Today marks a very special occasion! Yes, my birthday (hence the balloons)! …but today also marks a year since I received my first chunky knit blanket (thanks to my other half) knitted by none other than Lauren Aston Designs – AKA chunky knitting expert. So why is that so special I hear you ask? You got a blanket a year ago, so what?! Well even though I was absolutely over the moon when I unwrapped it, little did I know the impact that this merino wool gorgeousness would have on me and my blog. 

About a month after my birthday, I revealed my Scandinavian Inspired Bedroom on my blog and on my Instagram feed and it kind of just went a bit crazy. Instagram feeds with huge followings on the other side of the world started reposting the photo of my bedroom, it was re-pinned hundreds of thousands of times on Pinterest, huge magazines like Cosmopolitan and Country Living were featuring it online and the main topic of conversation – the chunky knit blanket at the end of the bed. Chunky Knit Blankets seemed to become massively on trend overnight and everyone wanted one in time for winter. And that’s was it, one photo of my bedroom and suddenly people were taking a serious interest in me – even now, nearly a year later, the photo of my bedroom is my most liked photo on Instagram, the blog post is my most popular to date with a whopping 400,000 views – I can’t even comprehend that number, it’s crazy. I never in my wildest dreams thought that a blanket would make a photo of my bedroom go viral. It will forever be mind blowing to me. I received so many comments, messages, emails asking where I got my blanket from and of course I pushed every single person to Lauren’s website and since then it’s been an incredible journey for us both. 

I suppose I have the wonders of Instagram to thank for everyone showing so much love to my bedroom in the first place, it really is the most amazing platform for finding inspiration, sharing content and so, so much more – but I never realised quite what an amazing community it actually was until I started my blog and ‘meeting’ Lauren virtually on Instagram is the perfect example of that supportive community. Despite the fact that we are yet to meet, we are pretty much insta-besties, we message most days, ask question after question for advice, like every damn photo on each others feed and are basically each others biggest fan-girls. 

So after a year of being in each others virtual lives, we have finally collaborated and I am so excited to finally share this with you. You all know how much I love and adore this lady’s work so that just makes this even more exciting for me! I hope you love the photos – also I just want to make sure that everyone knows that I made this balloon installation myself – yep (well the other half blew all the balloons up in fairness, so not entirely by myself), so whoever said being a blogger was easy did not take into consideration the hours of effort that go into getting that insta-worthy content – i.e. a totally unnecessary, but totally necessary gigantic pink balloon installation. 

The best part about this collaboration? If you fancy yourself one of Lauren’s chunky knitted blankets (which you can browse here), you can get 15% off with code LUSTLASTS – the code is valid on all blankets and is valid until 09.09.2017 – don’t miss out because these discounts don’t come about often lovelies! 

I can’t wait to see where will both be in a year’s time – Lauren, you rock, I adore you and your work!

*This post is in collaboration with Lauren Aston Designs, but as always my opinions and love for chunky knitted blankets are 100% my own.