Riding in Style – Brooks Bag

So after finding my almost perfect basket, I knew I’d be needing a bag to ensure things don’t fall out of my basket but also to keep everything dry!

Brooks thought of this and have the Camden Tote Bag.

It is designed to fit perfectly inside the Hoxton basket. It is made from a heavy duty canvas with leather straps and the internal has a plastic liner, combined with a waterproof zip it makes it a bag that can stand up to a whole bunch of rain!

It also works great as a shopping bag as I can fill it up and then just pop it into my basket and ride away. A great design and a great solution to being able to carry things and keep them dry. The nice long straps fit easily over my shoulder.

I’ve also discovered that if I buy more groceries than the bag can fit. I pop the big items into the basket and then I can pull the straps of the bag one over each shoulder and wear it like an improvised backpack.

The other thing I added to my basket was a stretchy black elastic net. It’s not pretty, it’s looks kind of messy but it stops random passers from grabbing stuff out of my basket, or when I go over bumps things from “jumping” out of my basket.

Riding in Style – Brooks Basket

One of my big hassles last summer in the torrential rain was lighting and the ability to carry stuff. So I knew for my basket I wanted to ensure a few things

- looks good, I am all for practical I just think practical should also be good design
- fits on existing bike but would easily transfer to new bike if/when I should upgrade
- I could mount lights with a battery pack onto the basket
- easy to take the basket on and off the bike so I can take it shopping etc So a handle or an easy way to carry it around would be handy.

So I knew what I was looking for,thankfully a very simple solution was found very easily.

The Brooks Hoxton basket is fantastic design, clips on and off the bike easily.

The fabric pouch inside contains the mounting bracket for the handlebars.

I could mount lights on it (though it may need to be drilled or use zip ties or something?) and it’s Brooks so of course it would be easily transferable to a new bike if I should upgrade.

In short it was close to being the perfect basket. It’s only downside was the bars are quite wide apart and I needed something where stuff wasn’t going to fall out. Luckily the good folks at Brooks had already thought of that too.

Come by next week to read all about it.

Riding in Style – AyUp lights

Last summer with the darkening days due to overwhelming rain and what appears to be more and more streets with less street lights (what’s with that?), I decided to light myself up. Well the bike at least.

For a few years The Englishman has had Ay-Up lights for his road bike. They are compact, look good, incredibly bright and rechargeable. So I pretty much knew those were the lights I wanted…now the only choice was colour.

With a wide variety of Anodised colors to choose from I originally wanted orange to match my road bike. Unfortunately the team at Ay-Up don’t have an orange colour they are happy with so they don’t offer one for sale (have to admire people who won’t put out anything substandard even something as simple as a colour!).

So naturally the only other colour choice for me was bright pink. During the ordering process you get to customize a few things. The type of lights and battery you want, type of mounts,colors of connecting bars and colour of your pod. The online ordering system was straight forward and easy to use. After placing my order they were delivered within 48 hours (awesome).

Upon receiving my only dilemma was how to attach them to the bike. Normally it’s a quite mount to the handlebars and you are ready to go. But the basket on the commuter bike kind of got in the way. A few zip ties and some Velcro and voila!  A bike basket with mounted lights and the battery safely mounted under my bag.

Added bonus now if I stop to get groceries on the way home I can unclip my entire basket, fill it with groceries and clip it back in and the lights still work all without having to remove expensive bike lights from the bike every time. Since then they have been lighting my way home and I couldn’t be happier with them.

They are bright, incredibly robust, easy and fast to recharge, waterproof and with the variety of mounts its a matter of seconds to swap it from one bike to another. I’ve also noticed cars are a bit more cautious during darker times as I don’t look like a bicycle because the lights are so bright so that’s a big bonus.

Riding in Style – life imitates art

Sweet style found via One Sydney Road

Riding in Style – Pretty dresses and cardigans

These lovely spotted dresses were featured on Everything Fabulous and were just so sweet that I had to share.

Her riding technique may need some work (that’s a whole lot of upper body movement happening there) but her style is awfully impressive.

Clothes by Lazzari

Riding in Style – The Finders Keepers cycling gift guide

I was recently asked to contribute to the Finders Keepers cycling gift guide and had so much fun finding all kinds of cute, pretty and useful things for my rides. I chose mainly based on riding around with my basket on the front of the shopper bike.

Take a look at the full gift guide here, all the ideas are super cool for the riders in your life.

Riding in style – Perfect summer style for riding

Am so hoping to rock this look during summer. It will be perfect for when the humidty makes my hair go funny and I still want to look stylish while riding.

Added bonus if I tie the bow low like this I can even pop my helmet right on top. Win!

Found via Everything Fabulous

Riding in style – Panniers that look kinda cool

I’m not a huge fan of panniers (mainly because rear racks are rally hard to fit to my tiny sized bikes) but these look cool in a military industrial type way.

Found via Swiss Miss

Riding in style – Scarves!

Am loving my new reflective edge scarf, big enough to fold and wrap in so many different ways. These images of Tamasyn Gambell scarves from lola bits and pieces are sure to get anyone inspired to wrap a scarf around them.

Or need to know how to wrap a scarf in your hair? Try this via becauseiamaddicted

Riding in style – sunglasses

Like many people I own quite a few sunglasses and can narrow down what I will and won’t buy in a pair pretty quickly

1. do my eyelashes touch any part of the glasses? If the answer is yes then I don’t buy them.
2. do they actually block out the sun? Having been caught out wearing a “fashion” pair of lenses and ending up with an enormous headache from squinting all day I vowed to never again wear lenses that don’t block out the glare.
3. do they give me a blind spot. On the bike I want to be able to quickly glance behind me make sure the traffic is clear and move to where I want to go. Not check, go and then discover there was a car in my blind spot that is now bearing down on me. Make sure your frame isn’t blocking your vision.

On the road bike I swear by my Oakley Radar‘s which I love as they are lightweight, no blind spot, no glare and my eyelashes don’t touch them. Quite possibly they are the perfect glasses for me.

However they don’t exactly look great with a dress and heels when I’m off to a meeting so I have a number of more fashionable pieces that go with that kind of look and am always hunting for more. They must however meet the criteria I need for the bike if they don’t then they are off the buy list. Hopefully one day I’ll find a pair that look fashionable and work as perfectly as my Oakley Radars.