Show Us Your Bits

Alice Cripps and Josie Lloyd
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Self-Improvement
  • Updated Weekly

Curious magpies Alice Rivers Cripps and Josie Lloyd uncover the personal stories behind everyday and extraordinary pieces of jewellery. Alice is the founder and Creative Director of Posh Totty Designs and Josie is an author and lover of stories, so between them they share their tales of their sparkly bits and their special guests tell all about what's in their jewellery boxes. This is a weekly natter with interesting guests about all things bling with a touch of comedy and heart. This season we have everything from meaningful momentoes, cheap and cheerful charms to high-end designer bling. Here are the stories behind the jewels. Please listen and like and share with your friends. www.poshtottydesigns.com/blog Instagram: @showusyourbitspodcast @poshtottydesigns Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  1. 3d ago

    Keep Curious, Keep Moving Forward - with Salima Saxton

    We’re on a health and wellbeing vibe this week talking about being off the booze and our love of Pavari cocktails, plus our secret addiction to the new season of Rivals. We’re also having a very down to earth honest chat with our guest - actor, podcaster, public speaker and coach, Salima Saxton.  Salima’s candid talk for The Moth has had millions of views on YouTube and is the story on which her forthcoming memoir ‘The Undoing’ is based. She talks about what happened when her husband, Carl, someone she’d always thought of as her ‘oak tree’ as he was so stable, called time on how they were living. She recalls the surprise of his frank admission about how he wasn’t coping, and her realisation that his mental health was in jeopardy. She sprang into action, dismantling their so-called ‘perfect’ London life, moving their three children out of their private school and back to her childhood home in the countryside. In doing so, she had to confront the ghosts of her past, but says that the upside is that in jettisoning all the ‘stuff’ she considered to be important, she’s reclaimed her younger self and what really matters in life.  Despite having alway marketed herself as great in a crisis, Salima was surprised by the way in which she reacted to her unexpected diagnosis of colon cancer last year and the news of the difficult treatment she had to undergo. When one of her friends described her as a ‘bad patient’, her incredibly popular Substack newsletter was born. Salima says that she doesn’t have a filter at the best of times, but she found comfort in sharing everything she experienced - from the silly questions she asked her surgeon, to her deepest inner fears. Unsurprisingly, her fans have deeply connected with her honesty, her humour and her compulsion to help other people.   Salima, who has been in shows such as This is England, Trigger Point and Twenty Twelve says she’s ready to move back into acting. She says her mantra for getting through life is to keep curious and to keep moving forward.The special ‘bits’ she brought to show us included a framed picture of her husband and son in a chippie. It was taken just at the end of her treatment when she’d lost her appetite, but suddenly had an overwhelming urge for big fat salty greasy chips. Her family drove to a chip shop in town and this moment reminded her that life would once again be ‘normal’. When she looks at it she says she feels emotional because she’s so proud of how her family pulled together and got through such a tough time. With her three teenage children growing up fast, she brings a child’s jacket that has gone through her two girls and her son and reminds her of her beautiful moments of their childhood in London. We talk about the nostalgia of motherhood and how we navigate the emotions of our children changing and moving away from us. She also brings a painting of honeysuckle that grew in the thatched cottage in which she grew up. It was painted by her late father, from whom she was estranged. It reminds her of the good parts of her dad and how she’s come to the realisation that he tried his best. If you haven’t discovered Salima’s honest, funny, engaging Substack, find her https://substack.com/@salimasaxton and also on Instagram @salimasexton Watch her emotional talk for The Moth here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oA0BBHoMLuM  To view our guests' special bits, please follow us on Instagram @showusyourbitspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    34 min

  2. Jun 5

    Work Hard, Play Hard, Be Kind - with Pauline Paterson from Dr.PAWPAW.

