Random acts of shopping

New shoes and dressing gown

For someone who claims to hate shopping, I certainly seem to have been buying a lot lately, though without spending very much actual money. I've just got another dress from Boden – it was knocked down from £115 to £22 in Clearance – and is very Grace Kelly. It's a cappuchino brown broderie anglais shirt dress, and for now is providing the background to the bags in the second photo. I plan to wear it with my vintage beige Cooltimer jacket, ivory lace flats and the boxy cream midcentury-style bag, which I got for £2 in the Red Cross shop.



The black lace bag is another charity shop special. My everyday bag is a 1960s black leather-look vinyl one by MacLaren of Norwich. Unfortunately it's starting to show signs of wear: the pocket zip has broken, I need to restitch the lining, and the underside of the handle is badly cracked. I plan to recover it and make a new handle when it finally 'goes', but I'm not sure how easy that will be or how good a job I'll make of it, so when I saw this little boxy bag in Oxfam for £7 I snapped it up. It's not quite as plain as I like for a day bag, but it will do. The snap clasp and boxy shape are very 'me'.

I also won £100 of Debenhams vouchers in Gemma (Retro Chick)'s giveaway. Spending them was a weird experience: I've mostly weaned myself off going into actual High Street shops, preferring to buy from charity shops, Etsy or online repro firms. I do get my bras from Debenhams as they do a nice selection in my size, but I wanted to get something different. I didn't know where to start looking. In the end, I spoiled myself with the softest dressing gown on earth, which I didn't choose because of how it looked but because I felt it on my way past the underwear department and decided I simply had to have. It cost rather more than I'd think of spending on a dressing gown but my old one, which I got when I went to uni in 1992, is falling apart, and the vouchers seemed like a good excuse to treat myself. It is more of a dusty lavender than fawn, and Muppets made from clouds could not be as soft as this! I think Mr Robot is already fed up of seeing me loafing around in it; he keeps telling me off for having the hood up.

The vouchers stretched to a pair of penny loafers too. (They're black, not the reddish shade they appear in the final picture.) These are quite 'budget' in quality – the little strip is just laid over the surface, not stitched down, so I wasn't able to pop a penny in – but they have a nice thick sole and will hopefully work well on days when I need something more practical than heels but smarter than hiking boots. And, of course, they suit the midcentury style I tend to adopt for work as penny loafers were popular with young people in the 1950s and 1960s. So, thanks, Gemma and Debenhams, for those!

I do need to cut back on my spending at the moment. I feel as though I've got a real awareness of my personal style now, and having found that direction I want to run in it as fast as I can. However, Christmas and parents' birthdays are coming, so from now on all my shopping really needs to be for gifts... Have you bought anything in the sales recently or started shopping for Christmas yet?