Sluttery by Post: Prudence and the Crow

We are very fond of books. You might have noticed, and you might even say that they have addled our collective brain. However, I've managed to keep my wits about me just long enough to bring you news of yet another book subscription - Prudence and the Crow. 

Run by Londoners Abigail and Peggy, Prudence and the Crow's USP is that they deal solely in second-hand books. Each month, you'll get a carefully-sourced vintage paperback, a handmade fabric book pouch to keep your book safe and sound in your bag, and a selection of other goodies to perk up your day. These might include bookplates, tea bags, sweeties, bookmarks, stickers... it's all part of the surprise! 

Your box will always be small enough to fit through the letterbox, so there will be no Royal Mail Red Card of Doom waiting for you after work, and no trudging halfway across town to pick up a parcel from a grumpy man who demands fifteen different types of identification and then tells you to wait another 24 hours before coming back. 

Each parcel also includes a library card, stamped with the date your box was assembled, and a handwritten note telling you a bit about your book, where it was bought, and why it was chosen.

And how do Abigail and Peggy pick your books? Well, you can choose between five categories - youth fiction, sci-fi, classic thriller, children's, or random. If none of the genres appeal, you should choose random, because later in the ordering process there's a questionnaire where you can share your literary likes and dislikes. And you can change your chosen genre at any point during your subscription, you fickle wee beastie, you.

Get a one-off box for £12, or choose a monthly subscription at £10 a box. If you sign up for a year or more, you get a birthday present! I imagine if you're the Queen, you get two. Sadly, I am not. 

I really like Prudence and the Crow. I love books, I love post, I love surprises, and I love ephemera. For a tenner a month, I don't think I can resist.

Friday Wishlist: Gorgeous things you'll want to buy RIGHT NOW

The perfect dress. £29.99 from Lindy Bop.

The perfect spoon sets. £7 for two from Urbane Hoylake.

The perfect love bird t-shirt. £25 from Oliver Bonas. (The summer collection is absolutely cracking.)

The perfect egg cup. £18 from Hop & Peck.

The perfect trousers. £65 from Reiss.

The perfect sandcastle bowls. £10 each from Hunkydory Home.

The perfect metallic shoes. £35 from Oasis.

Extinctly The Best: Brilliant Dinosaur Design

Happiness is a dinosaur cake stand. Seletti's new dinosaur range is the most wonderful thing. They'll be available at Made In Design from September which is OH MY GOD AGES AWAY. So until then, here is a whole bunch of other dinosaur goodies to keep you happy.

Dinosaur cookies! You'll need a gingerbread recipe to make tasty dinosaurs. Bite their heads off first.

Don't forget about the dinosaur rolling pin that we showed you earlier this week. (Robot rolling pins are also available. Damn thunder-stealing robots.)

I'll never, ever get bored of these dinosaur salad servers. They're one of my favourite pieces from Howkapow and they're £14.95. Look at them going for a stroll through the grass! Here's some salad inspiration for your hungry dinos.

It's a known fact that sandwiches shaped like dinosaurs are the best kind of sandwiches. They're even better than triangles. This sandwich cutter is just £2.99. That's a very small price for Jurassic carbs.

I know that woolly mammoths are definitely not dinosaurs. But they very rarely make it onto soft furnishings (or any kind of furnishings) and I think this scribbly little guy deserves a little promotion. He's in the sale at Ohh Deer (who also have some brilliant dinosaur cushions) and now just £19.95.

D'you think 'e saurus? I wish I'd had dinosaur wallpaper as a kid. I'm now really tempted to buy some dinosaur fabric and make a brilliant dinosaur dress. The paper is £50 a roll, the fabric is £80, both from Paperboy. Please tell me your favourite dinosaur in the comments.

What's better than dinosaur wallpaper? I'll tell you what, it's a short list of nothing much at all. Except Sian Zeng's magentic dinosaur wallapaper, complete with dinosaur magnets. Yes, that T-rex is eating a helicopter.

Here's unequivocal proof that kids get the best damn stuff. I really, really want a grown up version of this dinosaur rucksack.

