Whiteladies Road

If you ever find yourself in Bristol with a couple of hours to spare, I can highly recommend a trip to the Whiteladies Road / Cotham Hill area. There are eight charity shops in the area plus a couple of specialist charity book shops, lovely little cafes and restaurants, a fabulous wholefood shop and an out-of-this-world craft shop that I'd never been in before.  I had a lovely afternoon mooching around the shops and then meeting up with my sister and nephew to have a look at his new school (and very nice it is too.)

A few bargains were found in the charity shops, including a lovely large vintage black and white ticking bolster case.  I'm not sure whether to hold onto it for the fabric - which is gorgeous - or to try selling it on ebay.  I also got a really unusual raw linen vintage tea towel that has a pattern of Pennsylvania Ditesch Hex Signs.  I'm not totally sure what these are but have a feeling they may be something to do with the Amish (anyone know for sure?)  Oh, and a weird little china coaster that I just couldn't resist - a coaster is always a useful item.

Scarily, there were already a lot of charity Christmas cards on sale and much as I don't normally buy Christmas cards in September, I really liked these Ruper Bear ones and they only cost £3.75 for 10.  A visit to Creativity resulted in a very restrained purchase of only three little spotty felt squares but if I'd had more time (and more money) I could have spent a fortuen in there.

I also called in to Wild Oats, the most fab-u-lous wholefood shop, to see if they had organic coconut oil and arrowroot (which, indeed, they did) as I'm going to try my hand at making some home-made deodorant using this recipe from Sew Green.  P has the most dreadful allergy to most deodorants and is even allergic to Tom's of Maine.  He did find an Arm and Hammer Baking Soda one that suited him when he was in Hong Kong but it is not available in the UK so we're both hoping that the home-made variety might be less irritating on his skin.

The afternoon was rounded off with a cool drink in one of the many cafes there and a lovely trip back to east Bristol on the local train - something else I can highly recommend.

Comments

[angela]

The Pennsylvania Dutch Hex signs are indeed Amish. They paint them on their barns supposedly for good luck. Most of the original settlers were not really Dutch, they were German, but Deutch which means German got translated to Dutch by the English speaking Americans. Great finds!

[Lindsey]

Actually, the Old Order Amish never have the Hex signs on their barns although they are seen on other barns in Pensylvania. Lovely find.

[Maureen]

Lovely finds from Whiteladies, one of my favourite places in Bristo..though we won't go into the reason WHY it's called that!