50% Off – French Handmade Textile Clearance Sale

Hurry! 50% off for our French handmade textiles. They came all the way from an old textile town, Lyon in France. Do you feel that your living room needs a bit of loving care after the festive season? Then these French cushions are a must – they will brighten up your old comfy sofas with warm colours and cute pom-poms. Also don’t forget to take a look at our French cotton rugs and throws. We fell in love with them when we first saw them in France – they are just so beautiful! Oh, just to remind you, they are all hand made in France and high quality.

More new items will arrive soon – please look at our website JasmineWay Home Accessories

Where is Spring?

Hi there,

Are you one of us patiently waiting for the spring to come? We are indeed very fed up here in Surrey, where lots of snow and cold wind made our town look like a winter wonderland! We have been patiently waiting for a sign, a tiny sign of Spring, but feel like we are nowhere near…..

But I was working in the garden yesterday and surprisingly the sign of Spring is everywhere! Apart from a snow damaged trellis for our white jasmine, small buds are appearing slowly. Our roses have little pink buds all over, and clematis too it has tiny green side shoots! Ah that’s why I love this country – we have beautiful four seasons, don’t we?

Also we are doing a bit of re-decorating. After Christmas decorations are all gone and boxes are cleared away, it looks a bit bare. Although the coat rack in the hall is still full of thick jackets and logs are piled up in the basket, home decor doesn’t need to be wintry, does it? To brighten up inside the home we bought a basket full of crocus bulbs and a bunch of tulips from a local garden center. Now our living room is very colorful, and we can almost smell the sweet spring in the house!

Don’t forget to look at our website for pretty home accessories to brighten up your home. You don’t need to be an interior designer to create beautiful home. JasmineWay Home Accessories

Take care,
Jasmine

Hello from Jude, the Selkirk Rex Cat

Oh, look at him, our boy Jude is just waking up in the sunny conservatory. He is famous about having a say about his own bed – it needs to be equipped with genuine Scottish throw blanket and a soft “pillow”! Such a spoilt little boy… But building a conservatory has been one of the best home improvements we’ve done. Jude loves being there enjoying warm sun and heated floor all the time. It has actually started to look like a kids room with tiny toys scattered around the floor! Do you have a pet? They are so lovely, aren’t they?

Don’t forget to look at our website – we have a range of home accessories for kids rooms as well. JasmineWay Home Accessories

Take care,
Jasmine

Happy New Year and JasmineWay’s Experience with Swine Flu

Hello everyone,

Hope you are still enjoying the festive season! Just wanted to wish you a very happy new year. Isn’t it really hard to keep your house tidy at this time of the year? With various visitors asking to be fed, sadly the decor of our home will be the last thing we want to think about. Our living room is a full of things ranging from Christmas tree (of course), baskets with various biscuits and fruits, cat toys on the floor (!) etc. Does your home look the same?

I have been a bit lazy and didn’t blog much lately, but there was a reason for it. I came down with double pneumonia and swine flu in early November last year, and spent nearly 2 weeks in the hospital. It happened so quickly – it seems to have started with a Sunday dinner with my sister’s family and that was it. My little niece was coughing suffering from flu like symptoms at the time. Two days later I started to develop high fever and it went on and on. I was almost unconscious for about a week with high fever, but unfortunately it was very difficult to seek medical assistance because of the panic associated with this national pandemic scheme. You need to call a helpline, but you are just told to rest. Then it doesn’t improve and you call them again to be told exactly the same thing. It was absolutely a nightmare! I was whisked away to A&E twice, but still I was sent home (first time without any treatment whatsoever and second time with antibiotics for pneumonia). But third time lucky I was finally admitted to St. Georges’ Hospital in South London. Once I was admitted an intensive antibiotics treatment started straight away. But still it took more than 10 days for my pneumonia to clear. Because along the way I caught swine flu as well (doctors didn’t know which one came first, pneumonia or swine flu), I was in a very serious condition. But I can tell you, I highly praise NHS services at St. Georges’ Hospital. They were very efficient and everybody is extremely caring. I can’t thank them enough for what they have done for me.

One thing I’d like to let everybody know is to “get a swine flue jab” as soon as possible. I know many people are concerned about side effect etc., but you need to remember, once you became one of these seriously ill patients, mortality rate is 50%!  I can believe this from my own experience. So please everyone – get vaccinated! One simple jab may save your life and your loved ones’.

And thank you for supporting JasmineWay with many invaluable suggestions for our products. We are visiting tradeshows in London and Paris soon, and we promise to bring back more beautiful home accessories to share with you.

Don’t forget to take a look at our website – it’s full of unusual items for Home and Garden. JasmineWay Home Accessories

Take care,
Jasmine

My Enchanting French Life in Paris – back to 1992

Hi there,

Oh well, I’ve been thinking about telling my story to everybody for a long time and I just need to start blogging! It’s about my life, and why we ended up starting our French style home accessories business. It is also a story about love and hate, as it enfolds you will find how lovely and hateful Parisian can be…!

