Let There Be (Cheap) Light

January 9, 2012 by Erin 24 Comments

Last Friday, I left work early to meet my mom for lunch, and to do some shopping. I’d been eyeing this gray felt drum pendant shade from West Elm for a few months for my living room to replace the hideous light fixture that’s there now, and I’d just gotten an email from West Elm with a 15% off coupon. My mom and I were going to walk right by the store, so I figured I’d stop in and see if they had the light in stock. I say that as if I hadn’t already decided to buy it, like I was going in for a casual stroll. No no. I practically ran out of work in the afternoon, I was so high on the adrenaline that accompanies big purchases. I realize this makes me sound like an absolute shopping addict, but c’est la vie.

Anyway, we got to the store and asked a salesperson if they had the lamp in stock. He had to walkie-talkie someone in the back stockroom to confirm, but it turns out they had a few in the store. “Would you like to buy one?” he asked. Isn’t that cute? Would I like to buy one? I was practically hyperventilating at the prospect of finally owning it, and he couldn’t tell I was interested in taking one home with me from the way I was nuzzling against the floor sample, my arms wrapped around the giant shade as if we were long lost lovers. I’m not weird, I just really, really like home goods.

We got to the counter to check out, and what followed was basically the best moment of my entire shopping life. I’m pretty sure if nothing else goes right for me in this world, I will at least have this memory to cherish.

The thing is 26″ in diameter, and beautiful. Did I mention I loved it? Other drum shades like this go for a lot more money, so I was willing to pay $150 for it. Less, actually, because I had my 15% off coupon, don’t forget. But then, Arthur, the wonderful salesperson who forever has a place in my heart, says, “Oh, did I mention it was on sale?” NO, ARTHUR, YOU DIDN’T. Do you know what I love more than anything else in the world, even more than world peace? SALES. Say the word, observe the perfect way it rolls off your tongue. SALE. I’m trying to keep my heart rate down and my eyes in my head, thinking he’s going to tell me it’s $20 cheaper. Imagine the sound my head made when it exploded when it told me what the actual sale price was:

YOU ARE KIDDING ME. Arthur is informed that I will be naming my first born after him, regardless of gender. And then I realize I am so exciting I’m actually sweating. Arthur then solidifies my decision to build a statue of his heroic figure riding a unicorn in bronze, when he says, “Oh, and we’re having an extra 20% off already reduced sale items.” My eyeballs make an audible BOING as then pop out of their sockets. My mother is put on guard in case she has to catch my lifeless body as I faint to the floor.

I’m starting to think that this is a joke, a conspiracy, a candid camera tv moment. THIS CANNOT BE REAL. This is perhaps the single greatest achievement of my young life. What, mom? You thought that college diploma I got was something special? DO YOU NOT SEE HOW MUCH MONEY I JUST SAVED?

And then, the piece de resistance, the moment that will forever be engrained in my memory as the time I saved so much money I sweat through three layers of clothing: Arthur, beautiful, kind Arthur, he of the West Elm name tag and walkie-talkie, my best friend in the entire universe, says, “Didn’t you say you had a coupon?” !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

HOW COULD I FORGET I HAD A COUPON? YES, YES I HAVE A COUPON.

I don’t remember what happened next because I lost consciousness. My mom tells me I had a grin from ear to ear and laughed maniacally when Arthur (BLESS YOUR SOUL, ARTHUR) joked that he could charge me the full price if I wanted him to. Apparently I kept saying “NO WAY” really loudly every time he told me the new, lower price and just assumed I didn’t want to pay it. Isn’t he cute? My mom and I got lunch after I paid for the lamp so I wasn’t able to take it with me out of the store that day, lest I wanted to crash into a million people all afternoon with an enormous box. I did go back for it the next day, though.

So that is the story of how I saved over $100 on a lamp, aka the best story of my life. The only minor downside is that they were out of stock of the ceiling conversion kit to hang the damn thing, so it’s sitting in the box in my house. Once it’s hung I’ll take millions of pictures of it in all its glory.

Friday Five

January 6, 2012 by Erin 12 Comments

Happy Friday! And I’d first like to give a shout out to Fitz, who turns 1 year old today! I was hoping that he’d wake up today and decide to be less of a maniac, but no dice. The other night he stole a whole sweet potato from the kitchen and starting chewing it. In front of me. Like it was a toy. And he didn’t seem to understand why I got so upset. Obligatory picture of the birthday boy over on 365 later today.

