Pretty In Pink

I love this warm ballet pink with mustard, black and ivory palate, and I super love the campers. Are campers the new foxes?  I think so. These art block prints by Red Tile Studio are available from $29 on Etsy (they have all your favorite forest animals too).

You Are My Fave

Here are some pictures of the "Favorite Things" party we held this weekend at Little Farm.  The weather was beautiful and the cows were hungry. Our adult guests were treated to a delicious picnic lunch complete with fried chicken, potato salad, coleslaw and biscuits.  The kids snacked on prepacked lunches including peanut butter and honey sandwiches with the crusts cut off which I wrapped in wax paper and sealed with a quick custom masking tape.  The hit of the party was the kids table which I decorated with kraft paper and a few of Wylie's favorite things like trains, dinosaurs and a bag of costumes (including capes).  It also housed the cupcakes, vanilla with vanilla frosting, which were topped with miniature figurines of zoo and farm animals, and more dinosaurs.  I made an animal food station packed in the boys Ikat Easter Baskets, which we used to bag portions of food to feed the cows, goats, sheep and chickens. At the end of the day, the kids took home their W favor bags filled with animal crackers.    

Thank you to Jennifer Daily for providing some of the pictures for this post!

Getting It Together

I was curious.  I saw people posting sets from Polyvore featuring items that are not in their bank of images, which are limited mostly to fashion.  How could this be? After a little poking around on their site, I found a "clip to Polyvore" button for my toolbar. This may be common knowledge, but in the off chance I'm not the only one who hadn't figured this out, here's the link.

NewHaus by poppyhaus on polyvore.com

Pinterest is great for putting together visual inspiration, and I have a board 60 pins deep with ideas for my new house. I wanted to see some of my textile ideas together in one space to figure out what direction I was going in and I wanted to decide what I really wanted the mood of the space to be. A Polyvore set proved to be a little better for that, plus I could spiff it up with text, like creating my own editorial page. You can actually lay out furniture with rugs and console tables and art. This would have been so helpful when I got married, and decorated my first nursery. Perhaps we have too many tools at our disposal, but I just can't get enough.   

Spinning Circles

This is the stool that used to sit under the telephone in my grandparents kitchen.  I just loved to spin around on it, drinking soda, watching golf on their little TV. The stool sat on one side of a newspaper overloaded wooden desk, on the other side, next to the doorway, were the penciled in measurements of every grandchild, some from toddler to adulthood. After they were both gone, and the home that they'd created was necessarily changed, I became irrationally attached to this stool.  It now had a cracked vinyl top and rust on the legs.  My parents brought it to me along with the dining room table and chairs. I suddenly had all of these relics of my childhood sitting in my tiny house. I put the stool in the garage because I had nowhere keep it inside.  We'll be moving in a few months to a house that has a big kitchen, with a built in desk where the phone will go. The space is just screaming for a spinny stool. I got it out of the garage today, cleaned up the rust and recovered the cracked vinyl with a print oilcloth. Here's the before and after. 

 

Cheap Thrills

From top left: colored pencils with sharpener lid, 3 minute timer, flat folding straw hat, French pencil case, Japanese eraser and capped wood pencils, neutral folding reusable bag (recycled).  Pictured below: toy trumpet, library bookends, clear plastic umbrella.

I am not really a dollar store kind of person.  I am however, a Japanese dollar store kind of person.  Here in the Bay Area we have a local chain called Ichiban Kan.  It was recommended to me a few years ago by a couple of girls in the know, so I gave it a shot.  Over time I've picked up some great things like brightly colored plastic elephant watering cans for the bathtub, fun notebooks, art supplies and adorable chopsticks. I took Wylie on little adventure today which included a trip to Ichiban Kan in El Cerrito.  He got a toy trumpet. I got a clear plastic umbrella and some teal library style bookends as well as all the fabulous loot above for under $25.  My favorite find was the hour glass for a stylish "time out". http://www.ichibankanusa.com/

 

Large Art

I've been kicking around the idea of enlarging one of our special family pictures to create an original piece of large art, approximately 50x50, either canvas mounted or framed. I don't really want it to be a posed picture of us wearing matching shirts. I've been thinking something more abstract, but very personal; a timeless image that would always remind me of the kids and this time in our life...Today I got one. You are looking at a picture of San Francisco, made out of Legos. I think it will always remind me of them, and of home. Here's some more...
 

San Francisco, Legoland, California

Happy Feet

I hadn't bothered to replace the ugly Home depot standard issue door mat on our back patio since we've moved in, which is kind of sad since the ugly mat was in plain view of our eat in kitchen.  I picked up an inexpensive boring mat today and marked it off with painters tape into a Union Jack design, before coating it with satin finish spray paint.  It cost me under $10 and took about 5 minutes. What was I waiting for?

 

Come On Get Happy!

My friend Becky writes a blog and runs a brand called Deluxe. Her slogan goes like this: Make Your Home Your Happy Place. It really resonates with me...I think that's what I try to do with my space.  I have creative, messy kids and an open space house. I kind of have to embrace the small child thing when keeping house and decorating. Here's some pages from  my rulebook:

1. Keep the walls white and touch up those dirty walls every 6 months or so.  Make space on those walls for colorful "art".

2. Clean it up every night, but focus on play during the day.  I've learned that kids get really creative when two unrelated toys meet, and my time is better spent not picking up after them all day.

3. When introducing a new color, spread it around the house.  I recovered my dining room chairs with teal linen.  I added accents of teal shades throughout the house, with books, storage and a patterned accent wall. 

4. Use the ceiling as design space.  I put the anthropologist lanterns over the formal table, a Calder-esque mobile over the kitchen table, and a molded plastic pendant lamp in the kids play space. It draws the eye up.

5. Lighting is key.  I get a little grief for putting a lamp on my Christmas list every year.  My lamp collection floods our house with soft, warm light in the evening, eliminating the need for overheads. For me it's a real mood changer.

We have a small house, but it's in a wonderful neighborhood with unique outdoor space fit for impromptu pirate treasure hunts.  Should we ever move away I hope to recapture some of what we've put together here in the woods.  It's our happy place.

Absolutely Cuckoo

I've always wanted a cuckoo clock. For nostalgic reasons, we had them growing up... but my love of German decor kind of ends with Bauhaus and an A-Frame. What's a girl to do?  

Check out this bad boy. It's the new Cuckoo Clock from CB2. It sits among my books under a graphic print of San Francisco, Alamo Square perspective. As with all of my chotchkies, it's white, so it easily integrates into the existing space and kind of feels like the modern house in the old neighborhood. I did have to turn the cuckoo volume down because it scares the bejesus out of us in the middle of the night.