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I am a pure sucker for Pinterest, I was obsessed with it prior to our wedding, picking up so many little tips and tricks to add a flavour of us as a couple in our own way. Surprisingly, when it came to our home I was a little less obsessed, but I still find it a fantastic place to pick up the most random ideas from storage to art it’s all there. So when Fotostore approached me to work with them, having received the email surrounded by bare white walls, I jumped at the opportunity to do something a bit different to try and make this house a home.

We are a family that loves the outdoors so when I stumbled upon this beautiful collage hung from driftwood I knew I had struck gold with inspiration. I take so many pictures of the girls on my phone, like many a mother or father out there. The quality of cameras on phones now is just so good that I don’t bother to bring my digital camera with me on days out anymore, mainly because it would be just one more thing to worry about having to mind.Fotostore is an Irish company that has an innovative new smartphone app which you can use to print off the photos from your phone. The app is free to download and in it you have the option of getting prints, wedding or thank you cards developed. It is easy to use, what I did to make life easier was I set up a new folder on my phone and saved all the pictures I wanted to develop into that.
I could chose from a few different options within the Fotostore app, I shoot a lot of my pictures in square format so it was really useful that when I clicked those pictures it would tell me they were square and ask if I wanted to print them off in square format too (5×5 – perfect for the inset of those Ikea frames!). The ones I chose to print in square were highlighted then so I knew which I had picked. The one thing I would say was that it didn’t do this though if I had picked a picture in say 6×8 size which is a shame as it would have been useful to know which ones I had already selected to print rather than have to go onto the next stage and delete the second option I had picked a picture in two different sizes, if that makes sense. But that’s perhaps just me being fussy!Anyway, a few clicks later and I had my prints ordered, it took about 4 minutes (yes I timed it!) to upload all my pictures on a 4G connection which is pretty speedy considering I had over 100 pictures to print. I ordered my pictures from my bed at 6am on a Wednesday morning and I had all the pictures in my hand by 10am the next morning, incredibly quick service.The quality of the pictures from Fotostore was excellent. It’s obviously phone dependent so I found the pictures taken on my old iPhone 5 were not quite as crisp and clear as the ones taken on my iPhone 6S which were stunningly perfect and vivid.

Honestly though this is a really fantastic service, like I said I’m brilliant for taking pictures but if I lost my phone in the morning they would be gone. Yes a certain amount would be saved somewhere on ‘the cloud’ but given the amount of notifications I get about having not backed up recently I’m pretty sure I’d have lost a lot. And so many milestones and special occasions are captured on your phone, from Lucy’s first few days to the days she can almost climb out of her cot, to the girls first days at school and playschool.I must say too it was a pure pleasure to sit down with the pictures and go through them with the girls, looking through pictures on a phone you’re sure to be interrupted by some sort of notification so to be able to curl up on the couch with them to chat about the pictures, the times we had, was just lovely.

Anyway, I managed to create this beautiful hanging collage for their playroom which not only adds a beautiful pop of colour but it adds topics of conversations for months to come.