    It's a pop of colour this week with flamboyant, fabulous founder Pauline Paterson from Dr. PAWPAW. Pauline founded her company in 2013 with her husband Johnny, when their daughter developed eczema as a baby. The doctors recommended steroid cream but, being a hairdresser, Pauline knew how harsh chemicals could be — and just how delicate a baby's skin was. Back in Australia, the paw-paw fruit (a.k.a. papaya) is widely used for its soothing qualities. Once she put it on her baby's skin, the eczema cleared up straight away. Seeing the huge gap in the market, she created a clinically proven, multi-purpose, paw-paw-infused vegan balm — and Dr. PAWPAW was born. She's since used the same base formula to create a whole range of products, from hair care to lip tints. Pauline talks about working with her husband, how she's grown a huge business from scratch with no formal training, and her passion for developing her products. Intrepid and daring, Pauline is all about saying yes to life — climbing mountains, travelling far and wide, and most recently joining 50 entrepreneurs on a hair-raising tuk-tuk drive coast to coast across India to raise money for girls' education. Describing herself as a maximalist and a compulsive jewellery buyer, Pauline whittled her "bits" down to some fascinating pieces — including a pair of vintage sapphire and silver rings she bought in Egypt on her honeymoon. She also shares the story behind a moonstone ring: how it cracked, and how a woman in a crystal shop told her something evil had come her way — and the crystal had defended her. Down to earth and funny, Pauline also faced most parents' nightmare: losing a beloved cuddly toy and brings a pair of matching toys for each of her kids to show us.  She keeps herself grounded amid an all-consuming business by carving out time for exercise and lives by the mantra "Work hard, play hard, be kind". She firmly believes there's rarely a difficult situation that kindness can't solve. Dr. PAWPAW is available in most high street stores — see the full range at www.drpawpaw.com. Find Pauline at @mrspawpaw on Instagram and @drpawpaw. @showusyourbitspodcast To view our guests' special bits, please follow us on Instagram @showusyourbitspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    29 min

  3. May 29

    Brighton Beach Special

    Oh, we do like to be beside the seaside! Oh we do like to be beside the sea... Alice and Josie take to Brighton beach for this week's episode, because who doesn't love the British riviera when the sun is blazing down and everyone is in a good mood? Basking on the stones (and looking for hag stones - the special lucky pebbles with holes in), Josie regales Alice with her recent adventures in the Cannes Film festival where she's been talking about her film, The Bright Side Running Club - a story inspired by Brighton beach. Whilst Alice shares her fascinating with seashells and her gorgeous seashell jewellery collection. Do check out their new Substack page - Show Us Your Bits Podcast for the stories behind the bits. And @showusyourbitspodcast on Instagram Read the full transcript here. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1W4GK5aaiHv68jp1numaY_T91rA-ymZn7BaFxuL-TxF4/edit?usp=sharing To view our guests' special bits, please follow us on Instagram @showusyourbitspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    13 min

  4. May 22

    Wedding Dates with Ciara Crossan

    In this episode of Show Us Your Bits, Alice and Josie are joined by the brilliant Ciara Crossan, founder of Wedding Dates, for a conversation full of adventure, instinct, motherhood, bold decisions and the magic of saying yes. From backpacking around the world with kilos of sand in her suitcase, to just saying 'yes' and flying across the world to LA for the Grammy Awards with a DJ friend after being offered a free ticket, to building a business as a single mum of identical twin boys, Ciara’s story is packed with colour, courage and those extraordinary little moments that change everything. Her bits are just as full of life. She brings sand collected from beaches across the world, a painting she bought after that unforgettable Grammy adventure as a reminder of the moment she stepped out of her comfort zone and said yes, and a beautiful diamond necklace with three stones: one for Ciara and two for her sons. Bought to mark a huge personal milestone, it has become a daily reminder of what she has built, what she has overcome, and the boys at the heart of it all. There are seagulls in Brighton, a psychic twin dream, a wedding dress marathon, Kilimanjaro, imposter syndrome, instinct, and the kind of stories that make you want to look again at the objects you carry through life. A gorgeous, funny and inspiring episode about trusting your gut, backing yourself, and the bits that tell the biggest stories. In this episode-  In this episode of Show Us Your Bits, Ciara Crossan shares the story behind the meaningful objects she has collected through travel, motherhood, business and personal growth. Ciara is the founder of Wedding Dates, a wedding technology platform based in Cork, Ireland. She started the business in 2008 after growing up in a hotel family and spotting a gap in how couples searched for wedding venues and suppliers by date. Over the years, Wedding Dates has grown into a platform supporting hotels and wedding venues across Ireland and the UK, including its venue CRM system, WedPro. The conversation explores Ciara’s journey as a female founder, tech entrepreneur and single mother to identical twin boys. She talks about the loneliness of building a business, the importance of women’s networks, finding confidence in rooms where she once felt she did not belong, and the power of trusting your gut. Ciara’s personal objects, or “bits”, include sand collected from beaches around the world during two years of backpacking, a painting she bought after flying across the world to Los Angeles for the Grammy Awards with a DJ friend after being offered a free ticket, and a beautiful three-diamond Chupi necklace. The painting reminds her of a moment when she stepped out of her comfort zone and said yes to an unexpected adventure. Her Chupi necklace has three diamonds: one larger diamond representing Ciara, and two smaller diamonds representing her twin sons. She bought it to mark completing her postgraduate masters in international selling in 2019 to 2020, after once swearing she would never return to education. She now wears it almost every day as a reminder of what she is building for herself and her boys. This episode touches on entrepreneurship, motherhood, women in business, imposter syndrome, travel, friendship, intuition, meaningful jewellery, personal storytelling and the objects that hold our most important memories. Listen for stories about Brighton seagulls, a psychic dream about twins, running a marathon in a wedding dress, appearing on Dragon’s Den, launching the Irish Wedding Venue Awards, climbing Kilimanjaro with women from the EY Winning Women network, and learning to say yes to life’s unexpected opportunities. @showusyourbitspodcast To view our guests' special bits, please follow us on Instagram @showusyourbitspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    32 min

