I have two Marimekko pieces… the bf got this shower curtain and piece of fabric for me for X-mas last year. My dad made a wooden panel and it’s hanging in our bedroom. They’ve been around for so long, even my mom had their fabric framed, hanging in her first apartment.
shower curtain
enormous wall hanging
Their Autumn fabrics are now out and I can’t say I like many of them at all for wall hangings, pillows, upholstery, anything. They used to have a lot of variety. You could get these big retro patterns but you could also find an intricate clean repeat. What do you think? I think it looks dingy, boring and old… and not in that good old way.
I used to keep a journal full of cut out pictures of things I saw in magazines and I’ve shared a ton with you in the past. So, what does a grown woman do on a Wednesday night? Well this grown ass woman sat with her September issues spread out, a pair of scissors, a glue stick, paper and a pen. In all the magazines, I honestly didn’t see too many things that I fell in love with. I enjoyed concepts and styling ideas but not many individual items, except for these.
Oh, and I totally ordered the DKNY Pure perfume. I rubbed every last microbe of scent on my wrist off that magazine strip and couldn’t stop smelling myself. So cozy and comforting and sexy. The bf loves it. Part of the profit goes to a microfinance program for vanilla farmers in Uganda as well. I haven’t given up on my beloved Kenzo Amour… it just needs a little rest.
PS- I can’t spell Gabbana obviously
Click for the large version:
- This past Tuesday I got a wild hair and finally redid our bathroom floor. Much like the situation in our kitchen, it was a mess but much more livable. The landlord has hired some real asshats to do work in this building. We had black marble vinyl tiles (Who am I? Liberace?). They were laid down sloppily and there were ripples. I removed up to three layers of old flooring in some spots! We also have a claw foot tub and they never once managed to put the flooring under it! Who does that? It never felt totally clean. I understand older Victorian homes in the Fan district are full of these charming little qualities (this is a college town so why is the landlord gonna care?) and I knew our apartment was a diamond in the rough but come the hell on! Do a good job when you fix something! I got three boxes of discounted out-of-print peel & stick tiles from the same weird place I got the kitchen tiles from. The only neutral thing they had was a grey stone-like pattern. Fine. If I weren’t renting, I wouldn’t put this pattern in my home (or peel & stick tiles for that matter) but whatever. It’s clean. It’s bright. It’s done. (I still need to crawl on the floor to reach and paint the neglected trim beside the tub and repaint the claw feet.) Decades of funk have been removed from my home. $27 and 5 hours of work. (Oh, and my crappy little vacuum decided to fart a dust cloud so, 1 hour of that was spent letting the dust settle and then wiping down every surface in there. Fun.)
- I got approached to do my first product review and I’m really pleased with how it all went down. No one tried to sway me into a positive review nor did they ask for any specifics other than the links I already had in mind. I was compensated with being able to pick out a couple products I adore. It was a lot of fun and I hope to do it more often for companies that I believe in. Blogging about fashion is pretty much a giant product review anyhow so it only makes sense! The post is coming soon so keep an eye out!
- Here’s a big fat review right here – the (corded so it doesn’t run out of steam, heh heh) Shark Steam Mop. I am so very in love with this thing! Get a gallon of distilled water and go to town. The pads are machine washable. The first time you use it, you may get some streaking from all the residue other cleaners have left behind. For $60, this eliminates chemicals and replacement pads a la Swiffer and your floors are sanitized by the power of scalding steam.
- This blog has been at a new host for over a week now and I love it! There’s a lot more you can do with the WordPress.org platform on your own paid hosting site regarding plug-ins/widgets, ads, backups, etc. If any of you need advice on switching over from WordPress.com to the .org platform, please feel free to leave a comment or send an email. I will gladly walk you through the process. It does take a week to transfer over an existing domain. Ugh.
- Isn’t this jewelry catchall adorable? Find it here.
- I don’t have Photoshop so I was looking for something similar to Polyvore where I could add pictures to make a collage of sorts. Snapfiles is where I always go to find freeware software and it’s where I found FotoMix. I think a lot of you will enjoy using it. It’s super easy to figure out. The white background works well for the Polyvore style layouts. I also got Poladroid. It will make any picture look like a Polaroid! You can play with the settings for smudges and tilts. Here’s my first one. God I love her makeup! (at Katie Gallagher)
- Finally switched from IE to Firefox. I feel so 2005… like finally giving up an AOL or Hotmail email address.
