On Saturday we headed over to Camden for breakfast…

where we had nitrogen-oxide ice cream from Chin Chin Laboratorists.

You pick the flavour of cream you want, they mix it with nitrogen oxide (his thermometer showed -22 degrees) and it turns in to ice cream.

We got to have two toppings because he’d seen us in Camden the night before, when they’d closed.

We had chocolate ice cream, with salted caramel sauce, peanut brittle and candy floss sugar candy (which looked like shards of glass) and it was the best ice cream we’ve had in ages!

They even had swings to swing on while nomming your ice cream.

We wandered around Camden for a little while, where Mountain Dew were giving out bottles of their new energy drink, so everyone was florescent.

Then we headed to Cake Britain…

an exhibition of cakes!

The burger cakes were the coolest.

They were going to let all the visitors eat the cakes the next day – great if you have a sweet tooth!

Afterwards we went for a snoop around Orbital Comics, which is an awesome shop.

I wish the Harajuku vending machine wasn’t empty though – I’ll have to go back.

Afterwards I petted a horse…

and we had sushi in the park. Then we went for a look around John Soane’s museum, which is a hoarder’s paradise. No photo allowed in there though

Tom took me for a drink in an awesome pub he’d found a few years ago and thought he might never find again.

Then we headed to the South Bank for more noms.

I couldn’t resist making Big Ben look mini for a photo. I love my new camera sooooo much! Tom wanted to have a look around Namco but it wasn’t as good as the Trocadero.

Then we met up with Metaxa and Lynsey in town.

Metaxa took us to a theatre pub, which had lots of crazy things on the wall and singing coming from the room next door.

On a side note, I found proper purikura machines in China Town… so Tom and I are going to get some snapped on an exciting date that’s coming up in the near future!

This week has felt like an extension of my birthday. On Monday, I received a box of awesome treats from Medusa’s Make-Up and then my purple heart-shaped Daisy Rock bass, and then on Tuesday Sarah sent a package of awesome birthday treats, including a super cute Momiji doll with a really sweet note inside.

I love love love my bass. It’s looks even prettier in real life and it’s really easy to play because it’s designed for girls fingers. Tom and I have been playing Desaparecidos, McClusky and Paramore… hehe!

This week’s work included making Make-Up tutorials for Medusa’s Make-Up.

This is the first one I’ve made, so I hope I described everything properly.

I got a lot of purple things for my birthday, including this awesome Canon camera from Tom. It has a wide-angle lense, so all my photos will be 16:9 and it’ll look like I’m in a movie.

I couldn’t resist taking minature-style photos of Camden.

It looks so cute, like a toy-set complete with miniature drug dealers and punks.

Ross invited us along to their party in a really cool pub up in Belsize Park.

His band, Mars Patrol were using half the room to shoot a music video. We were too scared to go in it but there were break dancers, sumo wrestlers, dogs and lots of crazy people.

Today, we’re off on the hunt for weird ice cream. Last week I made some lemon sorbet, which was sooo easy and really tasty!

I woke up to a call from my bank’s fraud squad this morning because someone had stolen my card details and was trying to buy phone top-ups – super scary! I think I must have used a dodgy ATM somewhere.

This weekend was Andrew’s birthday, so we got him a membership to the Prince Charles Cinema, so that he can go to £1.50 movies in his free periods. Afterwards we met up with Emma, a massive dog licked my leg on the tube, Em dropped 5p and it ended up in the bottom of my shoe, and we went for mussels and beer at Belgo.

After dinner, we met up with Andrew and friends at The Cuban in Camden – a bar filled with couples dancing everywhere. Ben and Dave came too and Ben had an awesome skeleton t-shirt, which lights up when you take a photo. We were sat outside under an umbrella and heat fan in the garden and got very cold.

Afterwards we went for a cherry flavoured shisha pipe to warm us up, it was delicious!

Emma, Alex, Ben and Dave came back to the Mews to watch Limmy on YouTube, drink absinthe and have a band slam. Amazingly Em and Alex fell asleep with all the noise and stayed until the morning.

Tom and I went for an amazing last breakfast at Plan 9. I had French Toast.

Followed up with peacan pie, which made us miss Raven.

We went shopping for a little while in town. Carnaby Street has pretty xmas decorations with pink inflatable reindeer.

We had a coffee in the new look Starbucks. They had little individual cubby rooms with sofas downstairs, I quite like it.

