When you buy from us...

When you buy from our website, we love to package your order as a gift. Maybe it is, so it's ready just to give. If you've bought something for yourself, it's nice to receive something that feels like a treat. So, today our new packaging paper arrived. With big harlequins, it's the smartest way for your purchases to arrive.

In addition to your order looking super stylish, we've managed to reduce our postage costs within the UK too. So, standard delivery is now only £2.95 per order (the service is a 2-5 day) and expedited next-day can be chosen too. We also offer Saturday and Sunday deliveries on request.  If you spend £50 or over, your order is delivered postage free.

We hope you're thrilled with your order when it arrives - and you love receiving it as much as we enjoy wrapping it up in our new paper!

Affordable Wall Art

We've got some big, framed prints and posters at the moment, they're best way to add some interest to a big, bare wall. We love old wall charts and maps, but these prints are a great alternative, and hung alone or with other interesting pieces on the wall, they really create a talking point.

The Vintage style Eye Test poster is just like one you'd have seen in the optician as a child. We have it on our kitchen wall and it silently challenges everyone to check how good their vision is.

 

 

Large vintage-Style eye test poster - framed £30

The Bees & Honey poster is another favourite, made up of old honey bee illustrations and vintage advertisements.

 

Large Vintage Style Bees & Honey Poster - framed £30

The beautiful vintage butterfly illustrated poster looks beautiful on a wall. I usually find butterfly designs too twee, but this one is just right.


Large Vintage Style Butterfly Poster - Framed £30

We add to our selection of these prints all the time, and have quite a few interesting ones at the moment. Click here to view our range of wall art

Keeping up with the new arrivals

We've been busy photographing and adding in our newest arrivals. We'll have daily changes made to the website as we bring you more homeware, toys, gourmet products and more.

The best way to check the newest arrivals is to keep an eye on our "new" section.

 

If you've never bought from us before, you'd be wise to sign-up to our newsletter too, and receive 10% off your first order. You'll then be kept informed of any news, competitions and interesting products - usually 2 to 3 times a month and we never pass on your details or bombard you with emails.

If, at any point before, during or after making a purchase from us you want to ask a question or need some advice, we're always happy to help. As we've recently moved out of our shop, we don't yet have a new telephone line installed, so until we have a new number to call, please email us for a speedy response.

Almost Back to School...

 

It's almost time for children to go back to school in Scotland, although our English friends still have a little while left to enjoy the summer.

We've picked our favourite children's pieces, perfect for "back to school" - notebooks, pencil cases, reward magnets, wall map - all beautifully designed so that parents will love them just as much as children.

Our boy loves the wooden pencil box with sliding lid. Something I thought he wouldn't look at twice has become the item he's coveting most. Possibly because he knows it will store more than pencils, so he'll keep stones, coins and any 'gems' he finds on the pavement hidden out of sight. It's only £3.75, and because it's not emblazoned with a character that will likely be out of favour in a few weeks, this is something he can keep all year.

 

I love the reward magnets by Spanish brand, Londji, mostly because they're such a great design. They come in a fridge shaped tin, and if you have a balanced 'mum, dad, boy, girl' family  you can all get to use them. Everyone chooses a goal and writes their name, age and 'contract' onto one of the tags - with lots of trophy and medal magnets as you work towards your goal and complete it. Perhaps you'll allow a trip to the cinema or a new toy if he/she tidies their bedroom every weekend, walks the dog or takes out the rubbish. Having the magnets stuck to the fridge works as a constant reminder to stay on track!  £13

 

 

 

 When you're practising handwriting and arithmetic after school, a great incentive is to use a nice notebook designed for the purpose. We have really lovely jotters from illustrator Ingela P Arrhenius, just right for practising times tables and numbers.  £4.50

 

 

We have http://www.pierrotetcoco.com/pieroprints-a4-framed-print-the-more-that-you-read/. By PieroPrints, who has taken the always-wise words of Dr. Seuss and illustrated them into art with a wonderful motto,  "The more that you read, the more you will know, the more that you learn, the more places you'll go."
Available exclusively from us, it's only £15 and comes framed.

