This is so inspirational I just had to share. If I can be bothered to get the tape and the cutter (which is admittedly quite a big ‘if’), the Minx and I might just go out and do this round the nabe.
This is the sort of thing that Brooklyn-based street artist Katie Sokoler gets up to in her spare time.
{I’ve just discovered (via Whorange) her crazy wonderful blog Color Me Katie and it is FABULOUS}
You may be seeing a bit more of me round these parts, and a bit less of me on Facebook. And, you never know, I might even be getting some productive work done on the shop.
I’ve finally faced up to the fact that I have absolutely no self-control WHATSOEVER and have a found a little app which rations my usage of ‘time-leeching’ websites, such as Facebook, The Huffington Post, Ravelry and er, Perez Hilton. LeechBlock is pretty easy to set up though it only works with Firefox and not Internet Explorer.
It allows you to restrict the amount of time you spend on a site or a group of sites and even set up times when access is totally blocked. You can easily add sites to the list by right-clicking (or doing whatever it is that Mac people have to do). The whole thing is password-protected and the Husband holds the keys to the kingdom. It’s amazing how much more time I seem to have, and horrifying how desperate I am to access the sites during the short periods when they’re available to me. My name is Paola and I’m an Internet addict.
Now they just need to invent something like this for the fridge…
Remember this? I started knitting this lace shawl/wrap thingy back in April last year after finding myself in Portland with nothing to knit and a fabulous yarn shop close at hand which sold lots of colours of Seasilk.
Well, here it is today, washed, pinned out and ‘blocking’. And utterly and completely and totally FINISHED. It just needs to block and dry and then you can see it in all its glory.
It’s the first bit of true lace I’ve ever knitted and I must admit that it’s been somewhat of a struggle. The actual knitting wasn’t that tricky, though I did have to learn how to cable without a cable needle, but keeping track of where I was in the pattern was hard (the cable edgings had a pattern repeat of 8 rows and the diamonds in the middle in rows of 12) and managing laceweight yarn is a nightmare, with stitches dropping all over the place. It didn’t help that the main times I knit are either when watching TV, knitting socially or keeping an eye on the Minx. This job required FOCUS and tons of it.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to rip back to a lifeline, undo several rows or spend ages dropping back through the pattern to fix some silly little mistake I hadn’t noticed at the time (and being a Virgo I’m afraid I just can’t leave mistakes). On several occasions I had to abandon the project for weeks or even months on end, so fed up was I by the slow progress and the repetitive pattern. On more than one occasion I wondered whether I would actually ever finish.
But I kept plodding on, picking it up after it had been abandoned, relearning the pattern, knitting a bit here and a bit there and forcing myself to tink back to fix mistakes. In December last year I vowed that I wouldn’t start anything new until I had finished all my works in progress. I’m not normally so persevering, and this could so easily have ended up as a tangled ball at the bottom of my knitting bag, but the silk yarn was beautiful and expensive and I really wanted to wear the finished article. And so I pressed on.
And it occurs to me that knitting is a bit like life – if you keep going; if you keep adding stitch after stitch after stitch; if you pick things up and start again however difficult things may seem; if you force yourself to go back and fix mistakes; if you keep doing the right thing however little progress you appear to be making, if you just take a deep breath and apply some focused concentration to the job in hand, then one day, instead of a tangled mess, you will find that you’ve created something special and beautiful, of which you can be very, very, very proud.
Proper pics soon. More details, as usual, on my Ravelry page.
Funnily enough when I was researching my family tree last year I discovered that I am descended from a long line of Spitalfields silk weavers. And here I am 200 years later, still ‘weaving’ silk.
(And believe me, when you’re as amply chested as I am, you need it… )
I haven’t done a More Nice Mentions for a bit, but I do like to share the link love.
My interior styling post was mentioned by Whorange and Shelterrific.
Not Martha is thinking of buying a Nook.
The Times (the real proper London version, not that New York based upstart) Online’s Alpha Mummy blog mentioned the Hello Kitty plane, as did A Modern Mother.