It was in 1992, I was freshly divorced and working very long hours in an American bank, and FED UP. What I needed was a new thing to excite me. So I looked at all the possibilities, I’ve got a little money from my divorce settlement and there were several options, 1) go to grad school for an MBA, 2) travel around the world, and 3) just live somewhere for fun. At that time I was in Japan, so looking around the world you can imagine there were many places I could go to. Since I couldn’t decide which option to pick, I met and talked with many people for a while, mainly my crazy American girlfriends who were living in Tokyo at that time. I also went to see a French grad school that was offering one year course in various European cities including Paris, Rome and New York. The school rep was a really nice French man, of course, very charming. We were chatting about the possibility of me enrolling for the following year, but the fact that the school would take me around the world in such a short period was a bit daunting. Deep down I knew I wanted to spend quality time in one place, so moving from one city to another every 3 months was just too much. So in the end I decided against the grad school. Then one day an article in the newspaper caught my eye. It was an advertisement for Sorbonne University in Paris. They were offering a course for foreign students to study everything about France, culture, history, music, architecture, philosophy, and of course French language. My major at university was French, but I could hardly speak the language. So I decided this is a good idea! All preparations etc. happened very quickly. I found a French girl in Tokyo who was willing to rent out her apartment in Paris for a year. And I was all set – here started a true adventure!

I landed in Paris on a sunny day at the end of August. My friend Fumiko offered to come with me so that I wouldn’t get homesick (!?) Oh how I loved her when I got to Paris. To begin with you have to remember it was in 1992, so French people were still very stubbornly very French, probably they understood English, but never tried a word of it. And I tell you, Paris is worse… At the airport my life in Paris started miserably. I was shouted at and prodded about by a scary French customs officer, and I tried to utter a word in French, but it all came out wrong… She shoved me to an exit almost spitting at me! I heard her saying to her colleague “what a stupid Japanese girl”. Of course I was so discouraged…

Anyway, Fumiko and I found a taxi (somehow, don’t remember very well) and headed to a street called Rue des Petits Ecurie in 11th arrondisement. The quartier is now a very trendy, popular place for young artists and luxury boutiques, but at that time, it was just the pits! Full of immigrants and dangerous looking card parlors for gentlemen, and you could be in the middle of Harlem. Taxi dropped us in front of my apartment building, and with a security code given by the owner we hesitantly opened the heavy metal door. It was actually a modern apartment building, which is unusual for that area. My new apartment was on the 6th floor, and the good news, a working elevator! We eventually emerged in front of my new place. I let Fumiko lead the way and she opened the door….she steps in…..me following…

AHHHHHHHHHH (Fumiko), GRRRRRR (me), millions of cockroaches!!!!!!!

They were coming out of the drain pipe under the kitchen sink! What are we going to do?

Well you need to wait until my next blog – promise, I won’t disappoint you! Don’t forget to check on our website for beautiful French style home accessories www.jasmineway.co.uk

See you soon,
Jasmine

New Stock

After another exciting trip to France (our second in just one month) I finally have time to update our blog. Our earlier trip was a recce of of small chateaux in northern France & the Loire valley. Got some very useful ideas once more on French interior decor & design. So much so that we are now starting to redecorate & refurnish our own home to reflect our love of French country style decor.

We are starting slowly with the bedroom first, but ultimately we will be removing all the carpets and replacing them with wood flooring and marble tiling. The house will be furnished mainly with items from our website, but there will be a few items that will remain unique.

Our second visit was purely a buying trip, mainly to replenish stock, but we managed to add a couple of new items in the process. Check out our new items here.

The company cat (Jude) is always busy when new stock arrives, we have to unpack items for the photo studio,  so lots of boxes and packaging for him to play with.

A new dawn in the high street?

With the credit crunch, and so many big name high street stores struggling, could this herald a new dawn. Could this be the end of the mediocrity that we’ve had to suffer for so long, all the shops selling the same things. For too long the small independents have been squeezed out of the high street, and so went their individuality and uniqueness. 
A very good example is your local ironmonger, there are still a few, but not usually on the high street anymore, plus they stock all the little things that B&Q don’t.
Provided the councils and mall owners see sense and don’t price themselves out of the market, then maybe we can see a return to individuality in the high street. Remember all those unique, quirky little shops you seem to find on holiday, they just never seem to be on your own high street.
We all want uniqueness and individuality in our homes, maybe, just maybe we’re going to be able to get it.
JasmineWay was started (before the crunch) to offer those alternatives, and now hopefully we will start to see some bricks and mortar competition as well. On our buying trips across Europe and our visits to the foreign trade shows, we have found a huge diversity in our chosen market, and that diversity can be found on the web which can only mean greater choice for you, and if that same diversity does find its way onto the high street, then it really will be a new dawn indeed.

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