I'm a bit sad that I don't own a dinosaur scarf. This one is £152 from Terracotta, via Boticca. This is the kind of thing that I'd wear to events when I'm meant to look professional.

I've really got a soft spot for this pterodactyl necklace, I like the skeleton element to it. It's by Designosaur and it's £25 from Hannah Zakari.

Fancy some dino earrings? Fragment does a whole bunch of mix and match silver dinosaur studs. I like the raptor and the hadrosaur. They (probably) won't eat each other. Nope, no idea why there's a tiny bunny in the photo.

If you don't want a pair of sparkly dinosaur sunglasses then I really don't think we can be friends. That much tacky brilliance deserves to be celebrated.

Around the Shops at the Museums

Right up there with the cake, visiting the shop is one of the central tenets of any museum visit. And, museum shops these days offer you the chance to buy much more than an eraser and a pencil (though you can still get those too). You get things you know you aren't going to find anywhere else, and contribute to museum funds in the one fell shop - surely the ultimate in cultural snobbery.

Although I used to work for a museum shop, I still double-taked when I saw the above on Disney Roller Girl. It's a gorgeous eye palette created that By Terry’s Terry De Gunsberg has created exclusively for the National Gallery. This beauty is £150, but the National Gallery are selling everything from eye-stain pencils to nail varnishes to accompany their Making Colour exhibition. With this collaboration, I think they've possibly even topped their Artistic Bouquets.

There's beauty to be bought at the V&A too, in the form of the Exhibitionist range of nail varnish, made by Walker + Walker for the museum. The V&A's diverse collections especially lend themselves to amazing products, such as great jewellery and pretty T-shirts. They also regularly commission exclusive prints. This Rob Ryan You Are My Universe print is part of an edition of 500, produced to accompany the Wedding Dress exhibition.

Plenty other Sluttery favourites have made themselves at home in museums and galleries too. We've written about Mini Moderns and their close links to the Southbank Centre before. That combo is responsible for this fab Bartolemew chair too.

Here's the wonderful Tatty Devine for the London Transport Museum Shop. They've producing a whole range to celebrate 'The Year of the Bus', including this gorgeous bus brooch. It's yours for £35.

The Transport Museum also does great homewares, including these colourful luggage racks. Or you could go for one of these equally colourful cushions, based on tube seats (yep, this week we're giving you the tube for your sofa, as well as for your tent). They're £55 each.

Nip over to the Tate for another blast of brightness. This mug is part of their collection by Yoni Alter and is ridiculously up-to-date with London's skyline (if not strictly accurate when it comes to the colour scheme).

This sunshine satchel is another Tate exclusive. It's by Barbara Wiggins and is £99.

You could be brilliantly dressed by buying from museum shops alone, and not just the most obvious one. This scarf comes from the Science Museum and is decorated with an image of the Hadron Collider. (The Science Museum is definitely your destination if you want anything Hadron Collider inspired.)

For more not-quite-what-you-think-it-is, check out the Timorous Beasties collection for the National Galleries of Scotland. This eerie eyeball actually belongs to Mary Queen of Scots and is available, on the bowl, for only £6.50. If you're a David Shrigley fan (and who isn't really?), there's lots in store for you too.

Other museums and galleries with great shopping opportunities include Baltic, National Portrait Gallery, Dundee Contemporary Arts and the Design Museum. Have I missed any other favourites?

Immense tents

Team Sluttery is divided on the issue of camping. For Sara, it's a no-go, while Sian quite enjoys spending nights in tarpaulin. I regard it as a sometimes necessary evil. And, like all evils, it's something that can be made better with improved shopping options. Yep, I'm superficial but a pretty tent is going to increase the likelihood of me camping tent-fold.

Most varied of the options come via Field Candy who we've featured before: their crazy designs are also available through shops including Urban Outfitters. But it's also worth checking out their website for limited edition designs, such as the fine plumage on this Birds of a Feather tent. It's designed by Philip Gatwood and is £495.

For a much cheaper, but an equally well-feathered nest, check out this retro birdy pop-up tent. It's reduced to only £30 in the Millets sale.