Shop the full "Back to School" range at Pierrot et Coco here.

Children's Wallpapers - discount code this week

 

Thank you to Your Home Magazine for featuring one of children's wallpapers in their "wow-worthy wallpaper" decorating feature. We'd like to offer our customers 10% off any of the kids wallpapers until Saturday 9th August by using code YH at checkout.

Our children's wallpapers are incredibly popular, and with such distinctive patterns, you only need to do a short wall or section of a room to really make an impact. They start at £35 for a 10m roll, printed with environmentally friendly inks. We do have other designs, a bit pricier at £139 for six metres, so we recommend these are used away from sticky little fingers (even though it's washable!) and perhaps pasted behind shelving to create a cool backdrop for interesting toys and objects.

Some of our favourite designs :

Doll House Family Wallpaper in Sunshine

 

Space Racer Wallpaper in Pumpkin

 

Robots Wallpaper

 

Back in Stock : Vintage style hanging world map

 

This week sees our vintage style world map coming back into stock. It's one of our most popular items, and it's easy to see why. It looks old but is new, so none of the countries or capitals are outdated meaning you can impress your friends with your new found knowledge that Burma is Myanmar, Ceylon is Sri Lanka, Istanbul not Constantinople.

If we didn't have a child, we'd probably hang this on the black wall in our kitchen, surrounded by other interesting pictures. However, our boy who is five definitely wanted this in his bedroom, and whenever he's given fruit with an exotic country of origin he races to find it on the map.
It's interesting how many places are not exactly where you remembered them to be...
Vintage Style Hanging World Map £25 at Pierrot et Coco

Delicious Summertime Earl Grey Sorbet

 

It's summer and too hot to drink tea as often as we'd like. So, with a little bit of thought, and with surprisingly little effort we made the best tea sorbet, which proved even more delicious (and refreshing) than imagined.

We urge you to make this as soon as possible.

Pierrot et Coco's Summertime Earl Grey Sorbet Recipe

Ingredients :
3 heaped teaspoons of Dammann Freres loose leaf Earl Grey tea
150g caster sugar
Juice of a lemon
500ml boiling water

1. In a bowl, mix the water and sugar. Add the Earl Grey tea (in a little paper or muslin bag) and steep for 15 minutes. Add the lemon juice and stir. Refrigerate for around 8 hours or until properly cold.

2. Remove the tea bags and pour the liquid into an ice cream maker - this is the easiest and quickest way to make the sorbet. We found it turned from liquid to sorbet in around half an hour, which is much quicker than ice cream.

It can be eaten immediately (recommended!) or put in a container with lid in the freezer until you're ready to serve.

*If you don't have an ice cream maker, the best way to make it by hand is to pour the liquid in a shallow bowl such as a cake pan, place in freezer for 2 hours then use a fork to stir the slush. Return to freezer, and stir again every hour until it has the consistency you like. It should only take 4 hours or so from start to finish in the freezer until it's ready to serve.

We scooped our Dammann Freres Tea Sorbet into our St Petersburg cup, with a little Undergrowth Design T-spoon on the side. We've been using the Magimix Le Glacier ice cream maker for years, and despite the hard-to-ignore noise it makes when churning, do recommend it.

*Our Dammann Earl Grey is currently on sale from £12 to £9.

 

Our last week in Abbot Street

Our shop in Abbot Street will close at the end of Sunday 20th July, 2014. For many reasons (too many to list here) it's the best decision to take, and we're really looking forward to putting lots of effort into our website and making it look exactly the way we want.

We are currently having a sale in-store, partly as a way to thank all of our lovely and wonderful local customers for shopping with us since 2010 by giving them the chance to snap up a few bargains and also to give us a chance to move forward and make the online shop completely new and fresh. It will be much more exciting to start with lots of new brands and products, and as we are creative people at heart, we can't wait to style and photograph new looks for the website.

We'll miss all of our regular customers, we have come to know them well over the last few years and we have been genuinely touched by the efforts some have gone to for us, buying the most lovely gifts we are incredibly grateful for.  We hope to work out a free and perhaps same day delivery service for customers in Glasgow's southside as a thanks to the support we've had.