Urban Casita found us through the Homies. (UC is great by the way, do check it out).
Bushra at Fudgeit threatened to bake cupcakes using cupcake wrappers from mirrormirror but we never found out what happened in the end.
Anna Burns at Oh Hello Friend loves the Stacking Egg Cups and Stacking Storage pots.
Liz at Violet Posy thanked us for sponsoring her blog.
The Steel Cut Garland found its way onto House to Home (the website of Ideal Home, Livingetc, Homes and Gardens etc). It also appeared on Rdekko.
And some old links I’ve only recently become aware of. Design Crisis likes peacocks. Urban Nest also likes peacocks. Ohdeedoh likes Miffy. My Pretty Penny wants a shower cap.
Thanks everyone for the mentions! I really appreciate all the support – especially those of you who link to the shop (links are SO precious for an online shop). If you’ve mentioned either the blog or the shop recently and I haven’t linked back to you, please let me know, so I can include you in the next round up.
{The card above is from Etsy-based Letterpress artist Kirtland House Press.}
…watching things unfurl
It is ridiculous how excited I am that last year’s orchid has taken it upon itself to bloom again. My orchids never ever ever rebloom despite a lot of cajoling. It has been overwintering in our bathroom and of course I have no idea what triggered it off this time.
If you’re not a green fingered orchid growing genius such as myself (ha ha!) then you may want to take a look at this comment thread on Shelterrific, which has loads of wonderful orchid advice.
For advice as to whether orchids have any place in interior decorating at all, I refer you to Decorno here.
And I can’t work out whether I like these Boskke sky planters available from Velocity – (I think I’m coming down on the side of ‘like’).
The images, from Sunset magazine, sure are pretty though.
‘It became their routine. And so the evenings stretched out before him: still, gray, and gravel-strewn’
From Unhappy Hipsters, the most fabulous new blog since Stuff White People Like. And yes, I know this has been three times round the design blogosphere already.
Well, I was very much liking the idea of a shop window decorating competition, until I actually saw the results.
Three designers, three windows in Bloomingdales NYC, three boring as hell rooms.
First up The Urbane Traveller by Eileen Joyce for Bloomingdales.
What is it about Americans and brown interiors? It’s something that has really struck me since I’ve been living here. In the UK brown went out with the Victorians – thank goodness as it really doesn’t work with British light – but here it still seems to be the safe colour of choice.
This so bland, so dull, and so generic that words fail me. Except to wonder why a ‘sophisticated travel magazine editor’ would want to have two highly impractical stone orbs on her highly impractical coffee table. Let me know if you see anything interesting in this snoozefest because it’s eluding me.
Next up The Writer’s Romantic Supper, by Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan for Apartment Therapy.
This is where I destroy all my (fortunately nonexistent) chances of winning a ‘Homie’ next year.
It is criminal, yes, criminal, what Maxwell G-R, whose taste I normally quite like, has done to that absolutely gorgeous Neisha Crosland paper (speaking of which, we used to stock Neisha Crosland accessories in the shop and we must get some more in).
He has totally ignored all the very wise advice on feature walls you give below – covering it up with two truly horrible portraits, overwhelming it with an astonishing amount of fuss and clutter and turning the whole into some dingy Victorian drawing room, complete with a quite spectacularly horrible repro armchair. I know M G-R said he was going for a ‘steampunk-y’ vibe but honestly it’s because of rooms like his that minimalism was ever invented. And if my beau turned out to have an apartment like that I would feel too agitated and uncomfortable for any ‘romance’.
And finally we have The Modern Woman by our old friend Eddie Ross.
And, much as it pains me to say it, I like this window by far the best of the three, though that’s not to say that I actually like it. But at least we can be grateful to him for avoiding brown.
It’s a more modern style than we’ve seen from him before and I really like what he’s done with the cushions, (except for the Miles Redd-ish faux leopard skin), colours and artwork, though the paint speckled walls and everything else leaves me pretty cold.
