A week and a half a go my two friends Sheila and Janine came over from Northern Ireland to spend a very short but fantastic weekend with me in England. Shortened even further by a 5 hour delay in Belfast Airport before they could even board the plane to Southampton. Still we managed to pack a load of things into 48 hours, including; my favourite coffee shop, hobbycraft, scrapbooking at my house and a full day in London. Yep, we sure know how to make a weekend of it!

We met up with my friend Laura for coffee and the biggest Pain au chocolate's I have ever seen (thank you for welcoming us into your home). From Laura's house we went to Portobello market where we browsed and I bought a printers drawer to do some Ali type project, infact you can see the one I bought hanging from the top of the stall in the middle of the photo below. We were going to have cupcakes from Hummingbirds bakery but the queue was out the door and up the street, nevermind maybe next time.

On from Portobello we went to the theatre to collect our tickets then took a walk down to Covent Garden. After a coffees, cupcake and muffins in Starbucks the rain came down and what better excuse to get out of the rain than to go into the shops! Purchases were made by all of us in Cath Kidston and by Janine and I in Fat Face, amongst others.

Before the show we decided to get a meal early. We gave ourselves plenty of time to have pizza from a non-chain Italian restaurant, unfortunately we waited over an hour for our food, and still had to leg it to the theatre.

Hairspray was fantastic, made you want to get up and dance, although I contented myself with sitting and singing! Really pleased I'd bought the CD and DVD a few weeks prior to get to know the songs, it made the whole experience even better.

Hey girls, I wasn't the only one who missed you when you left, Matthew and Callum missed you too. They really enjoyed having you around to play with and read them bedtime stories. (And if you're wondering what is happening in the bottom photo, Matthew is getting Janine to time how long it's takes him to build his Lego cargo plane!)

Let's start planning our next trip!