  5. May 15

    The Beat Goes On - With Jed Novick

    This week on Show Us Your Bits, hosts Alice Rivers Cripps and Josie Lloyd are deep in the Brighton Festival - and in the spirit of May Madness, they have brought on one of Brighton's most distinctive characters to help make sense of it all. Their guest is Jed Novick, veteran journalist, former lecturer at Brighton University and the founder of a brand new Brighton arts and culture magazine called The Beat. Jed started his career as a sports feature writer on The Times after journalism college in 1986, before landing what he calls the best job of his life at The Independent in its earliest days - where he became quietly famous for writing invented TV listings, including entirely made-up soap opera storylines that attracted boxes of letters from readers suggesting plot ideas for characters who didn't exist. He later worked at The Guardian and set up several magazines before moving into lecturing, where he taught journalism at Brighton University until the course's shift away from print made him feel, as he puts it, like a stegosaurus. Taking voluntary redundancy, he has marked the start of his new chapter by launching The Beat - a 48-page print magazine curating the best of Brighton's arts, music, food, and culture scene, starting with a festival special featuring a double-page spread on the band Angine de Poitrine and coverage of The Great Escape music festival. The Beat is available via subscription through its Instagram page @thebrightonbeat_ As for his bits, Jed is one of the most jewellery-laden guests the show has ever had, wearing more rings than fingers - each one a story. A twisted spoon ring given by a friend for his sixtieth birthday; a ring from the National Jewish Museum in Amsterdam; a huge Moroccan silver ring spanning knuckle to knuckle; a black onyx ring bought in Kathmandu during four years of travelling that began when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989; a tiger's eye ring made from two stones he quietly pocketed from his mother-in-law's broken necklace; a matching ring made by the jeweller landlady of his local pub The Eddy in West Hill for Gilly's 60th birthday and a ring he cast himself in a cuttlefish casting course at the Phoenix Art Centre in Brighton - a gift for his wife Gilly Smith (food writer and host of the Cooking The Books podcast and also a previous guest on the podcast). He also wears a leather necklace holding a single surviving batik cow-bone bead given to him by a Dean Moriarty-type figure he met in Tokyo, a keepsake from his Jack Kerouac-inspired years on the road. As for suits, Jed traces his love of tailoring straight back to punk - both, he says, are about refusing to be generic. The episode also touches on his marriage to Gilly: the two eloped on April Fool's Day, told no one, then announced it at a party that evening. He grew up in Hackney, moved to Brighton in 1995 after the arrival of their first child, and once bought a house in the Sussex countryside purely because his wife sent him a photo of its pond. Alice and Josie close the episode buzzing about The Beat and the Brighton Festival, with Josie heading off to a wedding at Dreamland in Margate followed by the Cannes Film Festival to promote The Bright Side Running Club. Topics Covered The Brighton Festival and Brighton May Madness Artists' Open Houses in Brighton Jed Novick's career: The Times, The Independent, The Guardian The Beat magazine -- Brighton's new arts and culture print magazine The Great Escape music festival and Angine de Poitrine Inventing TV listings and soap opera storylines at The Independent Lecturing at Brighton University Jed's ring collection and the stories behind each one The National Jewish Museum in Amsterdam Travelling from Berlin to Kathmandu after the fall of the Berlin Wall Jack Kerouac and the On the Road years Batik bone necklace from Kenya via Tokyo Punk fashion vs bespoke suits Eloping on April Fool's Day Josie heading to Cannes for The Bright Side Running Club Season 10 of Show Us Your Bits To view our guests' special bits, please follow us on Instagram @showusyourbitspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    33 min