And of course he has to include his signature Kelly Wearstler–esque bust which seems to follow him around everywhere (see the link above for his house in Lonny magazine). Somewhat unnervingly the muse for this room is described as a ‘media mogul and mother of two’ and yes, every mother I know would just love to have half a hundredweight of statuary teetering on a precarious pedestal with kids around. It’s a lawsuit waiting to happen. Do young gay interior decorators actually ever meet kids?
Anyway, I was too bored/disappointed to bother voting, but if you’re inspired, full details of all three rooms are here. Do you like them?
Today is the Minx’s fifth birthday. And so of course she comes bounding into our bedroom this morning full of energy and excitement and shouts about presents.
For some reason it seemed particularly dark and I felt even crapper than I usually do when it’s time to get up, but it had been raining all night, which would explain the darkness, and when I asked the Husband what time it was (he keeps the alarm clock on his side of the bed) he said ‘oh, it’s twenty past seven’. I felt so dreadfully unrested that I asked him to double check but he reassured me about the time and we hauled ourselves out of bed and downstairs to begin the unveiling of half a ton of Disney Princess/Calico Critters/My Little Pony crap tempered with the occasional improving book.
This process had been going on for about ten minutes and I was just about to start making birthday waffles when I happened to glance at the clock on the VCR. Which said 3:52. Yes, my Cambridge-educated Husband had got his long and short hands mixed up and we’d all got up at 3.35 am. And of course after that the Minx was so excited it took her ages to go back to sleep, and she woke up again for the final time at 6.30 am.
So if you thought that today there would be a moving eulogy to my five-year old daughter or even any substantive blogging at all, then, dear readers, you are very much mistaken.
Instead here are a few pictures of the Gigantic Granny Square Blanket I crocheted for the Minx’s new dolls house.
She had expressed some disappointment that the blanket provided (a thin scrap of dark blue jersey) was too small for the sofa bed, so I decided to make the dolls their very own gigantic granny square afghan. I was very pleased with how well the yarn went with the decor and it seems that the (rather creepy) dolls are too.
This is another step in my ‘teach yourself to crochet’ campaign. After a few false starts I can now granny square along fabulously thanks to the Purl Bee’s excellent instructions. I’m almost tempted to start on a full-size gigantic granny square blanket just for us.
The yarn is the scraps from my first ever pair of socks. It’s fascinating to see how differently the yarn works up in different patterns.
I love getting comments on the blog because then I get to read your blogs and you really a gorgeous and talented bunch aren’t you?
Last week ‘Jess’ commented about running, so I went to her blog and discovered that she’s a pretty amazing photographer. I love the moody otherworldly atmosphere she achieves. It’s ‘atmosphere’ that transforms a technically competent photo (like the ones I take) into something special and I’d love to know how to achieve it more often in my own work. Check out more of her beautiful photography here. {All photos below copyright the very talented Jessica Eskelsen}
Speaking of comments, I’d love to get more commenting/conversations going on this blog. That way I can have one of those blogs like Decorno’s where she writes nice short posts and then gets lots of lovely and interesting discussion from her commenters while she puts her feet up and watches telly.
What makes you comment on blogs? Are there any things that stop you from commenting? If you’ve been lurking on this blog but have never commented, why not? (<- she says, hoping to trick you into commenting 🙂 Is there anything I can do to encourage more comments on this blog? Won’t it be embarrassing if this post gets no comments?
…watching the sunrise
Do you remember a couple of Januarys ago I started a photoblog called Today I Am Mostly? I didn’t have enough time then to keep it going then, but I’ve missed doing it so much.
This year I’m determined to really work on my photography and photo styling, so I thought it might be a good idea to revive TIAM. I’m not going to commit to every day, but I’m hoping to post two or three photos every week throughout the year. I’ll post them on ‘mirrormirror’ and also to www.todayiammostly.com and to my Flickr page f you want some unadulterated eye candy.
I’ve also retrospectively published a picture here.