- Oh! I found out that the cholesterol medication Lipitor can cause anterograde amnesia (unable to form new memories), which is exactly what my mom has been experiencing for a frustrating 2+ years now. I talked to her doctor and they switched her to something else. Keep your fingers crossed that this mess will settle down since we were seriously thinking it was Alzheimer’s or dementia.
- I’ve been pondering the time wasted on over-explaining and dumbing down. Lately, there’s been a radio commercial asking people to bring their Civil War memorabilia to a show like Antiques Roadshow. They say that they want to hear your stories, where it came from, family history etc. I wondered why they wasted radio time when they could have just said, “prepare to give provenance”. I really dislike when people tease the use of a “five dollar word“. Those beautiful concise words that sum up entire concepts are my favorite! (Is there a word for that?) I think when you cater to a deficiency, you encourage it. Why is it so hard to look things up and learn something new instead of complaining when someone is proficient with the English language? PS: my friend MJ‘s boss sent her this and I just about died (I love semicolons):
I keep seeing these wonderful prints I want on my walls. I never wanted to decorate with small wall hangings. It starts to feel messy. A few large pieces were fine with me but now, I’m starting to justify a few groupings in my head because these prints are so great!
All from Little Paper Planes. Click picture to be taken to it.
Someone is finally selling prints of particle tracks officially licensed from CERN. I am sooooo excited. I have been searching for so long. I even wrote to CERN to see if they were selling prints but they have bigger fish to fry. Media Storehouse has them in different sizes, framed and unframed.
I want to get a few of them in smaller sizes and hang them together. These are the ones I’m considering. Sorry about the watermarks. Nerds unite!
Bubble chamber particle tracks. Coloured image showing a collection of tracks left by subatomic particles in a bubble chamber. A bubble chamber is a container filled with liquid hydrogen which is superheated – momentarily raised above its normal boiling point by a sudden drop in pressure in the container. Any charged particle passing through the liquid in this state leaves behind a trail of tiny bubbles as the liquid boils in its wake. These bubbles are seen as fine tracks, showing the characteristic paths of different types of particle. The paths are curved due to an intense applied magnetic field. The tightly-wound spiral tracks are due to electrons and positrons.
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Streamer chamber photograph of 220 charged subatomic particles spilling out from the collision of a high-energy oxygen nucleus with a nucleus in a lead target. The picture was obtained by the NA35 experiment at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory outside Geneva. In addition to the 220 charged particles that leave a track in the streamer chamber, physicists estimated that a further 80 electrically neutral (& therefore invisible) particles were created in the collision. From a run in November 1986.
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The floor pillows are done! I made them yesterday and it took less than 1.5 hours! I’m not going to give you a huge tutorial on making pillows because it’s the easiest thing on earth to sew (next to curtains).
I did not make removable covers. A lot of people are using pillow forms inside covers these days and a small 12″x12″ form will run you about $7. (Enough polyfil to stuff two 12″ pillows is about $5.) Making pillow covers is also more complicated than simply sewing two pieces of fabric together and they don’t make forms big enough for what I was doing. I simply bought poly-fil and stuffed the hell out of them and finished the hole under the sewing machine.
Home decor fabric comes rolled up on a tube and not folded on a bolt like most garment fabric. You get a piece that is usually 54″ wide with upholstery fabric and about 44-45″ wide (folded in half on the bolt) with normal fabric. Get your measurements straight and give yourself about 3-4 extra inches of both length and width for uneven cuts at the store, selvage (the finished edge by the manufacturer that could interfere with your print) and to give yourself a 1″ edge away from your stitch (seam allowance).
My pillows are rectangular because for each pillow I got 1 yard of 54″ fabric = 1 pillow a bit under 36″ x 27″ (I only had to pay for 1 yard for each pillow = $24 total)
I didn’t use pins because the fabric was heavy and I didn’t iron because I’m lazy and really didn’t need to.
After I had sewn all the edges with a 1″ seam allowance, leaving about an 8″ hole for stuffing, I trimmed the corners so they wouldn’t bunch up and turned them right side out.
via
I poked the corners out from the inside with the tips of my scissors so they would be clean. Now, this is the part where most people would stuff and finish the hole and be done but, I wanted finished flange edges so, with the pillows right side out, I ran the edges under the sewing machine again, about 1/3″ in. This also gives the edges some extra reinforcement.
So then I stuffed and stuffed and stuffed some more and closed them up under the sewing machine, which was a pain in the ass and really should’ve been done by hand, but whatever.