  6. May 8

    We're back

    Welcome to Season 10 of Show Us Your Bits -- and what a milestone it is. In this opening episode, hosts Alice Rivers Cripps and Josie Lloyd reunite after the summer break to catch up on everything that happened while they were apart, before teasing an exciting new season of guests. Alice shares the extraordinary story of a three-day charity walk across the Sierra Nevada in southern Spain, organised to raise funds for Leo's Angels -- a charity set up by her friend Emma after the tragic death of her 11-year-old son Leo from an epileptic fit. Twenty-three female founders walked more than 60 kilometres together through the mountains, raising over £23,000. The walk was not without drama: the group survived a terrifying encounter with a massive swarm of angry bees that had been smoked out of their hive, forcing the women -- including one member with a severe bee allergy -- to silently wade through a river bed surrounded by thousands of bees for two kilometres. Alice came home buzzing with energy and renewed motivation for life and business. Josie, meanwhile, had been travelling in Vietnam. The trip took in Ho Chi Minh City, the island of Phu Quoc, Ninh Binh's stunning inland waterways, the ghost-town tourist developments around Ha Long Bay, and the vibrant old quarter of Hanoi. Josie also did a Vietnamese cookery course, visited a Michelin-starred pho restaurant and came home via a stopover in the futuristic city of Shenzhen. Back in the UK, she celebrated her husband Emlyn's birthday with a full Beatles tourist experience in Liverpool. On the business front, Alice has been appearing on QVC to sell her Posh Totty Designs jewellery collection and is growing increasingly comfortable in front of the cameras. Josie is heading to Cannes to promote her film The Bright Side Running Club. The episode closes with both hosts looking ahead to a packed Season 10 guest line up, including several of the female founders from Alice's charity walk. Topics Covered - Leo's Angels charity and the story behind it - The Sierra Nevada 60km charity walk for epilepsy research - The bee swarm survival story - Travel in Vietnam: Ho Chi Minh City, Phu Quoc, Ninh Binh, Ha Long Bay, Hanoi - Vietnamese food and the Michelin-starred pho restaurant - Shenzhen airport and modern China - Liverpool and the Beatles tourist trail - Selling jewellery on QVC - The Bright Side Running Club film at Cannes - Preview of Season 10 guests To view our guests' special bits, please follow us on Instagram @showusyourbitspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    16 min

  7. Mar 20

    The Gin Lady - with Tina from Warners Gin

    Co-founder and CEO of Warners Gin Distillery, Tina Warner-Keogh started off with a mission in 2012 to save the world from mediocre gin. From a farming family, she used her gut as her guide and nature as her inspiration to diversify her husband Tom’s family farm, installing a still and growing botanicals. Tina tells the story of starting a business from scratch to pioneering the world’s first rhubarb gin. From a patriarchal family, she’s had to grow in courage and belief, steering her business through Covid and the cost of living crisis to the success it is today. Sustainability is absolutely at the heart of what she does and her mission is to the world’s leading nature-driven drinks business. She brings some china pea pods, as she’s nicknamed ‘Tina Pod’ and is very close to her Mum. She also brings some colourful ‘wings’ beaded earrings from Tanzania, which commemorate her epic climb up Kilimanjaro as well as a framed picture from her brother with a very special meaning.  She says that her six minute diary helps her process her emotions and makes her focus on gratitude every day and that her dogs keep her grounded and happy. Find Warners gin in good clubs, bars and restaurants, as well as supermarkets near you.  To view our guests' special bits, please follow us on Instagram @showusyourbitspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    1h 6m

  8. Mar 13

    Talking To Strangers with Gill Paul

    Internationally best-selling author Gill Paul has written plenty of non-fiction, but has turned her love of history into writing ‘what-if’ novels, taking real historical figures and weaving stories around them. It was her experience of teenage heartbreak that led to her write about the Romanovs in The Secret Life and The Lost Daughter, but she’s tackled all sorts of eras, from Jazz age New York, to the juicy rivalry of Jackie Onassis and Maria Callas, along with the sexist world of publishing in Scandalous Women, to name but a few. A romantic at heart, Gill shows us her very personal mementos including a LOVE sign from her current partner, a beaded doll gifted by her nephew after a school trip, her grandmother’s wedding ring and her late mother’s lipsticks, still bearing the shape of her lips.  Gill swims outside every day in the Hampstead pond, but as well as the efficacy of cold water, she says her life hack it to talk to strangers. She says it’s a Scottish thing, but striking up a conversation with a stranger has the power to completely change your day. Follow Gill on all the socials and on instagram @gill.paul1  To view our guests' special bits, please follow us on Instagram @showusyourbitspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    38 min
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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

Curious magpies Alice Rivers Cripps and Josie Lloyd uncover the personal stories behind everyday and extraordinary pieces of jewellery. Alice is the founder and Creative Director of Posh Totty Designs and Josie is an author and lover of stories, so between them they share their tales of their sparkly bits and their special guests tell all about what's in their jewellery boxes. This is a weekly natter with interesting guests about all things bling with a touch of comedy and heart. This season we have everything from meaningful momentoes, cheap and cheerful charms to high-end designer bling. Here are the stories behind the jewels. Please listen and like and share with your friends. www.poshtottydesigns.com/blog Instagram: @showusyourbitspodcast @poshtottydesigns Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Information

  • Creator
    Alice Cripps and Josie Lloyd
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    91
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Alice Cripps and Josie Lloyd
  • Show Website
    Show Us Your Bits

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