuring a blue tit and yellow wagtail, this beautiful set of printed PVC coated canvas bags are very 70′s. Lined in nylon, they’re easy to wipe clean if you have any spillages, making them fab for the frequent traveler or make-up fiend. The cute make-up bag measures 215x140mm so is also the perfect size for popping in your handbag, to protect its lining from loose powder and rogue lipsticks.

The heart-shaped Wren zip pulls are a neat little contrast against the fabric and will withstand a fair bit of tugging when you’ve overfilled the bags. At 310x200mm you wouldn’t think you’d run out of room in the wash bag, but I’m the last person in the world who will criticise you if you do! This is currently housing all my daily lotions and potions and I love its cheerful design when I delve in every morning.

At £16.99 its such a lovely gift for a special lady and in true Mary Poppins style, they’re practically perfect in every way!

If I’ve tempted you, have a browse of Nichola’s wibbly wobbly world of Spoilt Rotten Gifts, and pop over to her website, or show her some love on Pinterest, Facebook or Twitter.


A Spot of Christmas Shopping with Getting Personal

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I love a good gift site. It takes all the pain out of choosing something unique and special for tricky-to-buy for people. The extent of my Christmas and birthday list for Craig (born on 12 Dec; how bloody inconsiderate!) is usually socks, beer, face cream and a designer tee-shirt. He’s a real lad’s lad with expensive tastes and a propensity to leave-me-to-it present-wise (“You know what I like…” - like I’m some sort of Oracle). One year I even resorted to buying him underwear for me, thinking it might be a treat for him, but he stropped for the entire day so I won’t be trying this again.

FOR HIM

Football Gifts

When I spotted a really cool football-inspired gift on Getting Personal, I quickly fired off an email to see if they’d like a review. Although he’s far from being one of those men that spend their Sunday’s in a football shirt, he does follow Manchester Utd with irritating closeness. We can’t nip out to the garden centre if they’re on the telly, and 99.9% of his Facebook statuses will be whinges about signings or sending offs. This personalised football headlines book therefore looked right up his street.

Not only is it superb quality with imitation leather finish and gold embossed personalisation, it’s tabloid sized to ensure an easy read. Each of the pages are produced from original newspaper scans printed onto thick quality paper. It promises to document the most sensational headlines and articles from your club’s history spanning back some 100 years.

Each book has a detailed insight into their favourite team, everything from bank-breaking transfers to cup glory to last gasp winners. It’s all here.

Getting Personal Football

From my limited knowledge of Manchester Utd, I expected to see dozens of articles on the fateful air crash that claimed 22 lives in 1953, Fergie’s takeover from Atkinson in 1986, iconic signings such as Cantona, Keane and Rooney, their treble win in 1999, and some of the headlines that caused grown men to sob when Ferguson stepped down. They’re in all in there, in fab black and white quality print. Okay… this might be my idea of sheer hell, but it’s bound to be a hit with my Craig.

This fab book is just £39.99 with over 60 of the nation’s top flight teams to choose from (including the biggies from the Scottish League). I really hope I’ve managed to get across how chuffed I am with this, and I haven’t made an idiot of myself with dates etc. I’m more of a rugby girl myself!

FOR THEM

We also received a fabulous personalised character bean bag for the Little Dude. Dex has an annoying habit of watching the television just a few centimetres from the screen which drives me mad and sees his daddy whipping out the screen cleaner every five minutes. I chose this as I hoped it would convince him that he can see more from a distance!

Dexter Bean Bag This is perfectly sized for Dex. I must admit we have no idea whether this is a Small (£39.99) or Medium (£59.99) but they’ve guessed correctly whichever it is - his feet still touch the floor and he can simply back into it to sink his bum onto its soft surface. To my surprise he also managed to spot it had his name on so it’s made it onto his list of coveted possessions that is dragged from room to room. It seems to be favoured over his leather armchair which I’m guessing is because it’s wobbly to sit on so more fun. I can’t claim my plan to tempt him away from the telly worked though!

Dex Bean Bag TV

It has a suedette finish for both the main fabric and all the trimmings (character design and personalisation) meaning it’s warm to touch and easy to keep clean (alternatively Woolly Sheep and Milky Moo Cow are made from knitted polyester fur fabric). There are no harsh seams to poke his bum and the stitching is robust and will hold its own. The entire cover comes off for machine washing as the balls are held in a little sack. It’s finished to an impressively high standard and won’t lose it’s shape despite being flung around the living room.

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I plumped for a dog design (or Dood-Do as Dex likes to call them). The colours are fab for our living room but there are a wealth of other designs to choose from that are more colourful to complement nursery themes. Prices range from £39.99 to £99.99 depending on size (£99.99 had me gawking a bit but the small size is perfectly adequate for toddlers and fairly priced)

Bean bags

FOR ME!

Haha! Well you didn’t expect me to share this did you?

Personalised Wine

Getting Personal also kindly sent me this personalised bottle of white wine (£19.99). Interestingly, I was able to compare this to a previous review from Treat Republic and to be honest, this failed to excite me as much as their pink bubbles did. Despite it arriving securely boxed in white polystyrene, there was no presentation box. Given Getting Personal pride themselves on gift-giving, it would have been nicer to receive this ready for gifting.

Personal wine

Naturally there are dozens more designs available (with a vintage selection to mark extra special occasions); the labeling was great quality so it’s a neat way of saying thank you, happy birthday, season’s greeting etc. Being a bit of a wine aficionado however, I wasn’t keen on my wine. Of course I would expect for the wine to be far cheaper than retail price (and bought wholesale to boot) but it tasted way too sharp in my opinion. Maybe I’m being too unkind and my taste buds were having an off day. Perhaps I should sample the Rose and Red before being so judgmental!

