The Craft Begins

Yeah, this is what I was aiming for when I went out taking pictures last week, but I didn’t quite get there…

I’ve been meaning to paint walls charcoal for the last few years, and I’ve finally landed in a place where I can paint the walls whatever color I want!  When everyone heard about my plans they thought I was insane, said I was going to be living in the batcave.  However, now that they’ve seen it in action, everyone loves it.  And rightly so.  Because it’s awesome.

I’m going to go ahead and say that the previous owners’ design aesthetic was a little…conservative.  As much as I love color, I also really love neutral tones, which is why all of the big furniture and expensive to replace items are in grays and browns.  We were lucky that the wood floors were in such great shape – I’m going to put down rugs eventually but I’ve been tracking in so much grass this summer it wasn’t worth it.  The cabinet in front is an antique store display – all of the drawers are filled with craft supplies!

Sorry the second picture is a little cockeyed, but you get the point!  I really struggled with a finding a way to make sense of a big, oddly-shaped living room but the antique cabinet made a perfect room divider.  Notice the mirror glass on the other side?  Didn’t know what to do with the big windows in front as they were kind of low but some low-backed club chairs and a pair of bookcases on either side of the wall seemed to do the trick.  In the very back, I found an old stereo cabinet that was in great shape and it really makes the little walkway make sense.

That’s it for the before and after pictures, but here are some detail shots for you:

The view from my couch – that’s what I meant about the windows with the chairs in front.  I love that little silver table – there’s a smaller matching one between the two modern chairs and all of the chrome in the room ties together really nicely, I think.  And that globe in the background?  The whole thing lights up!  I have a globe lamp (and the coolest grandmother ever).

I bought these Japanese fishing floats at the flea market last year and I haven’t known what to do with them, but I like the way that they just kind of roam in the basket.  And these chairs are my favorite chairs in the whole world – they’re sooo comfortable and I love the plaid and brass detailing.

Since I’ve got a lot of wood (with the floors and all the big furniture) and the living room was tending to look like an 18th century French naturalist’s apartment (I wish!) I wanted to balance them out with something a bit more streamlined and modern, and these chairs were perfect.  How’s that for a great secondhand find?

There’s still a few things that I’d like to do to the room and a few kinks I’d like to iron out but I was really excited to share the progress with everyone!  Hope you’re having a great week.

Did anyone get a chance to see the meteor shower last night?

I stayed up way late and drove up into the mountains to watch it.  It was so cold!  Summer is quickly ending.  I got scared away though by some people walking around in the woods next to my car who wouldn’t respond when I called.  I’ll admit it, sometimes being alone in the woods in the dark makes you a little paranoid.  The meteors were amazing though.

I apologize for the photo quality on this one but I got a little carried away and redid all of the chairs before I could get a decent before picture!  Luckily, my roommate saved the day.

These chairs were built in 1937, and were pretty solid if maybe a bit worn down.  I’ve got way too much wood in my house as it is so I wanted to redo them without necessarily staining them.  I decided on a bright, semi-gloss white (there’s nothing else in my house that’s white other than the ceilings!) and I found the beautiful, thick ikat upholstery fabric at a fabric store in town.  I can’t get over how much I love that pattern.

I’ll show you the rest of the dining room, soon!

I’m at my family’s house in Montrose, Colorado getting ready for the Olathe Sweet Corn festival this weekend.  If you’ve never had Olathe sweet corn, you’ve never had corn.  It’s the plumpest, sweetest, grassiest corn that’s ever existed in the world.  They’re mowing down one of the fields this week so we’re going to follow along behind and grab all of the sweet corn that I can fit into the back of my car.

In the spirit of the corn festival, here are some pretty corn pictures to get you good and hungry.

1.  snake eyes 2.  Another Pint Please… 3. *MarS 4.  Trimmer471 5.  Darwin Bell 6.  r-z

I’ve had to pull down my food blog for the time being, so I’ll be posting some more food-related tidbits here for a while.  I’ve been getting tons of beets in my CSA share for the last few weeks, and this is a way of preparing them that’s pretty easy and delicious.  This is one of my “eyeball” it recipes so adjust to your needs and likes.

