Stationery - Note books

Hello lovelies!

I hope you are well.  We had a pretty dreadful day yesterday as far as weather is concerned. But today is back to "sunny Suffolk".

Ive been on the look out for a notebook to take with me to church as my old one is nearly full.  Ive been browsing the online shops as I want something a little more special than the ordinary ones I find when out and about.  I thought is share with you some of the lovely ones I have found. 

Firstly I looked on Etsy.  Now I know prices can vary but I love bespoke items like you find on there.
I found these beauties.  Although I want a A5 size I couldnt not mention these! 
The constillation ones you can find Here  and the personalised one Here 



I then found this little beauties in Wilko
You can find them HERE  
I love the pastel colours, in particular the blue.  Priced at £2.50 they are a absolute bargain and so pretty.  You just have a random colour sent to you if you order on line. To be honest I wouldnt mind either of these.

I also found these lovely ones at OHH DEER.  My daughter is obsessed with unicorns and I know she'd love this.  Unicorns have seemed to have made a big come back in 2017.  I have to admit I have a soft spot for them too!  Priced at £7.95 its a bit pricey for what it is but I still love it!

Here   you can find this lovely little note book.  It's priced so affordably it could be perfect from a toddler to adult!  I wouldn't mind paying £1.50 for the grandchildren to do their little doodles in! 

So this is just a small selection of notebooks availible out there.  If you search online there are hundreds of stores selling notebooks but for me, Ive just put in a order for the pastel ones from Wilkos! 

Bye for now

Hales xxx

Pro artist Palette Tam beauty

Hello My lovelies!

Today I would like to talk to you about the Tam beauty #Pro artist palette.
This is  a magnetic palette which you fill with the eye shadows and highlighters of your choice.
The size of the palette is big enough to hold eighteen of the pro artist  eye shadows.  They are of standard size so you could potentially use any other brand of eyeshadow pots to fill your palette. Its the palette that is magnetic not the eye shadows.

It has a full sized mirror on the inside that I love about it.  I like my palettes to have mirrors as it saves all the fiddling about with trying to hold a mirror and a palette at the same time! Its made from a good solid plastic.  Some of the more expensive palettes are made from cardboard.   Being made from study material, you know its going to last you a long time. 

sorry for the rough picture, its extremely hard to photograph a mirror!

The only down side to this palette is that the eye shadow are not very good.  This surprised me as Make up revolution/Tam beauty are a brand I use often and enjoy their products immensely.  They are very chalky and crumble in the metal cases which in turn make a huge mess in the palette.  As I said this is a real disappointment as the palette is so lovely and at £5.00 is a lot cheaper than other brands alternative. 

So, In summing up I would say buy the Palette!  Its of a good quality and the finish on it is lovely.  You can find it here .  It would be a welcome addition to any make up collection and you wont regret it.  The eye shadows and highlighters however I would give a miss.  You could fill this pallet with other brands.  there are some here for instance.  The palette is worth buying just for the size, look and quality.  I think the other brands of magnetic palettes pale in comparison to this one if I'm honest.

I hope this review has been helpful to you and I look forward to hearing your opinions on it.

Look after yourself
Bye for now
Hales xx

Branded Choclate Vs ALDI alternatives!

Good Morning everyone! Or Good evening depending where you are in the world!

Today we have been testing out branded chocolate bars and comparing them to the ALDI alternatives. Its a hard job but someone had to do it! So we choose four different chocolate bars and then bought the ALDI alternatives. All the branded chocolate was bought from pound land so oh course was £1.00 for four.  With the exception of the tunnocks bars which were six in a pack.

So firstly we have the Mars bars And their alternatives the racer bars.  

  We opened them and tried the mars first.  it had the usual soft caramel and nougat covered with chocolate.  It tasted like... well a normal Mars bar! Opening the Racer bar, which is the ALDI alternative, the first thing we recognised was that they are the same size.  Good start!  They come in a pack of 6 for 65p.  We tasted them and found they indeed did taste like a mars bar.  For the price we were very impressed.!

Next on to the tunnock caramel bars.  These are Mr PB's favourite ever chocolate snack.  On tasting we saw that they were layers of caramel followed by layers of wafer in between and then covered in chocolate.  Very tasty!  The Aldi alternative was the same structure of caramel and wafers.  They cost 81p for a pack of eight.  Upon tasting we saw that once again these were very similar to the branded tunnocks and apart from their not being as many layers we couldn't see much difference. 

On to the Snickers bars

The alternative to the Snickers is the Titan bar.  They retail at 65p for six.   This time after tasting the Titan bar we did see a difference.  There is a lot of caramel and not many peanuts.  After having such good experiences we felt a little let down by these and we give you a thumbs down for these ALDI. We will not be repurchasing these.

Lastly we have the twix Vs the jive bar.

With these we found that again they were the same size and came in a pack of five for 65p.  These are extremely good value and are exactly the same structure as Twix.  In fact we decided that we preferred these Jive bars to the Twix.  They tasted not as over poweringly sweet and were a nice snack. 

All in all we would definitely purchase the ALDI snack bars over the branded ones. (with the exception of the titan bar)   They are definitely a good cost effective alternative and they don't scrimp on taste.  We also filmed while we were taste testing and you can find our video here. 

So thanks for visiting us here today and we hope to see you all back again really soon.  Bye for now

The PB's xx