Our wines come from the prestigious Bodegas Lozano winery in Spain. Located in La Mancha, one of the oldest and largest wine regions in Spain, the vineyard was founded in 1853 by Juan Ramón Lozano.

The family built their first winery on the land in 1920 and Bodegas Lozano is now the largest privately-owned, family-run vineyard in Spain. Amongst the grape varieties grown there are Macabeo, Tempranillo, Garnacha, Sauvignon Blanc and Cabernet Sauvignon.

This wouldn’t put me off recommending them though, there’s soooo much choice on their website and it’s easy to navigate with gifts for every budget. To check out some more of their selection, head to gettingpersonal.co.uk or say hello on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest or Facebook. Their Christmas shop is also now open for festive inspiration!


Vintage & Retro Gifts - Spoilt Rotten Gifts

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Spoilt Rotten Gifts is an online gift boutique for unique gifts with a retro twist.

Coming from a beautiful Yorkshire village, owner and Textile designer, Nichola Watson had to do all of her shopping in Kingston Upon Hull, famous for its fish trail and the House Martins and definitely NOT its boutiques! That is where Spoilt Rotten Gifts came in….with a background in buying at John Lewis and an eye for the unusual, Nichola sourced an ever expanding range of online gifts from Norwegian lunch boxes, to Californian cartoon jewellery pendants including a popular range of accessories from Disaster Designs, all to be sold in the eye-catching wibbly wobbly world of Spoilt Rotten Gifts.

Christmas is the perfect time to discover new online gift shops. If you’re anything like me and have a really hard time choosing that perfect gift for your in-laws, you’ll often end up trawling the internet looking for something you wouldn’t find in boring old Boots (I’m definitely not one for hitting the 3 for 2′s buying bath oil sets that will no doubt gather dust in someone’s bathroom for years to come). The best gift shops have items you just can’t find elsewhere and will make someone’s eyes light up upon receiving it; Quirky items that will transport someone back to their childhood, offer a practical solution to something they’ve often whinged about, or something so undeniably pretty you’d be delighted to receive it yourself. This is true of simply everything on Spoilt Rotten Gifts.

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When Nichola got in touch to see if I’d like to treat myself, or a member of my family, to something from the site, I must admit I didn’t give any of my loved ones a second thought. There was simply so much I wanted, I had to treat myself. As I’m due to move in just a week’s time (eek!) and will have a brand new nursery to deck out - I plumped for a very sweet cushion that will keep Bump’s crib warm until he or she is ready to sleep in it - The Freya Dream Big Cushion. It’s very cute and I can’t think of a better sentiment for a peaceful nursery; “Dream Big Little One, Tomorrow You Will Move Mountains“. I have a funny feeling however that Dexter’s will be cuddling up to this until D Day though as he’s forever cuddling and squeezing it.

DisasterDesignsBagOuter

Having lugged the essentials for Dexter’s birth to the hospital in a Tesco carrier bag (he came early and we left the house in an almighty panic), I also fancied something infinitely more lovely this time around. Spoilt Rotten Gifts has tons of roomy weekend bags that looked just perfect so I also plumped for fabulous overnight bag designed by Jan Constantine exclusively for Disaster Designs. With it’s very British / Irish theme and appliqué union jack heart, I’m hoping it helps me embrace the whole ‘Keep Calm’ mantra when I walk into the Royal Berks Maternity Unit in just a few months time.
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Determined not to be caught off guard this time around, it’s now crammed full of deliciously cute newborn outfits, water wipes, cotton wall balls, spare knickers, and other not so attractive birthing essentials. With two internal pockets (one one handy zip pouch) and generous pccket on the outside, there’s plenty of room for everything I need. I’m having to remind myself daily not to empty it and swan around town with it!
DisasterDesignsBag
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Inside, the lining is a printed fabric covered in ‘Love’ which is very cute and would make for a perfect change bag as it won’t show up any indiscretions. The outer bag is leather look PVC but smells and looks just like the real thing. It’s so very pretty, I’m delighted with it.
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Delivery, and postage and packaging was better than Santa himself could manage. My gifts arrived within days, lovingly wrapped, and with a mini packet of Love Hearts squirreled away within the folds of the parcel. Perfect.
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Yet not confined to gifts for hormonal women and babies, there’s also plenty there for the man in your life, for the home and exclusively for Christmas. Here are some of my favourite bits:
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Clockwise (left to right): Disaster Designs Beatles Ticket to Ride Satchel, Magpie Wildlife Owl Apron, VW The Original Ride Campervan Satchel, Magpie Wildlife Otter Cushion, Gisela Graham Summer Garden Gardening Bag, Disaster Designs Moomin Woodland Flask
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If you’d like to find out about more gifts available on the website, there are simply tons of reviews from fellow bloggers to read:
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  • Mrs Shilts reviewed (and is giving away) a very gorgeous Baby Reindeer Gift Set (baby sleepsuit & shoes)
  • The Crazy Kitchen received a very beautiful teapot and owl cushion if homeware is more your thing
  • And the very awesome Jen from Love Chic Living has fallen in love with her new wash bag set

If I’ve only gone and made you more intrigued about Nichola’s wibbly wobbly world of Spoilt Rotten Gifts - why not pop over to her little shop, or show her some love on Pinterest or Twitter? - I dare you not to fall in love with something. And if you’re feeling lucky and are lusting over a gorgeous Disaster Designs bag of your own, there’s a Facebook competition to win this equally stunning matching wallet and satchel from their adorable “Once Upon A Time” range.

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DISCLAIMER: I was sent these lovely gifts free of charge in exchange for my thoughts. How lucky am I?!

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