Blacks also have a bit of a bargain in stock at the moment. This pretty teepee meadow tent, sleeps up to ten of friends (pick your friends carefully in such close circumstances), and has been reduced from £300 to £99.

For anyone who can't bear being without their phones, Bang Bang are the tent makers for you. They come in a colourful range of patterns - I especially love these jelly beans - and include a solar panel and storage bank so you can charge those cameras, phones, speakers and everything else you need to enjoy the great outdoors. It's £200 from Urban Outfitters.

If you have a hankering to do camping on a grander scale, check out the bell tents available from Boutique Camping. Their website notes that this '4m tent is perfect for couples but can sleep up to 5/6 people, luxuriating in an open-plan bedroom'. While I wait to be convinced by their use of the word 'luxuriating', it's undeniably nice to have a tent you can stand up in. Such luxury costs £459.

From the potentially sublime to the ridiculous. This is the Empire beach tent, enabling you to make a shoreside change of clothes with dignity. I'm sure the humiliation of carrying this onto the beach almost beats the humiliation of accidently flashing your breasts at a grandad while changing after a dip. Or you could set this up in your garden for snoozy summers in the shade. Pick one up for £295 from Deckchair Stripes. 

We've already shown you the genius that is the camper van tent (now available in new colours), but for transportation tent delights it's got to be Firebox's London Underground Tent, Escape from being crammed in on the tube each morning by being crammed in this tent with 19 of your mates instead. It's something of an attention grabber though, as this Mirror article points out. It's also £1999.

But, for my ultimate tent fantasy, it's got to be Anthropologie's Altair tent. Priced at an equally fantastical £5998, I'd expect it to come complete with this beach setting too. But for convincing me that camping could actually be fun, it's definitely the one. 

Etsy Pick: Valek Rolling Pins

STOP EVERYTHING: I have found the best thing on the internet, so we can all just give up now, and make biscuits covered in ROBOTS instead. Because LOOK. 

When Polish designer Zuzia Kozerska got her hands on a laser cutter, she decided to try engraving wooden rolling pins, made from local beech wood. And lo, her range of embossing rolling pins was born. Let's explore some of her other designs...

This dinosaur design might be my favourite. I want to cover every biscuit, every cake, every piece of pasta with Diplodocus and chums. Hell, I want to cover my FACE with them. No? Okay, no.  

I like this subtle design - at first glance it just looks like a nice wavy pattern, and then you realise it's lots of lovely foxes. How foxing. And foxy. 

I'm starting to wonder if Zuzia is in fact one of Team Sluttery working undercover in the forests of Poland. Robots. Dinosaurs. Foxes. AND NOW CATS. The only thing that's missing, really, is unicorns. I think it's only a matter of time. 

The cat pin was Zuzia's first design - she made it for her niece who loves cats, BRILLIANT AUNTIE KLAXON - and it has a teeny-tiny surprise hiding among those moggies...

... a mouse! Really bloody cute. 

Would you like fries with that biscuit? YES PLEASE.  

Zuzia can knock you up a beautiful personalised rolling pin, too. Choose from a star or heart pattern, and go for phrases like "made by..." or "baked by..." OR - excitement - your own custom text. The possibilities are infinite. I'm unsure yet whether swears are allowed.

Valek rolling pins are £24.41 each, plus £6.51 shipping to the UK (there won't be any duty or taxes to pay), except for the personalised pins, which are £32.55. That's pretty damn reasonable for something that's handmade with so much care. One of these would make a brilliant present for the baker in your life, and the personalised ones especially would be great gifts for a special occasion. 

Which design would you choose? 

Friday Wishlist: Gorgeous things you'll want to buy RIGHT NOW

The perfect floral dress. £55 from Warehouse.

The perfect fairground mug. £16.50 from Snowden Flood.

The perfect silk scarf. £38 from Karen Mabon.

The perfect drinks trolley. £195 from Oliver Bonas.

The perfect flamingo necklace. £8 from Joy.

The perfect shoes. £110 from Boden.