My tiny home decorating corner

In the corner of our livingroom, I've placed my great-uncle's travelling trunk from his days in the coast guard. It had been consigned to my parents' basement for decades -- I didn't even know it was there. Originally, I intended to use it as a coffee table, but it was too big and blocky. We decided to get something more delicate so that we could see the cowhide rug. We moved it to the corner, where it has provided extra storage space (needed in our 500 square foot apartment), and one of the few flat, open spaces in our home. Currently living on the trunk are a shiny gold vintage lamp (a graduation gift from me to my husband when he finished his Ph.D.), a gold painted bowl from bali, some old books, an antler I found near my family's house, and our record player. Sometimes the record player also hosts a cat, though we strongly discourage this!

After a friend's wedding, we were given six of her leftover milk glass vases, and I have loved clustering these with fresh flowers on the trunk to give that dark corner a bit of color. I first arranged flowers as a hostess in a very nice restaurant outside Boston and loved the challenge of balancing color, structure, and height.

Flowers live so briefly I have been photographing them and then editing them on instagram. I love to share the little bit of seasonality we get here in Northern California.

 

 

Zelda the cat, posing insouciantly with billy balls.

spring flowers  (daffodils, calla lilies, narcissus, fennel, ceanothus, ferns, lavender ) I collected in our neighborhood

I bought a bunch of green wheat in late fall, and the brilliant local florist suggested flax, thistle, and eucalyptus to go with it.

early spring bouquet of irises, tulips, and greens.

Capturing the Light

As I mentioned last month, in my post about a new pin I had made, I created a new photography set-up. I am finally getting around to telling you guys about it today.

I am a member of the handemadeology team on etsy, which is a business and promotion oriented team open to all. There is a great blog set up by the founders of the team that you can visit at http://handmadeology.com that  is a wonderful resource for and support for etsy sellers. They have advertising tips and photography tips, and they also promote sellers, which is always appreciated!

I decided to build a cheap little light box based on the instructions provided by handmadeology here.  I didn't want to buy foam board as the tutorial recommends because, as we all know by now, I am CHEAP. Rather,  I currently have several large rolls of lovely artist paper that I bought on sale from a local art supply store, and I figured I could use that instead to line the cardboard box. So, I cut off two sides of a small cardboard box, and measured the bottom and sides of the box against the large roll of lightly-textured white paper.

Ta-dahhhh!  This is my wee little lightbox. I didn't do it perfectly, 
obviously, since there is a little area the paper 

doesn't cover in the corner. I need to do something about that.

The Anatomy of a Soup

OK, so this blog post was supposed to go up over a week ago, and I had all these lovely pics arranged perfectly, but then I started to mess with the html to make everything line up nicely, screwed up my tables, and then accidentally erased everything. A sad emoticon cannot even begin to communicate my frustration and mounting inner rage.

But... I am determined!  I will not let html and blogger combine to defeat me. I will deliver a post with lots of lovely pictures, despite the fact that taking pics is kind of a challenge with my li'l point and shoot and the other fact that writing comes a lot more easily to me than visual aesthetics. To the post!  

<< biking home with fronds of fennel from the SB farmer's market >>

(Warning: very non-vegetarian material ahead)

Megan Models my Wares

Collage pin 

My friend Megan, another PhD student in the English department and a fan of Irish lit, was a sweetheart and agreed to model for me for some Etsy photos.  Her hair is so gorgeous and she has such a cool and unique style that I knew she would enhance my brooches and bobby pins.  She did such a great job and made it so easy!  We played around in the afternoon light for an hour, and then we each grabbed dinner, and later went to a clothing exchange organized by a friend -- more on that soon.

Modeling these pins

Her hair is so thick!  I think she looks stunning here. I blurred out the background by using a mask in photoshop and then applying lens blur.

A bunch more images after the jump.

Thyme is on My Side

Oh how punny.

But it's true!  I've always had a ridiculously hard time keeping plants alive.  When I was my dad's gardener for two summers, my job was pulling weeds, because I'm really only good at killing plants -- I put my black thumb to good use, then.

But the sun is rising on a new day!  My roommate, Miss E, bought me a tiny thyme plant from the farmer's market because I love to use thyme in my cooking (like mushrooms, there is something essentially earthy and dark about the flavor of thyme).  And the poor little plant slowly turned into brittle twigs despite (probably because of) my attentive ministrations and regular watering. I was at a loss, despairing of my inability to keep plants alive.  But, thank goodness Miss E and my landlord are good gardeners, and they suggested transplanting the thyme plant into a larger pot, since it seems that regular watering does very little for a plant unless there's enough soil for it to draw the water from in the days between watering.

Clicking Away

I am trying to improve my photography skills so that I can make my items in my etsy shop more attractive. So, I am having fun taking pictures of random things in my life, and trying to manipulate my cheap digital point-and-shoot into imitating something more expensive. And working, very, very slowly, on understanding the many ways in which one can use photoshop to improve a picture without over-doing it.

So, here are some pics I was taking of things in my garden, breakfast -- whatever!

Ms. E's dwarf lemon tree

Our lavender and succulents

home made spicy sausage rolls with leeks and celery