I surprised Tom with little wooden London transport blocks, which I had found in Muji (my new favorite shop). He loved the little tube and routemaster.

Afterwards, we crossed horizontally (twice) at the new and improved Oxford Circus. It felt a bit like a game, because everyone bumped in to each other in the middle and got scared when the green man went red.

In the evening, we went through to see Lynz, Claire, Alex, Emma and Andrew in Ealing and had yummy Nepalese food for dinner.

My Mum has come to visit for a few days and yesterday we went Halloween shopping and for a walk around Holland Park.

The squirrels were out in full force.

They’re getting bigger and bigger every time we go and they were very hungry this time.

The peacocks were very hungry too. Mum saw a peacock standing in a shop doorway the other day and when she looked up, the shop was ironically Peacocks.

This squirrel was our favourite, it sat on a bench with us for 20 minutes while we fed it peanuts.

We spent today in Camden, had drinks and cake at the organic cafe, and went costume shopping in the market. I got Tom an awesome sailor top for £8.

Yesterday was Fashion’s Night Out, which was like a pub crawl in the expensive fashion shops of Old Bond Street. Emma got us invites for the party at Chanel, where they had a nail bar in the basement (I’m surprised that no-one passed out with the fumes) and a photoshoot with Daisy Lowe upstairs. We stayed for a glass of champagne before heading off to see the rest of the street. It felt like a grown up’s version of Halloween, going from shop to shop, having nibbles, picking up freebies and glasses of booze. We had mini-bottles of champagne at DKNY, nibbles and OJ at Camper (where they had the most adorable kiddie shoes that I want in my size), truffles from a chocolate shop and then more champagne from Alexander McQueen.

Burberry had the best drinks, we sipped on Pimms with strawberries and gin & tonics, while I fell in love with this layered mac. At £1000, I’m trying to figure out if I could sew my own.

In the evening, we were invited to see the Plasticines play at Proud Camden, so we met up with Wendy and headed along. The Plasticines are a girl band from Paris and Tom described them as the “French Sleater-Kinney”. They stopped mid-set to tell the crowd that they were “f****** s***” and wouldn’t keep playing unless we made more of an effort, which was pretty awesome. Keep an eye out for them in a future issue of Snippets.

Proud seemed like quite a nice venue. It’s in the Stables Market, so the bar area was made up of lots of little stables  filled with arcade games, pole-dancing tables or comfy sofas. My favorite was the Dress-Up Bar, where you could try on different outfits.

My grandparents are staying in a lovely little guest house near Little Venice, which has an adorable dog called Billy. I made everyone bagels and we went for lunch in the park this afternoon.

After lunch we caught a boat to Camden lock, it was a really nice day to be on the canal. The awesome Chinese boat in the photo is a restaurant that I really want to go to someday.

I’ve been in love with the Stables Market in Camden ever since Nick and Iain took me there in 2003, but at the moment it’s undergoing some serious redevelopment. I think I like what they’re doing with it, but one of the guys I spoke to thinks they’ve gone overboard with the metal horses.

We had a look around the markets for a few hours, grabbed hazelnut milkshakes and then caught the boat back to Little Venice. On the way home, I spotted my future dream house! It has it’s own pier and a huge willow tree. The lady on the boat said they go for around 30 million… time to start saving!

In the evening we went for dinner at Vapiano’s but I couldn’t wait to get home and play with my new sewing and embroidery machine. We freaked out a little when it arrived, when we realised it wasn’t suppose to work in the UK, but my Grandad had made an adaptor for my Mum’s old sewing machine (which was also American and from the 60′s) and it worked with the new one too.

It’s the most amazing machine ever and such an upgrade to my last one. It’s super easy to thread and it’s all automatic,which kind of takes this skill out of sewing. We spent the evening embroidering handkerchiefs with our names.

Tom’s parents were on their way back from Italy, so they stopped in to see us for the day. They brought us quirky little pencils, mine was a cat and Tom’s was a rabbit.

We started off the day with brunch at Cafe Laville, the restaurant over Maida Hill tunnel, and then had the clever idea of taking a canal boat from Little Venice to Camden. Tom’s Dad found a pair of bright yellow reading glasses in Italy, which have a magnet in between the two lenses, so you can pull them on and off quickly. Very futuristic and Euro chic!

The boat trip was lovely and I spotted many potential future houses. When we got to Camden, we went for a drink at the Hawley Arms, where Allison from America’s Next Top Model was taking photos of herself in the mirror in the toilets. We then continued our pub crawl to Gordon’s Wine Bar at Embankment.