Here they are! They’re super puffy right now but the bf is already lounging all over them so, they’ll flatten out a bit soon enough.
If you have any sewing questions, please feel free to ask!
I took a walk around my neighborhood today to play with the new camera and take some pictures of the old architecture that makes this area so distinct. I played with the pinhole effect on the camera a few times. The neat thing about the Fan District is that each walk you take brings you new discoveries. I could walk around a thousand times and it would always be exciting. I love this place. (Click on the Flickr link to the right to see all the pics!)
Each block has its own characteristic architecture that seems to run in groups.
Good ole Robert E. Lee on Monument Avenue. This is the South.
The way people take care of their tiny yards and porches makes me smile. As the seasons change, so does the entire feel of the neighborhood. There are a lot of hidden gardens tucked around that I would love to climb over fences to see!
There are some of the cutest little houses ever here… and so many strange varieties of trees. My favorite is the ginkgo, one of the oldest trees in the world. You can see the distinctive branches peeking in the 2nd picture.
Even the alleys are inviting and magical to me but the bf is convinced that they are full of stranglers.
For a while now, I’ve been escaping into this dreamy world of soft focus pictures and an ultra-feminine aesthetic. I love my clean minimal apartment with all my heart but; there is another side of me that would be just as happy in a little country cottage, growing my own vegetables and making art.
I posted about the image bookmarking site called We Heart It a while back. Every few days, I peruse the pics and add a few more to my collection of these fantasy images. This is my latest favorite picture:
Outdoor party in the country anyone?
Yesterday, shoppher tweeted about this post which ended up turning into one of those internet perusing explosions where I discovered a few new blogs I think I’m going to love. You might too!
Habit
Dreamcats – if you love dreamy cats. I submitted some pictures of Nibbles when she was a kitten. Here’s one:
The Snail and the Cyclops – love this girl’s style
Fieldguided – a nice little life
Any recommendations?
A few weeks ago I asked the interwebs for help and got none. I’ve continued my hunt to find a large version of this killer kitty with pie on his mind and I’ve come up with a plan.
Today, I went ahead and ordered the $1 post card that’s for sale at Buy Olympia (which ended up being $5.99 after shipping!) and I am going to do a few things. I am going to scan it as a humongous file and save it on a thumb drive, I’m also going to take a picture of it saved in RAW format and save that as well. Then I’m taking this thumb drive and the post card itself to Richmond Camera and see what they can do for me. If it’s a success, I will be happy to send you the big file that worked so you can do the same at your local print shop, since I know a few of you have been waiting for an update.
I’ll keep you posted on what’s going on as soon as the post card gets here!
I’ve been trying to hold steady to the 1 in 1 out rule. You don’t bring any new clothes/shoes into the house without getting rid of something first. Since my closet space is at a minimum, this is really necessary to keep it all under control.
I’m also trying to slowly rid myself of simple space killers like old t-shirts that I never wear but I’m holding onto for whatever reason. A friend got me a funny t-shirt as a gift but I’ve never worn it and never will. Stains, pin-holes, shrunken, faded, etc. It all has to go.
This weekend, the bf got a gigantic tv that came in a gigantic box that we need to hold onto for a year, just in case. I flattened the box out to put it under the bed and had to get all my shoes out first and clean up the cat fur tumbleweeds. I have 4 of those stupid shoe organizing bags that fit under the bed. Each one holds 12 pairs of shoes and each one was full, but I had recently purchased a few new pairs that were in places they shouldn’t be. So, I ended up getting rid of about 6 pairs of shoes that were either uncomfortable, had fallen out of favor, or needed repairs that I knew I wasn’t going to take care of. Just being realistic is a challenge!
It felt good to tidy up and be honest with myself.
I also just splurged and bought myself a new camera. I hate hate hate my little point and shoot but know I will never get back into photography to the point of investing in a pricey DSLR and lenses. I found a happy medium and got a carazay deal on a Lumix DMC-FZ35 with a wide-angle Leica lens! This meant I needed to assess all my other big purchases to see what needed to go.
It arrives tomorrow and I can’t wait!
I haven’t used my serger in over a year and I really don’t see the need for it in my life anymore so, I just put it on Craigslist to recoup some of the camera’s cost. This definitely takes some of the sting out of the purchase.
When finances are tight or you’ve set a goal for yourself to live honestly, it always seems like a constant juggling act to rid yourself of things you don’t use anymore to afford and make space for the things you want now.
What’s clogging up your life?
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