We will miss our beautiful shop, but we are also looking forward to enjoying the rest of the summer and indulging in some new creative endeavours.

May Day!

It's the 1st of May, and even though the sun may not be shining where you are, it surely soon will. Our thoughts turn to longer evenings, trips to the seaside, ice cream and sea breezes.

If you're on our mailing list (subscribe via our website now if you're not!) you'll already have been sent our favourite Red, White & Marine Blue picks for spring and a fabulous Bank Holiday weekend 15% discount code. (use MAYDAY at checkout for all orders over £25 - valid until Monday 5th May )

You can view the online version here : 

Moorish Nautical Tile Wallpaper by Barneby Gates : Click here to view

Hirondelle Gold Mugs - Limited Sets available

It's been a while since we've had these Hirondelle Gold Mugs, but they still remain the most popular piece of kitchen & dining ware we've had. Although they are beautiful, their popularity is also owed to Celebrity Big Brother who used them throughout a series a few seasons ago.

We have a few sets of four mugs, slightly imperfect, in that they may have a lighter coating of gold at the base or a few pinhole size marks on the metallic coating etc. They are still quite gorgeous and the little flaws are not at all immediately apparent.

We have sets of 4 for £25, available with £4.95 courier delivery within the UK

Tattooed Eggs for Easter

If your children like to eat the eggs after they've been rolled, it can often get a bit messy when the inks or paints run in the wet or dewy grass and while it won't do them much harm to eat a green-tinged egg, it does look horrible. We've come up with a fun and much cooler alternative to painting eggs for Easter.  This is a good thing to do with children but definitely worthy of a breakfast table for adults too! We love how these have turned out and they hardly took any time at all.


You will need :
A pack of our Circus Tattoos,
Hard boiled eggs (we chose Clarence Court's Duck Eggs because they are larger and a beautiful, almost translucent white colour)
A cup of water
Scissors
Paper towels.

Next, decide on what your first tattoo will be. We went for the smaller ones in the pack, because it can be tricky trying to get the tattoo onto the curved shape of an egg.

 

Cut round the shape of the tattoo - instead of sticking to the guidelines on the reverse of the sheet, we found it better to cut closer to the actual design. Remove the plastic covering, place face down onto the egg and dab with wet (not soaking) paper towels until the tattoo has fixed and the paper comes away easily.

 

 

 

 Keep working away until all your eggs are decorated with a wonderful tattoo! You'll also be left with lots of tattoos too big to use on eggs, and we think they'd be ideal for decorating pieces of wooden furniture too (if the children don't want covered in them of course)

 

 

5 drinks to keep you toasty

It's freezing today, so we've picked our favourite hot drinks to keep you toasty until spring decides to rear her pretty head.

1. Vogue has described their dark chocolate as ‘heaven on earth’. Here it is in an apothecary style jar, ready for you to whip into a delicious hot chocolate. Or pour it straight into your mouth. We’ve heard both are entirely acceptable.
£10

2. This roasted, ground coffee comes from a small producer in Tuscany. We even know the owner’s name of the ‘coffee garden’ in Ethiopia where this is grown, harvested in November and December, washed and sundried on trays. Perfect as an after dinner coffee.
£7.95

3. Rochester Dark Ginger. We love this in any form. Straight from the bottle, warmed with a dash of dark rum, and especially made into two cocktails; The Dark & Stormy (in a highball glass with ice, rum and lime) or The Big Mac (over ice with bourbon, amaretto, cranberry juice and raspberry). Some have even been known to add it to green tea to give it extra kick.
£4.50

4. This Parisian tea brand’s best selling tea worldwide is ‘Detox’. With the weather we have here, we’re glad Kusmi also do something as soothing as Caramel. Ideal to go with a slice of hot apple pie on a cold day.
£12

5. There can’t be anyone who doesn’t love Prestat’s chocolate. We have their boxes and bars, and now the hotchocolate, in a two-piece box. Even the Queen Mother shunned other brands to keep Prestat in her bureau drawer, and Roald Dahl wrote about their truffles. No cupboard should be without a box of their drinking chocolate for late night suppers and anytime cheer-ups.
£10

Just when you thought Paris couldn't get any better...