We went to see the 4th plinth in Trafalgar Square, where a rather boring woman was trying to promote the shoes she sells. She was on her phone for most of what we saw. I’m going to start watching the live stream and get addicted.

On the subject of shoes, I saw these dreamy sets in the window of Irregular Choice. We interviewed their creator, Damien Child for the new issue of Snippets. In the evening we went for dinner at Vapiano’s and had coffee on Carnaby Street.

I bought some new shoes in the sale and they arrived today. I ♥ red shoes!

A bunch of people on CO+K asked me to be one of the Crafty Superstars a while back, so I crafted up 5 projects especially and we’ll be launching one each day this week.

The first project was a how-to for sewing a Gothic Lolita Cuff and it marks my third hundred project on the site. That’s a lot of crafting!

I’ve also been doing lots of writing recently. Not only did we just finish the new Snippets but I had interviews with the creator of Irregular Choice and Polly Scattergood today for the next issue. I’ve also just finished “how to enhance your Glastonbury-watching-sofa-experience” for Drowned In Sound, which was fun to write.

We totally failed at seeing 8 out of 10 cats last night, as they’d changed the start time and we didn’t realize, but they’ve put us down as priority for next week. We’d made a packed with Tony to go to Nando’s, because everyone says that it’s good, so we went for dinner. It’s a lot like a glorified take-out joint, a la Chicken Cottage or one of the dodgy fried chicken restaurants you see all over London. You go up to order your own food and there’s a lot of queuing involved. It’s obviously not a very good place for vegetarians. Debra Barr, from The Apprentice was there, being quite mouthy like on the show. When she left, someone shouted “you’re fired!” at her – I bet that doesn’t get old! Afterwards, more fun was to be had at the Hawley Arms.

I wore my new Viv Westwood, Venus top, that Tom got me. I think it looks like something Sailor Girl would wear and I love it to bits.

Tom bumped in to Henry (from The Inbetweener ) again today. Last time we saw him he went on of a tour of our mews, and today he’d just got back from furniture shopping at Ikea. He called us his Mews muse. Tom met another one of our neighbours, who was Freddie Mercury’s costume designer (she made his famous yellow jacket) and now designs for TV shows and movies. She said that Freddie Mercury and David Bowie had visited the mews in the 80′s, so I’ve been trying to imagine them walking up and down our cobbled street.

Late last night, Bruce (my Canadian uncle) stopped in for a flying visit. He had been on holiday in Spain, Morocco and Italy and was spending one last day in London before flying back to Vancouver. We got to spend the evening with him and we kicked it off with cupcakes from Candy Cakes in Covent Garden.

Instead of going to our neighbour’s single launch, we went on a Camden bar crawl, starting off with a few rounds in the Hawley Arms.

Followed up with a yummy meal of mussels, frites and cherry beers in Belgo. They have the scariest toilets in that place. The cubicles are made of frosted-glass brick walls and if anyone was to walk past, they’d get quite an eyeful.

Next up was the Lock Tavern, which was quite nice but the bar staff closed the roof terrace early on, so we had to sit inside. Later on we headed to Lock 17 next to the canal, for a few more drinks before heading off to do something I’ve always wanted to try…

smoking a shisha pipe.

We shared one filled with strawberry smoke and it was rather pleasant. It is bad for your health though, so I wont go making a habit of it. Tonight was the perfect end to a month filled with guilty pleasures and copious amounts of alcohol. Next month, I will be an angel – time for half year resolutions.

On Monday we went to see The Yeah You’s with Dermot O’Leary at the BBC Maida Vale studios.

We walk past them a lot on the way home and we’d always wondered what they were like inside, so when we were offered tickets, we jumped at the chance.

It was really cool inside. The band weren’t very good but Dermot was funny and it was free, so we can’t complain. We’re going to apply for tickets to recordings there a lot more now.

Last night we went to the Hawley Arms in Camden. It was Amy Winehouse’s favorite boozer, but now that she’s moved out of Camden, it can be ours. The roof terrace is really nice and you can sit and watch the fancy trains go by while you drink.

Grant and his girlfriend, Hannah were suppose to be meeting us there, but he ended up going on a drunken adventure with the singer from The Others, and we didn’t see him until much later on.

The best thing about the Hawley is that they serve mini eggs, lollipops, dolly mix and caschew nuts on tap.