We love Ikea.. who doesn’t?? The joyous shopping experience means you go in for one simple lamp and come out with 2 of said lamp, a shelving unit, 5 new plates, 12 glasses that are just PERFECT for cocktails/juice/wine/prosecco/whatever liquid justifies the purchase… oh and 82 candles. But it’s all so fantastically low in price we leave giddy, ice cream and hot dog in hand.
And this day was no exception, well apart from the fact we went with the intention of amassing an colourful array of shiny new Ikea purchases. After a year or so of doing this blog, we felt bored using the same boards, slates and bowls for all our photos, it was time to mix things up. So to Ikea we went.
Before we even entered the store we figured setting ourselves a budget would be a wise choice, enough to pick up a whole host of different and exciting things but avoiding ending up bankrupt. We had a few ideas of things we wanted to pick up but no solid plan, we knew we wanted a range of different plates and there was a crate that had been eyed up on a previous trip to the shop. But apart from that we were open to see what we found as we walked around.
UTSPÄDD – pack of 4, £3
Once we entered the kitchen section, these ice lolly makers were one of the first things that we picked up. Making your own ice lollies is already fun, but homemade calippo ice lollies?! We knew right away we were going to get a lot of use out of these and had an idea there and then to make these Prosecco, raspberry and elderflower ice lollies you may have seen us post a couple weeks ago. Super easy to use.
SOCKER – £0.95
There’s not a fat lot to say about this one. It was cheap, we loved the fact it was metal and thought it would be good for holding cutlery… or ice lollies. Oh and it’s actually a plant pot.
VARDAGEN – pack of 2, £3.75
These adorable tins caught our imaginations as soon as we saw them! They are a lovely small tin with such cute patterns, our brains went into overdrive thinking about all the cakes and puddings these would be perfect for. Unfortunately as you can see below our first trial with these tins didn’t go so well, the Orange and rose polenta cake was delicious but did not come out easily… we are planning on trialing different cakes in here to see if it was the polenta that caused the problem (we’ll let you know how it goes).
ELLY – pack of 4, £2.50
Tea towels… not the most exciting items, but the green on these was such a lovely tone, and we really liked that the pack of 4 gave us 4 different designs. These are pretty thin material for a tea towel so not sure how great they’ll be at drying dishes but we bought these with the intention of using them in photos, we’ll leave the cleaning to the dishwasher…
TEKLA – £0.35
More tea towels. These ones have red on them though.
A WOODEN SPOON (couldn’t find this one online…) – 35p
Have you ever tried to take an interesting picture of a wooden spoon? It’s not easy… Classic kitchen item, 35p, couldn’t say no.
SOMMAR 2016 – £2.25
The blue of this plate was so eye catching we just had to have it. It’s a medium sized plate and we figured this would be good to add some vibrancy to photos and really set off the other colours in some food, like below with the falafel. Not sure how a good old viccy sponge would look on it though…
SKURAR – £1.50
This one isn’t technically a plate, it’s actually for candles but we don’t care (how rebelious of us) because it’s so cute. And we have the white version of it, as some of you may have seen in the salted dark chocolate fudge recipe we posted at christmas, so decided to add the black one to our collection too.
SANNING – £1.50
These ones were just too cute, so we bought 2 of them… They are the perfect plate for a tea party or a slice of cake to have with your cuppa. We like how the actual plate is pretty simple, plain white with a scalloped edge, and the detail is in the blue and orange print.
ARV – £2
A grey plate is a bit unusual don’t you think? It’s not every day you see a grey plate. And we like unusual so we bought it. Simple with a classic pattern around the edge and a lovely shade of grey. Did we mention that this plate was grey…?
FRODIG – £1.50
This plate isn’t grey, this one is glass. And it’s bloody adorable. We feel like it should be used for serving trifle or something else equally nostalgic of 60s Britain.
SANNING – £1.75
Don’t worry, this is the last plate, which is good because clearly we’re running out of things to say about plates… This is the biggest one that we bought, proper dinner plate sized. It also came in a smaller size but a lot of the other plates are small or medium sized so we decided we wanted a bit of variation. This is another pretty simple design, with a muted detailing on the lip of the plate, we think it would probably work well layered underneath another smaller plate.
VARIERA – £3
This is some sort of shelf, or part of a shelf system, and probably one of the more random of our impulse buys. But we thought it would be useful for creating some height and differentiation on a table laid with baking a mess treats! And the cutout pattern is pretty damn cute.
KNAGGLIG – £5
This is a really sweet little crate, ikea sell a range of them in a few shapes and sizes, which come in 5 or so pieces and is possibly the easiest thing we’ve ever assembled from the flat pack giant. Useful for storage, we thought it would be good for photographs, can’t you just picture a heavenly crateful of crusty loaves of bread…? (we certainly can)
IDEALISK – 90p
A tea diffuser (useful for when you want to drink tea) and it’s only 90p! Can’t really go wrong!
So there you have it, a list of items with funny names that we liked. We know this is different from our usual recipe posts, but we really liked all the things we’d picked up and thought other people might too. Like we said at the beginning, everyone loves Ikea.
