Lovely children's shop: Little Yellow Birds

I just came across Little Yellow Birds, a gorgeous online store specialising in stylish things for small people (though I think bigger people could comfortably commandeer quite a few...). Lots of very sweet stuff, most of which I hadn't come across before (I've slightly fallen in love with the shadow-puppet wallpaper). Here are my own favourite picks...

1. Felt ball 'Freckle' rug, £350 A little pricier than the things I usually feature but the bold colours and tactile texture just seduced me. Great for little – and large – feet to pad about on. It's circular, and measures 120cm across.

2. Little Rabbit Cushion, £30.50 How can you resist those fantastically floppy ears? Backed with red picnic cloth on the back side, this super sweet cotton cushion measures 40cm x 30cm.

3. Fine Little Day: Splash Cushion, £42 This beautifully bright and cheery cushion is by Elisabeth Dunker, the Swedish designer behind the label Studio Violet (check out her cool, quirky illustrations) and Fine Little Day (listed by the Times as one of its top 50 design blogs). The cushion measures 40cm x 40cm.

4. 'Hand Made' Wallpaper, £100 per roll (52cm x10cm) It's the kind of wall covering you can imagine a child happily staring at for hours as they listen to their favourite bedtime stories – and no excuse not to try to make your own shadow shapes the old-fashioned way, too. It's made by a nice little company called Paperboy, check out some of their other designs.


5. Blackboard Bear, £34 A slate wall-sticker for scribbling on in chalk (if you can bear, ahem, to). 50cm x 50cm.

6. Charley Harper ABCs Book, £6.95 I adore Charley Harper's artwork (I've previously featured a memory card game that uses his illustrations). As well as the animal-themed images the book also includes the inspiring (especially for budding young artists) story of how Harper began drawing as a young boy on the farm where he grew up.

Elphick's online art shop

It's a day of discovering lovely new things... Isn't this the sort of shop you want to just rush into?

Elphick's, in east London's Columbia Road, run by the artist Sharon Elphick (you can see her flowers in a vase picture in the window) is packed with the owner's well-chosen collection of art, including her own – and at very affordable prices.

I'd heard about the shop but have never been - but the online version is almost as exciting. There's so much great stuff I don't know quite where to start. Without doing an inventory of the entire catalogue, I'll attempt to self-edit and pick out a few highlights you might like the look of. But do check out the shop for yourself - there's a lot going on.

I really like this print, called Tuba, by Helen Lang aka Madamsange. It reminds me a bit of one of my favourite children's books, Patrick, by Quentin Blake, which has equally joyous visions of flowers growing where you least expect them, and shoelaces turning into giant ribbons. But Helen's boxy figure feels much more Fifites/early Sixties than the fluid, 1969-published lines of Blake. The print measures 30x40cm and costs £55. See more of Helen's work at her Wet Paint website.

Not sure if Russell Loughlan's work is still at Elphick's but it had its debut there last year. And I like his work so much I thought I'd include it - plus a link to his site, above, just in case. I know Russell, but hadn't seen his work until it appeared at Tales from a Park Bench, a special pop-up shop/ performance art/writer-y thingy I took part in. But back to Russell, who combines illustration, found imagery, vintage postcards, antique maps and pop culture. Elphick's were selling them in recycled frames for £145 each.

I tried hard not to feature one of Sharon Elphick's lovely bird artworks and picked this postcard montage instead (are those John Hinde cards?). A woman after my own heart, not only does she cherish old postcards, but seems to share my love for bird ephemera. (In my house, from where I'm sitting right now: I can see one money-box - a 1970s brown owl; one lamp - one of Ed Carpenter's pigeon lights; a sticky-in-the-ground wooden garden ornament (from Brazil) and my Ikea outdoor bird fairy lights.) Wish You Were Here, at her more expensive end, is £350.

I love Charley Harper, as old-school followers will know. But I've struggled to find prints of his work –in desperation I bought a Harper memory card game from the Saatchi Gallery shop and framed the whole pack of little squares. I like it, but I also like this print, which is one of about ten that Elphick's is selling – it's £40. And I also now know why I had struggled to find Harper prints before – Elphick's is the only place licensed to sell them.

Charley Harper - but affordable

I can't remember where I first came across Charley Harper's gorgeous, stylised bird and nature illustrations - but I instantly fell for their clean, colourful modernist style. Look at them - how could you not?

But then I was thwarted: I could not find affordable prints of his work anywhere (I hadn't, then, stumbled across this brilliant Charley Harper prints website). But while on a work excursion to the opening of the new Saatchi Gallery in the King's Road, London, I found myself in the rather lovely little on-site shop and spotted the Charley Harper Memory Card Game - the children's game where you have to find two of the same images on little card squares and match them up. It cost less than a tenner, but I walked away with a whole bundle of Harper pictures in one little box - brilliant. Once home, I laid them out on a piece of card to fit a nice, square Ikea birchwood frame, glued them down once I was happy with the arrangement - et voila: cheap art!

The Saatchi shop online isn't very easy to navigate so I can't see if they still sell it, but I found it on Amazon for a bargainous £7.53. Nice.