OFF THE RECORD: HELLO 2015!

Welcome to the first Off The Record of 2015! We haven’t done this feature for a couple of weeks now because we were off eating far too many mince pies and our body weight in chocolate! I hope you guys were doing the same? I feel well and truly rested after 2 weeks off for Christmas and New Year, me and Emily have never taken time off before when we haven’t been somewhere abroad. It’s a strange feeling I think because when you’re on holiday, of course you don’t want to pick up your laptop and do a few things, you want to lounge on the beach am I right?! But when you’re just relaxing at home…it’s a whole different story! I had to purposely stop myself so many times from almost ‘just doing this one little thing’! I guess that’s a great thing though, being so in love with your job (if you can even call it that!) that even when you’re not working, you want to! Here’s what else we’ve been loving these past couple of weeks…

JESS LOVES…

♥ Getting back to work and organising all of the exciting things that we have planned for 2015! I have such a GOOD feeling about this year!

♥ Spending Christmas with the family and absolutely stuffing my face haha We went to Celtic Manor this year for Christmas and the food that was there was amazing, I was blown away!

♥ Trips to Ikea that resulted in a new office chair (in Bespoke Bride’s branding of course!) and some pretty new wrapping paper for the year ahead! Any of my friends with birthdays coming up are in for a treat with their wrapping!

♥ Going to town with New Year! Even though we just had a house party, that didn’t stop us from making Haribo vodka red bull jelly, cherry vodka redbull jelly & skittles vodka in all the colours of the rainbow! It was one funny evening with a lot of dancing, dart playing, drinking games and laughing! The perfect way to see in the new year!

♥ Trying some new recipes for 2015, one of the things I really wanted to do this year was get out of my cooking habits of making the same thing all the time! So far i’ve ventured into sweet potato curry, roasted red pepper soup, chicken puttanesca and last night I made some pork meal balls for the first time! If you have any recipes that you want to share then please leave me a comment and let me know some! I need to broaden my cooking horizons!

♥ Game of Thrones!! OH MY GOD How have I not been watching this?! We’ve just finished series 3 and cannot wait to start series 4! I must admit it took a while for me to get into it but now I am hooked! We also watched True Detective in the gap between Christmas and New Year (hello duvet day!) and I can honestly say that was epic too! I love all these drama series!!

EMILY LOVES…

♥ Christmas seems like such a long time ago now but it wouldn’t seem right to have our first OTR of the New Year without mentioning what an awesome time I had. It was amazing to spend so much time with my family without the worry of working. I was super strict to make sure I had a full two weeks off for the holidays this year, which is something I have never done before. It felt great and I am back feeling refreshed and motivated!

♥ Spending New Years Eve with our nearest and dearest friends. Way too much alcohol was consumed and it may have taken me a few days to recover but it was a whole heap of fun!

♥ Waking up on a foggy morning, putting on lots of warm layers, grabbing a camera and doing a 3 hour hike across Offas Dyke! I am setting myself a mission to complete the whole walk this summer, maybe not all in one go though, it is 177 miles after all!

♥ Getting back into the swing of running. I was naughty, ate way too much and drank way too much naughty stuff over the holiday season but so far I have nailed three 5K runs and I feel much better for it!

♥ Using the new slow cooker my brother bought us for Christmas, literally I am cooking everything in that slow cooker and it tastes so so so much better! Why is that?!

♥ It would be fair to say I was super spoiled this Christmas but the highlight had to be my new Canon 7D. I have wanted a good camera for so long and I have fallen in love with it, I cant wait to use it more!