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.
As an amusing postscript to our previous discussion about the difference between a duvet and a comforter, Metafilter asks, ‘Do British people use sheets?’. Cue lots of Americans horrifed by insanitary British habits.
Can I turn this
into this?
Heavy Petal is a great gardening blog based in Vancouver BC and thus full of tips for the Pacific Northwest gardener. She found instructions for making this gourd birdhouse on craft blog Two Straight Lines and I’m going to have try it.
Surely even someone as craft-challenged as myself can manage this, particularly when you can buy the gourd ready drilled and cleaned from here? I have ordered my gourd and will keep you posted.
It appears that I should also be buying tomato seeds about now. I want to try growing heirloom tomatoes this year and am thinking about trying them in Topsy Turvy planters hanging round the house.
With apologies to the Fug girls.
I have been discussing with Elaine from my new BFF blog Decorno the importance of having opinions, of which she has many very forthright ones.
As a cynical Brit I do find the ‘hearts and puppies’ stuff you find on some other blogs a bit difficult to cope with, so I’ve been thinking for some time of doing a ‘rooms I hate’ series on here. Though I was gutted to find that Elaine already does this (and much better), if you want more snark.
But I digress. Today’s room is from the doyenne of British interior design Kelly Hoppen. Ms Hoppen has built an empire on designing rooms for people with so little personality that even colour is considered to be freakishly avant garde. She has even produced a range of beige paint. Her rooms shriek ‘good taste’ so loudly that they end up having not much taste at all.
This example from Homes and Gardens is apparently part of a new London house built for an American client.
I have to say that I do like how she plays with different textures within the neutral palette, and her signature black wenge floors and the subtle pleated pelmets at the top of the curtains which work in a room this big and imposing.
But everything, from the immense table, to the huge black armoire and the heavily bevelled mirror is just so stolid; and a room without colour would drive me me mad in about thirty seconds (just one little hot pink flower arrangement somewhere PLEASE); and I hate that this is a brand new house but filled with repro details; and the way the knick knacks have clearly been bought in by the yard and there’s not a single thing in here that is treasured or has history. And most of all I hate that the chairs are wearing dresses.
Didn’t chair dresses go out in the 80s? Weren’t they just things in ‘Ideas for Soft Furnishings’ books that no one ever made? Or if you did make them it was to disguise the fact that your chairs were all mismatched and rickety and came from a junk shop? Which I hardly think is the problem here, since the table apparently costs upwards of £50,000. And the wonky seam on that chair with its back to us is driving me nuts.
What do you all think? Get dissing discussing in the comments.
