Pink of Perfection

Remember that vintage fabric my friend sent me after finding it in a relative’s North Dakota attic? I didn’t know how to properly honor it, and a year later, here’s the answer I settled on.

I first saw embroidery hoops used as fabric frames at Purl Patchwork as a way to display their Liberty of London swatches. (I’ve always loved the black and blue feather print.) But when I kept seeing them in shelter mags and on design blogs, I thought it was a decorating device too “over” to do in my own house.

But you know what? Screw that. It might have taken me a few years to finally cop to my desire to get pretty fabrics on the wall any way I can, but now that I have, I find the results ridiculously cheering. Who cares if something is “everywhere” (Keep Calm and Carry On, anyone?). If you love it, make it yours, bring it into your house, and let it bring you a bit of joy every time you pass down the hall.

This project is just my kind of skill level: Iron your fabric. Then slip the fabric into the embroidery hoops, tighten the screw and pull the fabric taught. Cut off the excess fabric, and hang them on the wall on tiny nails. Done and done.

The bad news is, I killed a plant. A couple weeks ago, I went on a plant buying spree. Green plastic pots filled with pink polka dotted leaves and viney tendrils were two for $5 at the farmer’s market. Then later, walking home from a cafe, a flower shop had a tray of long-armed, spiny aloe plants for sale, and a tall, proud looking green thing. Of course, I had to have them all.

Ever since I visited my friend in Los Angeles in the spring, I have realized that my dream life has a lot more green things in it than my actual life. Jenny had plants hanging from the rail of her balcony, and a terracotta pot filled with succulents and a bed of stones. At night, she might have snipped buds from white rosebushes and slipped then into the narrow neck of a tall bottle back in her apartment.

I came home wanting more green on my windowsills and fire escape. And it’s why, when I ran into a jade plant at Trader Joe’s, I swooned. There’s something about jade plants that so speaks to me––they don’t need much, and they hold what they need, in reserves, inside of them. Yet despite the lovely symbolism and my ability to instantly make reality an element of my dream life right there in the grocery store aisle, I had to stand, weighing the pecuniary ramifications of a $10 plant for several minutes. Then finally it hit me: I’ll spend $10 on a sushi lunch but I can’t drop the same amount to make my ideal life vision a reality? So I got my priorities straight and happily carried that jade plant home, where it greets me every morning from my bedroom windowsill. An important lesson: it’s always worth it to spring for the things that really bring you deep delight, especially when they cost less than $20.

I killed the pink polka dotted thing. I think, perhaps, it was more delicate than it looked. It might have been the rain or the wilting heat. But I still have the jade plant, the aloe plant next to it, and two unidentified green things in the living room: one low and long-armed, one tall and proud.

Here’s the good news: I’m pretty into these cookies. In fact, would it be wrong to say my favorite thing about these cookies was the raw dough? It was the best I’ve ever tasted. Some of their magic seemed a little lost in the baking, but they came out of the oven soft and have stayed that way for days. Plus, while I would not go so far as to call these cookies “healthy,” they do have a number of good-for-you items in them, like whole wheat and oat flours, canola oil, and agave nectar. This is not reason enough to eat them for breakfast, but all the same, I did. Let’s just call that my other piece of bad news.

Continue reading “Chocolate Chunk Cookies with Almonds” »

Did I feel like a blogger gone mad asking to take this picture of an account manager at the end of a meeting? Yeah, sort of. But is jauntily wrapping dad’s old tie around your waist a genius stand-in for a lost belt? You betcha. I love the J. Crew cool of this striped vintage number on a simple navy sheath and think it would make a particularly fetching masculine-feminine mash-up on a girly dress. Here’s to DIY in action! (Let this also serve as proof that I don’t dwell exclusively in the land of fresh flowers and daydreaming. I sit in windowless conference rooms, too!)

Since I came back home from vacation, I’ve been a bit obsessed with transforming our living room into more of a paradise (going away tends to seed grand ideas like this, have you noticed?). I’ve picked out a couch (just can’t decide if we need a chaise on one end), and am planning to recover two chairs with very simple white slipcovers. They are improvements that will likely total in the hundreds of dollars, but when it comes to making a house a comfy home, they seem well worth it.

