It would be fair to say that for ChickPea and PudStar, one of their favourite books of the past year would be ‘The Fairy Dancers’ by Natalie Jane Prior and Cheryl Orsini – my interview with author Natalie Jane Prior is here. Neither of my girls even do ballet, but there is much to love in this gorgeous book and the stories it contains have absolutely captivated them. So when the Summer holidays rolled around the promised  Bunkers bunk bed was delivered and the room needed re-painting…we went with ‘The Fairy Dancers’ as the room theme; excellent colour palette, gorgeous images; dachshunds; flowers and dinosaurs. What more could you want?

I colour matched a paint to the front cover at Bunnings (the lovely man behind the paint counter has done for me before, ‘oh you’re the library lady aren’t you?’) and endpaper fabric and paper was ordered from Spoonflower.  Endpaper PRODUCTS people!  Author Natalie Jane Prior, a talented seamstress, had used Spoonflower to custom print fabric of the book endpapers, ballet slippers and of Coco the dachshund. I can endpaper tables (below)…sheesh I could endpaper a whole wall. 

Wall hooks (and plenty of them) are a must for our girls, and I did a little happy dance when I found dachshund hooks on Instagram, which I ordered from Hello Knobbly and we adore.

Chickpea is very happy down the bottom what I would describe as a dinosaur grotto…and she claims the chair as her own (best not to argue with her).

The bookshelves? Well funnily enough, being a librarian, I’m quite fussy about my bookshelves…no?! Really?! I’m a fan of face-out book shelving obviously, and we do have some of this at home, but to be honest with the volume of books we have, we also need some good old fashioned, but very strong, shelving! The ones we got from Bunkers are sturdy in the extreme and match the bed (oh how I love a matching accessory) and the girls are fighting over who gets to arrange them every day. Sigh.  I’m sure this will wear off.

And of course the fairy door still takes pride of place for PudStar – she’s not much into Santa or the Easter Bunny, but by glory she loves a fairy. 

Images by the lovely Lyndal O’Gorman, because she has a camera, as opposed to me with my iphone. She is also an extremely excellent wildlife photographer and needed to be challenged with photographing a bed rather than a bird. I paid her in dinner and homemade tomato sauce.