Today is also the first Friday Five of 2012! I wasn’t good about doing these regularly last year, at least not for the first few months after I came up with the idea, but this year I’m going for the full 52 (or how ever many Fridays are in this calendar year, I’m too lazy to count). Without further ado…

1. Striped tote / 2. Je T’Aime poster / 3. C’est La Vie card / 4. Limiting my technology / 5. At Home With White

I’ve mentioned my love of Etsy store Rib & Hull before, the Warsaw based designers of incredible wool and felt bags and Mac cases, but somehow refrained from obsessing over this black & white striped tote. The whole bag is hand crafted from natural canvas and leather, and feeds my crazy addiction to stripes. Unfortunately, this winter weather makes it nearly impossible for me to carry any bag on my shoulder without wrestling down my enormous puffy winter coats sleeves, so this might be better suited for warm weather. But I promised Annie I wouldn’t talk about warm weather because warm weather means warm weather clothing, and the both of us are on a spending freeze when it comes to more clothing. I’m betting her resolve is better than mine, because I can’t go 2 days without buying something. I’ve tried.

The “Je T’aime” poster by Swedish designer and art-director Therese Sennerholt appeared in one of my favorite interior shots of all time, and I’ve spent an ample amount of energy tracking it down:

from here

The poster is a) Swedish and b) in French, so naturally it is perfect for me and I must make it mine. I finally was able to figure it out thanks to a new blog I stumbled across that I am totally in love with, Vosges Paris, an interior design blog that combines the writer’s, AND I QUOTE, “love for French grays and Scandinavian whites.” I’m pretty sure this blog is my soulmate. All she has to do is feature macarons one time and I’m going to lose my mind. Anyway, the poster is reasonably priced and might make an appearance in my house sometime soon. I just have to find a really old leather chair to sit it next to. Tell me the styling of that shot is incredible?

Continuing on with the French theme, the “C’est La Vie!” card from Rifle Paper Company is so darling I can’t even stand it. When my dad told how much he loved me, he always said, “I love you so much I could bite my toes!” I don’t know why, but it’s one of those phrases that’s stuck with me and I’ve come to use it on lots of things. Thus: that card is so darling I could bite my toes! The mixture of French, rain, a neckscarf, a striped shirt, and lipstick is just adorable. At $4, it’s a total steal and I’m going to buy one and frame it and put in on my desk. (See what I mean about not having any restraint when it comes to buying things?)

I’m going to skip number 4 for a moment, and head right to #5 on this week’s list, which is a book that was perhaps written solely for me. “At Home With White.” From what I can tell, since it hasn’t been released yet, or maybe it’s being re-published, I don’t know, the book is a collection of home design images and tips for having all-white interiors. How to layer white, how to balance it, how to roll around on your painted white wood floors delirious with delight, etc etc. It comes out at the end of February, and I’m really considering taking the day off and showing up at the bookstore first thing in the morning. Is that weird? Probably. But someone out there not only gets me, they wrote me a book, so respect must be given.

Okay, so back to #4. The Blackberry with the “No” symbol through it. I woke up on January 1st and made a last minute resolution: I want to limit the amount of screen-time connectivity I have in my daily life. I work at a job where I sit in front of a computer anywhere from 8-10 hours a day. In the mornings, the first thing I did was reach for my Blackberry to check for facebook notifications or emails or twitter updates. I would be online on my phone during my commute to work, at a computer all day, and then on my Blackberry on my way home, where I would walk in the door and promptly boot up my iMac or my macbook and surf some more. I hate it. I hated feeling hyper-connected all the time. I missed the days when I didn’t have to worry about facebook. I made the choice New Years day to delete the facebook and twitter apps from my phone, to not check my phone once during my commute in the morning or on the bus home, and the resolution that when I come home from work, I do not touch my computers. My life has improved in the span of a week. I’m reading more, playing chess at night, having conversations with people, playing with my dog more, taking real photographs. Anything my phone has to tell me, with the obvious exception of phone calls, I have access to all day at my computer. I’m considering deleting my email from my Blackberry as well; it’s only my personal email, nothing is so important that it can’t wait until I get to work. This means that when I turn my work laptop off at 5:30, I check out, I sign off for the night. I’m done. No facebook, no email, no twitter. This change has this made me happier and less anxious. I’m more productive when it comes to this blog, because I have taken away my option of sitting on the couch with my laptop all night. I’m even debating downgrading my cell phone to a non-smartphone (I refuse to call them “dumb phones” when they do exactly what cell phones are supposed to do).

