Bills, bills, bills, don’t they get BORING??!! So, it’s lovely when something fabulous arrives in the post and this morning I got a treat with a new Annie Sloan colour card falling on to the door mat, packed full of advice and information. Since discovering this range last year on Half Built House, basically if it doesn’t move quickly in my house, it gets painted. The cat’s lucky still to be black and ginger.
I’ve painted and waxed all sorts of stuff from rocking chairs to flower pots, timber to terracotta, for clients and myself and I just can’t fault it. If Annie ever sells shares in the company, I’ll be a major buyer 🙂 This is just part of my collection below, and I’m not even a stockist!! And just in case you’re thinking it, no they don’t pay me to rave about their paint, I genuinely both rate it & use it all the time.
I say that because today I had a brief Twitter conversation with Holly Becker of the influential blog Decor8. She’d tweeted the following “I’ve been unfollowing lots of lovely bloggers lately because the blog tours they go on results in floods of sponsored tweets. Too bad. :(” which I TOTALLY agreed with. These BlogTours send interiors bloggers to New York or LA or London and ferry the special few around certain chosen companies who sponsor the tours, resulting in a deluge of what are mostly boring forced tweets about products the bloggers are mostly and obviously indifferent to, as the whole point of the Tour is actually to have fun in a foreign city with great new friends. So there’s the boring tweets and blog posts, and then there’s something which irks me personally, the selection process. Or rather, the “who you know and who likes you and how to tweak the rules to ensure certain bloggers get to go” process. I don’t blame the talented interiors bloggers who get chosen, who wouldn’t drop everything for a freebie trip to LA, but I have no respect for the process, the organisers or the philosophy behind it. I refused to enter any *competitions* to go as I thought it was an entirely flawed and unfair process with favouritism and cherry picking rather than fair competition on places. I saw how they picked people and didn’t like it.
I’m happy to talk about companies such as Annie Sloan because I genuinely use and love the product and know others would to if they tried it. I tweet about B&Q & Ikea, not cause they pay me in plywood & flatpack, but because I spend half my life in there. I tweet about products and companies I see at trade shows because what they’re exhibiting floats my boat, not because they shower me with gifts and freebies.
It’s such a new *industry* this blogging & tweeting malarkey, but you have to be authentic about it. If you love it, rave about it. If you don’t, don’t sell yourself short. Like Kate did today with Weetabix 😉
Anyway, enough of the serious stuff and back to this fab colour card – if you’d like one, contact your local stockist or email paint@anniesloan.com, and mine came with a fantastic info sheet about different techniques too, so make sure you ask for that!
I quite fancy having a go at gold size, now where’s that cat…….
Just got mine today in the mail! Ha! And yes, I am reading a lot of your posts tonight as I just discovered you – my fault for living in the US for the last seven years and not following British interior blogs!