Ingredients:
beets
butter
goat cheese
honey
dill
salt and pepper to taste

Chop beets until they are fairly small, and toss with a pad of butter in a glass baking dish.  Bake at 350 for 10-15 minutes, depending on how large your pieces are.  Toss them with a little bit of goat cheese, salt and pepper, and drizzle a little honey on top (I prefer something less sickly-sweet) topping with a few springs of fresh dill.  Enjoy the summer flavors!

I got to go to the Denver Botanic Gardens last week for a little party, so of course I brought my camera.  All of the plants were beautiful but I saw a few things that I really liked and thought would be fairly easy to re-create at home.

I like the way that a few mis-matched but color-coordinating pots are all lined up here, growing a festival of different colorful succulents.  For me, keeping the containers in the same color scheme really allows the attention to be focused on the plants but makes an overall significant visual impact.

Sweet potato vine happens to be one of my favorite things in a container, so of course I was drawn to this arrangement.  I also like the ornamental cabbage a lot.  That’s something I’ve seen really creeping up in lots of garden designs lately.  What’s most interesting to me about this arrangement is how bright and colorful it is!  A great way to wake up an otherwise lackluster outdoor area.

I understand that not everyone can probably afford a Henry Moore sculpture in their garden (if you happen to end up in Denver, you have to check out the exhibit) but why not incorporate some kind of sculpture into your garden anyway?  You could create something yourself or head over to the nearest art school.  A bonus – if you cruise by after school’s out a lot of the art school kids just throw stuff away.  You never know what you’ll find.

I threw this picture in here just because it was pretty, but it does illustrate two other ideas – using a water feature, and incorporating lots of color (especially when it contrasts!).  I’m sure this pond isn’t too deep but the fact that they’ve painted the insides black makes it look as if it’s gone on forever.

That’s it for me for garden ideas for the day – anyone else have anything new they’re trying out?

This is the beginning of the before and after house pictures!  I’d like to get everything totally perfect before I show you guys, so we’re starting with the basement.  I’ve got a roomate moving in this weekend so I will get some pictures up after she gets her stuff all in there but I did get a good picture of what the basement just looks like by itself.

Behold, the before:

And the after!

The wood paneling was terrible, and the blue carpet…ugh.  The worst part is, it went partway up the walls so we had to tear out all of that and put in baseboards instead. It’s pretty hard to see that in the before picture but trust me, the baseboards made a HUGE difference.  Make sure to look for the mountain scene paint-by-numbers in the first picture, as they will be making a reappearance in the house!  So, new carpet, painted the paneling, and a different basement emerged.  I can’t wait to see what it looks like with someone living down there!

I don’t have TV so I haven’t seen the latest episode yet – please, no spoilers!  In the meantime, I’ve been stalking about some photos of the unfairly beautiful Jon Hamm and January Jones.  I’m particularly enamored with this spread they did for Vanity Fair a few years ago.  Enjoy the photos!

A friend of mine sent me the link to these images, and I have to say, I was amazed.  From what looks like a pile of trash comes these amazing life-like shadow images.

Can you even imagine the foresight and patience it would take to create something like this?

Can you believe that these pieces are just made from paper and pins?  So amazingly intricate and unusual.  Lyndi Sales is an artist from Cape Town, South Africa, and the pieces shown above are all in reaction to a horrible plane crash.  From destruction comes beauty, I suppose.

There’s something very entrancing about Gregory Euclide‘s work.  It’s like the dioramas that you used to make as a kid, only infused with massive amounts of skill and political and social commentary.

He creates these little worlds that you just want to get pulled into, though there’s a bit of a recoil once you realize what his pieces are composed of.

If you want to see more of his work (and there’s a lot more), click here.

Hey guys!

I’m revamping and updating my little shop a bit.  I don’t have too much so far but I’m excited to see where it takes me.  Here’s some pictures of my first items:

A reader a while back pointed out this Japanese architecture firm to me – I fell in love immediately.

Such playful use of vibrant color – though my personal style tends more towards the subdued I really am drawn to color like this.

Words cannot describe how amazing these photographs from Lori Nix are.  She creates these intricate little miniature scenes that are somehow a tiny bit sinister, and photographs them so beautifully you’d swear that it was a real place.

She’s got other collections that are interesting as well, but there’s something so sad about these that draws me in.