I know it seems counterintuitive to make this choice given that, uh, I have a blog and it’s on the internet and it requires attention and maintenance. But I just feel like I’m wasting $30 a month on a data plan (okay, fine, my mother is wasting $30 a month on my data plan, because yes, I am 25 years old and still on my mom’s family plan, SUE ME) to tell me things I either don’t want to know or things I am capable of finding out from the computer I’m in front. It’s surprisingly liberating, but it’s only been 5 days. We’ll see if I end up in withdrawal.

Okay, so spill. Have you been keeping your resolutions so far? What about my self-imposed technology-ban? Would you ever try it? Do you think you could survive? And what are you up to this weekend? Tomorrow is supposed to be fairly warm (in the 50s, they’re saying!) so I think I’ll take the birthday boy to the dog park and let him get beat up by bigger dogs. He loves it. See you on Monday, kiddos!

You Ruined It.

January 5, 2012 by Erin 12 Comments

I found my dream room, you guys!

Check that beauty out. All white. Everywhere. Not a speck of color in sight. It’s perfect, it’s heavenly, it’s everything I’ve ever dreamed of. The room is a concept installation by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, photographed by Mark Sherwood and Ray Fulton, and on display at the Queensland Museum of Modern Art. It’s called “Obliteration Room.”

Check out that living room! I spy a bunch of IKEA products. And did you notice how everything is white? Because it is! It’s all white!

Aw, look, a woman and child, sitting on the white sofa in the white room, drinking out of white tea cups. Even the little girl has all white on. Oh, um, hey, little girl? You’ve got something on you there. It’s like a sticker. I think there’s one on the table, too. You should clean that up.

Hey, wait, what are you doing?? You’re getting those colored stickers everywhere! Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to put stickers on the walls?! This is getting out of hand. You should stop. It was good when it was white. Come on, let’s put the stickers down before–

Oh my god, oh my god. They’re everywhere. You guys…there are dots….EVERYWHERE. I’m having trouble breathing. I think my heart just deflated and fell out through my belly button. It can’t get any worse than this, can it? It’s can’t, there’s no way–

I’M DEAD. I died. My soul exploded at how sacrilegious this entire thing is.

The purpose of the art installation was for it to end up exactly as it did. Children were given stickers and encouraged to “decorate” (!@!&$(*SJHGFSJHDKAGGJ!#) the room, to live up to its name of “Obliteration Room.” You know why it’s actually called that? Because my soul was obliterated upon seeing it. I can’t believe people let their children do this! This is not art! This is destruction at its worst and a million, rainbow-colored reasons for birth control at its best. Obviously you cannot have children and an all-white home. GUESS WHICH ONE I CHOOSE.

(I’m posting this for therapeutic reasons, so that I may become more comfortable with it. It’s the same reason I watched “Little People, Big World”; to become desensitized to ~~midgets~~, sorry, ~~dwarves~~, sorry, Little People. It’s all about facing your fears. And apparently I fear nothing more than all-white rooms being RUINED by color. Except for spiders. And elevators.)

Garland

January 4, 2012 by Erin 27 Comments

Sorry if things look weird around here. I spent yesterday coding intermittently and changing some things around. So if things are looking a bit, um, awkward, keep hitting refresh until they look somewhat cohesive. And forgive that awful new header. It’s only my 7th in 11 months, and I’m still super unsatisfied with it. It is very much a placeholder at the moment.

A while ago, back in the baby-days of this blog, I posted about a house tour that was giving me Office Envy. Specifically, this picture:

I mean, come on, right? While I don’t have a pink office or fancy tassel garland, I do have my own white lacquer West Elm Parsons desk, which ended up appearing on one of my girl Annie’s posts, which is in fact how we even met (Annie, look at our cute little comment exchange in your thread!). This was an important post for me, even though I was a Bad Blogger back then and left 2 comments un-responded-to. Shame on moi! In the post, I also called out how fabulous (and fabulously overpriced) that tassel garland was. And it is. Absolutely fabulous and crazy expensive. A girl can dream, though, right?

Well, the way things work around here is that I dream about something and obsess over it for an ample amount of time and then forget about it entirely, exhausting the need to buy it (hopefully). Such was the case with that tassel garland, until I read Theresa’s post on the best trends in fashion & home design in 2011 and voila! There was the gorgeous garland in all of its sparkly, flowy glamour. And it was like a piece of my heart I hadn’t known was missing was filled in again, and the angels sang in all their reverent glory. “There you are, tassel garland!” I cooed, ” I can’t believe I ever forgot about you!” (You totally think I’m exaggerating, don’t you? Do you know me at all?)

UGH. WHY ARE YOU SO PRETTYYY. And why do you cost $130??