Alain Ducasse with pastry star Christophe Michalak and designer Patrick Jouin have created a   Parisian kiosque dedicated to sweets. The "choux d'enfer" concept serves little choux buns or "chouquettes" at 3 for 6 euros (or the quantity I'd be inclined to go for, 10 for 17 euros).

    (image : fastandfood.fr)

    (image : M+O)

If only this concept would open a little closer to home,  it would make breakfast choices very simple...

Find it (or make a detour to visit) at : The intersection of Rue Jean Rey and quai Branly 75015 Paris (or Métro Bir-Hakeim - the one for the Eiffel Tower)

We're now open 7 days a week

We've resisted for quite a while, but for several reasons, we've decided to open 7 days a week. Lots of people were confused by our Monday & Tuesday closing, and those who only ever passed by on those days thought we had closed down entirely. We're making some changes to the interior, as well as a few 'behind the scenes' things going on, so we do need to be there seven days.

We've also changed our Sunday opening times, so the new hours for the week will be :
Monday to Saturday : 11am to 5pm
Sunday : 1pm to 5pm

There may be days we need to close, and we might get so exhausted we'll re-think it entirely, but for now, we are a 7 day a week kind of shop. We hope you'll make use of our new days!

Foxes, Bears, Hedgehogs & Dolly Parton.

 We don't have space for many greetings cards at Pierrot et Coco. We're not a 'card shop' or a 'gift shop', so don't want to devote too much space to birthday cards and the like. However, we always have a very carefully selected range, rejecting more than we accept when they don't fit in with our aesthetic so we were very happy to be approached by Glasgow School of Art graduate and illustrator, Heather More.  It was love at first sight when she showed us her small collection of animals with lots of character and the "I know you love..." pop star range of greetings cards. They've proven to be just right for our customers, after all, who could resist a fox in a Bowie T-Shirt?

Here are some of our favourites :

Fox in a Bowie T-Shirt birthday card

You're Getting Married Foxes Card

I Know You Love...Dolly Parton card

Art Carte Postale : Set 1

We are very happy to have taken delivery of the first designs of the PieroPrints Art Carte Postale series. There are 10 of his A6 postcards wrapped in beautifully illustrated paper and tied with striped string, making them very gift-able, covetable and collectable.

This series is the Dia de Los Muertos collection, with 2 each of 5 designs. There are big-eyed Mexican girls, boys and dogs on the fronts and lots of space on the back to write a note - but we think they could also be framed for the wall.

Of course, it's the wrong month for Day of the Dead, but we'll take a bit of Mexican kitsch, Frida Kahlo style and bulldogs with tattoos any day of the year.

This set is £10, and for now, is exclusive to us at Pierrot et Coco.

 

WIN Joe & Seph's Gourmet Popcorn

To show our Scottishness, we're doing a little competition for Burns Night which is Saturday 25th January. Some of you might not know who Robert Burns was, but if you've ever shook arms on New Year's Eve to 'Auld Lang Syne' then you're already  familiar with at least one of his poems.

The Prize? A big, glass jar of Joe & Seph's Gourmet popcorn - flavoured with caramel, Colombian Coffee and Scotch Whisky to help you celebrate in a less traditional way than piping in a haggis.

Of course, once you've eaten all of the delicious Joe & Seph's air popped popcorn, you can use the glass jar for anything you wish.

It's worth £25, and all you have to do to be eligible for entry is sign up for our newsletter, via our website - www.pierrotetcoco.com - before Friday 24th and we'll automatically enter you for the prize.

You can be sure if you do sign up for our (soon to be fortnightly) newsletter, we won't annoy you with stuff. We'll choose what we send you carefully, and respect your privacy.

Instagramming

Obviously very late to the party, but we're now on Instagram. We'll be posting pics we wouldn't normally share on Facebook or the blog, so follow us to enter the sometimes bizarre world of Pierrot et Coco.