As I was sharing all this yesterday with a friend, getting her thoughtful nods of approval, I asked if she had other ideas. You know, fresh solutions for my same old spatial problems. Her eyes traveled around the room.

“Is the printer usually on the floor?”

“Oh, um, no.”

“Maybe you could move it.” She looked around more. “And what are all those cords under your desk?”

“Well, I don’t know really.”

“Maybe you could corral them? I bet you could do it in an hour. Use some twisty-ties.”

At first I thought she wasn’t quite playing along with my game. After all, I meant big, sweeping, grand changes, like totally rearranging the furniture, not piddly, organizational tasks like moving the waffle iron and abandoned picture frames from the tops of the bookshelves. But then I realized, of course, that my eyes had grown accustomed to certain unpolished, cluttered bits in my apartment; getting those in ship-shape might have as much as an effect as a big white couch, and for a lot less dough.

In fact, I’ve hated the jumble of cords under the desk that snake out into the floor space beyond since we moved into this apartment twelve million years ago. Why had I just come to accept this eyesore?

It took only thirty minutes to corral those cords. Nevermind that I broke the internet in the process and am typing this on stolen wifi. It’s well worth it. Thirty minutes for one small corner of peace of mind. And eventually I’ll figure out how to get our internet back up and running. Here’s hoping. (I believe this is what Gretchen Rubin calls in The Happiness Project a “boomerang errand”––one completed task that supplies you with a new, fresh to-do. Lovely.)

So why is it so hard to get going on these little tasks? They drive us absolutely nuts and yet finding thirty minutes to empty out a drawer or deal with a mountainous pile of mail seems as difficult as finding the time and money for a two week vacation in Fiji. But the results, oh, the sweet results. The pay-off is so much greater than what you have to put in to get ‘er done. So why does it feel so insurmountable sometimes? What are the little annoyances around the house causing you to lose your mind? And what would it really take––in terms of money and time––to make them pleasing again?

print for sale on etsy

It was a brutally hot day, and despite best efforts to the contrary, including a striped top and a crisp white circle skirt, our heroine was melting into the blacktop of the Brooklyn Flea. But lo, hark! Spotted in the distance was an oasis of sorts. There, tucked between the vintage tin signs and 1930s feed sacks was salvation: Brooklyn Soda Works. She felt too wilted in the punishing June heat to dilly dally with otherwise delightfully sounding flavor mash-ups like salty plum or jalapeno grapefruit. She needed pure refreshment, and fast. A cup of fizzy ginger lemonade was pulled from a rigged-up cooler keg combo (”How do they do that,” she wondered?) and placed before her. A few sweaty dollars seemed a small price to pay for such an expedient rescue mission. She sipped, she sighed, she was saved.

Continue reading “Fresh and Effervescent Mint and Ginger Lemonade” »

Yesterday, when I was convalescing, I fell down the rabbit hole known as Polyvore while watching The Bachelorette (seriously, Justin–for real, or not?). I’ve known about Polyvore for years from the cool collages of stylish girls that show up on fashion blogs. As much as I love making a collage, I never used the site since I wasn’t nuts about the branding on the application.

And then! I realized that, duh, you can take a screenshot of your collage, rather than posting the embed code. The pics won’t be handily clickable, but oh well. The point is, I now have a way to collage my heart out, without wondering what to do with the giant finished product.

Last night I designed my evolving look, dubbed “Nerdy Lady,” worked on an outfit for Sebastian’s movie premiere, and then moved on to plotting a California-cool, semi-professional look for my friend. And now, I can’t be stopped!

What I love most about collaging is how through selecting images you love––a beautiful tart, an antique locket, a mod, streamlined couch––you begin to see patterns. It’s like being a magazine editor of your own life, with your most authentic self revealing herself through images. And that’s my current goal: to listen to my authentic self. It’s the voice beyond the chatter that says you’re not good enough or smart enough or beautiful enough or that a pint of ice cream really will make you feel better. That voice is a menace. But your authentic voice? She is a soothsayer and truth-teller.