A bowl of linguine alle vongole from Nigel Slater’s The Kitchen Diaries (the clams in this part of the world are so good and so cheap).
A bar of Green & Black’s Almond chocolate (if you couldn’t get this in Seattle I would have returned to the UK by now).
The definitive BBC version of Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle (the perfect Lizzie Bennett, eat your heart out Keira Knightley) on the telly.
Some knitting.
No, I’ve not exactly become American quite yet.
We’ve been doing the tourist thing this week, as friends from London have been visiting, which has meant three kids aged three, two and one in the house.
I take my hat off to any mother who has more than one child – one child can be considered an excusable mistake, but any more is sheer lunacy.
Anyway, they went yesterday and this morning the Minx is out with her father and I am revelling in the quiet and trying to make sense of the chaos. And recovering from the terrible cold which is of course inevitable when you hang around kids.
They can occasionally be cute though.
I also got this gorgeous little necklace from Hannah Made, which features a tiny photo of a collage made by Michelle Caplan for her Collage Lab project (I have to admit that the Husband needed to be gently led in this direction).
I just love how this is a collaboration between two different artists in very different media, but who have combined to make something so unusual and pretty. It’s currently hanging on my inspiration board just so I can look at it.
The postcards are from UK photographer Donna Compton, who takes the sort of flower photos that I aspire to take (found via Decor8) and the marble magnets in Amy Butler prints are from the Purple Pear.
Sometimes the Husband gets things so right.
Bouquet from Fleurish – the best florist we have come across in Seattle. I love how they enclose a little card telling you what’s in the bouquet.
Also much loving the use of ripening blackberries in the bouquet – though I have no idea where they get them at this time of year.
Once upon a time some people bought a house in Seattle. And it was mostly a very nice house, if you ignored the fact that it had been painted by colour-blind people.
The living room, for example, was painted bright egg-yolk yellow accented with a pillarbox red fireplace.
The woman who bought the house really wanted to do something about the fireplace as soon as they moved in, so she set up a poll on her blog asking whether she should just paint it white or strip back the paint.
Despite 49% of her readers telling her to paint it white, she decided to strip back the bricks to see what was underneath using a fabulous paint stripper made from soybeans.
First of all the fireplace looked like this
and then this
and it stayed that way for a very long time because removing the paint was really quite time consuming and tedious.
And then a friend announced that she would be coming for a visit and the owners of the fireplace decided that it really should be finished before she came.
So they set to work with a vengeance and got it looking like this with just one week to go before adding the final touches.
And finally the fireplace was finished.
Yes, after all the anguish and elbow grease we decided to paint it white after all, and are delighted with the result. I’m wishing we hadn’t spent quite so much time and effort coming to this conclusion though, and I promise I will never, ever ignore you guys ever again.
There’s still much to be done, but finally I’m really starting to like this room. We’ll be talking paint colours next week.
There are two things in this world that I would love to be able to do and that is sing and draw.
Those of you who can do the latter might like to see excerpts from a fabulous article which appeared in February’s Elle Deco UK, where they asked an illustrator to illustrate four rooms from literature.
It really makes me want to get reading and drawing and researching historic trends in interiors. And living in The Great Gatsby.
Images from Elle Decoration UK, February edition. Illustrations by Yoco. Click on the images to read the text.
I’d never heard of Yoco before, but here are some utterly gorgeous illustrations from her website.
About a hundred years late as per usual – it’s already been extensively raved about elsewhere in the blogosphere – here’s what mirrormirror looks like on Ez’s fabulous illustrated blogroll on Creature Comforts – easily the most beautiful blogroll on the web.
I was intrigued to see which images she would choose from all the random pics I’ve posted up, and whether they would capture the ‘brand’ that mirrormirror has – in my own head at least.
I LOVE what she’s put together, if anything it’s nicer than I would have put together myself. It’s very clever how she’s pulled together the yellow, aqua and grey colour palette (what a great and unexpected colour combination) and juxtaposed the silhouetted and cut-out leaf shapes
Interestingly I wouldn’t have chosen those actual images, but the use of colour and pattern, the mix of contemporary and girly and the clean lines are all what I would love mirrormirror to exemplify, so I’m so glad Ez picked up on them. A career as a ‘brand psycho-analyst’ clearly beckons for her.
For the first time I think in like EVER, Washington state gets a chance to influence the presidential nominations (usually it’s all sewn up by Super Tuesday or even before, and this year nobody thought that Super Duper Tuesday would be anything other than decisive). All the candidates were in town yesterday, and people I’ve been speaking to seem really excited that they get a chance to make a difference.
I’m loving the fact that the ‘script’ for this election appears to come courtesy of the West Wing’s scriptwriters – young, idealistic, minority Democrat v. old guard, maverick, not completely insane Republican. Though even the WW didn’t think to throw a credible female candidate into the mix.
Interestingly Washington votes via the public caucus system, which means that everyone has turn up at a neighbourhood location and vote in person. There also appears to be a state primary, but that doesn’t apparently count for anything, so just colour me confused there.
Here are local bloggers Not Martha and Decorno’s takes on the matter. I really wish I were eligible to go to a caucus as it would be a fascinating slice of American life.
As a woman I still believe it’s an honour and a privilege to vote, so if you’re a Washingtonian just get out there and do it. I don’t really care who you vote for (as long as it’s not Huckabee) but if anyone fancies casting a vote for Obama on my behalf then be my guest.
Interesting discussion here, via Swiss Miss, on what the fonts used by the different candidates in their campaign literature say about them.