Wait. Wait. IT COMES IN OTHER COLORS? Say it ain’t so!

Honestly, I’m still in love with it. Maybe even more in love with it now that I know it’s available in this hue. But despite my well-paying job I am still no closer to justifying spending $130 on tassel garland than I was when I was unemployed and broke. But aren’t the colors so incredible? I love the mix of blues and minty green and silver and rosy bronze. If I can’t spend $130 on sweetly colored decorative garland, maybe I’d be willing to spend my money on clothing and accessories in the same colors? (This is called a segue, observe its literary powers of transition.)

1. Shirt / 2. Cashmere sweater / 3. Sequin scarf / 4. Ballet flats / 5. Oxfords / 6. Glitter Loafer / 7. Rebecca Minkoff Bag / 8. Bronze Skirt / 9. Pleated Skirt / 10. Clutch

Okay, so those mint patent oxfords are 11 types of ridiculous, but they are pretty much the perfect shade of sea-foam blue-green, aren’t they? And they are kitsch enough to be cute, even if they aren’t practical. I knew J Crew would come through in a big way (both tops and the glitter loafers are theirs) because I remember a few years ago my sister (in-law, though I hate qualifying it like that; she is my sister and has been since I was 5) and I sat on her couch and looked through/drooled over the spring J Crew catalog and it was just page after page of that color scheme. We decided “Vespa green” was the name of the shade of those green ballet flats, from Topshop, after the iconic Italian moped. Both skirts come from Topshop, who has a surprising number of skirts of all lengths and (questionably tacky) patterns. These two mimic the same shape of the tassels as well as the colors, and would look darling paired with a bright opaque tight. To bring in a bit of sparkle, the gold sequin scarf from Bando and the glitter loafer from J Crew fit the bill nicely. I’m in love with the shape of the loafer, though I don’t think glitter is appropriate for just any day. And I’ve been lusting after a Rebecca Minkoff “Morning After Mini” bag for a while, but in black, not the bronze one. Still, the shape is the same and the color works for our purposes. That oversized silver clutch is from Zara and is on mega-sale. I just eyed it up in person at the store, and it’s pretty great for a night out.

These colors are making me think ahead to spring, when my day will not start with temperatures in the teens and chunky snow boots and puffy coats. The weather on the east coast took a big dip after New Year’s and has been so bitter the past few days. Some girls look like cute little snow bunnies all bundled up in their winter gear, but not moi. I look like an abominable snow man in a mish-mash of dark brown and black and gray. It’s really, really appealing if you’re into that sort of giantess thing.

I swear this isn’t the last time I’m going to pimp this, but maybe the third to last? Who knows! Regardless, if you haven’t checked out my 365 Project yet, what are you waiting for??

Inspiration

January 2, 2012 by Erin 8 Comments

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope your celebrations were wonderful and not too tiring. I wore sweatpants to a friend’s house (fancy sweatpants, okay?) paired with a sequined tank top and blazer. My thought process was that I’m going to be sleepy and fussy once the clock hits 9pm, so I might as well be comfortable, but it only ended up backfiring because I was so comfortable that it made me even sleepier. The party was (thankfully) very low-key and relaxed; we ordered Indian takeout and played Catchphrase (followed by a few rounds of Adult Catchphrase, which was way funnier) before watching the ball drop at midnight and popping open bottles of champagne. The brilliant part was that I got to go home and crawl into bed in my (fancy!) sweatpants, and then I wore them out to a diner the next morning where I stuffed my face full of greasy breakfast food. It was awesome.

I spent the better part of Sunday making good on my 2012 resolution to participate in the 365 Project. After debating over whether to post my daily photo on here with the rest of my posts or on a separate part of the site, I settled on creating a subdomain. I then had to figure out what that meant and how to go about executing it. This of course meant I had to undertake a design to create an uncluttered and simple layout to focus on the photographs. That was a fun few hours. I proudly present to you: 365 @ like / want / need. There’s even a fancy (fancy!) little icon over on the sidebar to your right. I haven’t posted today’s photograph (yet!), but January 1 is up as of yesterday!

So. What better way to kick of a brand new year than by continuing to indulge my obsession with all white interiors? If you thought I was bad in 2011, you are really in for it this year.

from here

I’ve already heard from most of you via blogs, twitter, or elsewhere about how your NYE went, but feel free to tell me about your night! Did you wear sweatpants? Have you stuck to your resolutions so far? I know it’s only been a day but there was one year I broke my resolution to not be sassy within 15 minutes of the clock striking midnight. So. You know.