Ah, the Sweet Scent of Publicity

Good news! My new Fairy Lights were spotted on Apartment Therapy for their Etsy Scavenger today. This is the best birthday present ever. Yay!

Fairy Lights Available on Etsy!

After working out some kinks, Fairy Lights are now for sale at my Etsy shop! I have many colors to choose from, in two sizes. The large version is 22" x 12", and the mini is 14" x 12".

I am also considering a table top version, a cylindar luminary. I would need to order some lamp parts, so please let me know if you would like one and I will add it to my Etsy shop as an exclusive. Thanks everyone!

Back in the Dawn of the Intarweb. . .

Do you remember this? I love the Skeleton Hootenanny. I wish I knew what the song was, though. First person to post the correct answer gets free Steampunk jewelry!

Mortar Combat

I admit it. I am an avid cook, but I do not own a pepper mill. I've bought several over the years, and they were each as flimsy a piece of equipment as I have ever seen. Most broke within a month, the most memorable being my last purchase, which cracked on the third use. Needless to say, I have grown rather disenchanted with pepper mills and have lately resorted to grinding pepper in my massive granite mortar and pestle. I have yet to meet the spice that could stand up to that. I swear I could grind quartz into a fine powder in this thing. Not that I would, but you know what I mean. Anyway, this is not an ideal situation. I have been seeking a solution.

Yesterday, I was bouncing back and forth between the Bliss UK and Bliss US sites, wondering why America deserved only Nigella's cookware line (lovely and orbular though it is. Salt Pig - mmm.) yet the British have things like this:

I saw the ceramic hand on a design site a few days ago (Apartment Therapy? I can't remember. It was in a bathroom, for holding bracelets), and was trying to source it, though I'm not sure that the $60+ it would cost to get it here is ready to leap from my wallet just yet. But I did find this: Oliver Hemming's Spice Boy. And, as it happens, Unica Home has sweetly provided an American distribution point, so that I can ignore the dollar's pathetic slouch next to the British pound. And they have it in blue!

A Quick Brown Fox. . .

I was looking out my window the other day and was more than a little surprised to see a huge fox sitting near the sidewalk. I've seen both grey and red foxes south of here, closer to the Cherry Creek canal, but never this far north. We don't exactly back up to a wooded area, unless you count the fenced construction lot or the small adjoining park that has, I think, eight trees. I grabbed my camera, and got a few shots before it trotted off. They came out fairly fuzzy, due in large part to the screens in my windows, but I am glad I was able to record the moment.

It's Blue!

I love my Kitchen Aid stand mixer. The Boy bought it for me with a gift certificate for Best Buy he had wrangled from his office. Best Buy had red, yellow, blue, and black in stock. I got black.

Why? Um, I'm not too sure. I think I had grown so used to kitchen things being white, black, or chrome that my mind shut down in the presence of alternatives. I also knew I wasn't going to redo my light blue and green kitchen around a primary color, so black it was. Coordinating kitchen appliances to tea towels and wall color was not in my price range. (Now, of course, I am eyeballing the Smeg refrigerators and the Elmira line. Which are still out of my price range.)

But I am not tossing a perfectly good mixer for the sake of my color sense. Besides, Kitchen Aid stopped making the baby blue color, drat them. Sooooooo . . . I traipsed off to the hardware store and bought enamel spray paint in a pretty blue color and whipped out my masking tape. Ta da! It went so well that I even snapped up a retro bread box (which only seems to come in pink or red) and painted it as well. Now I have a lovely matching kitchen and I can feel my microwave getting nervous every time I walk by with a paint can.

Note: If you are going to try this at home, make sure you tape over the vent on the back of your mixer. You really don't want to get spray paint on the motor. Then, after the second coat of paint is dry and all the masking tape is off, spray some paint onto a paper plate or something and paint the vent grill with a brush. The breadbox was much easier. No moving parts.

All Healed Up!

Looks like they are both going to pull through with a minimum of trauma. And a consistent diet of wet food has in no way diminished that. Ahhh. Now I get to watch as they try to figure out why their claws are so ineffective on the scratching post. Damn vets and their nailclippers.


Although, as you can see, one of them has already surmounted this problem through her ingenuity and brute strength.

Waiting For the Sun . . .

I went to my local nursery today and bought new plants! I have very limited choices in this area because 1) If I buy anything spiky, my cat will nibble off the leaves until it's dead and 2) I have only northern facing windows, so if the plant needs more than four minutes of sunlight a day it wilts and then dies. So now I have basil, mint, and catnip on the sill, and a purple oxalis (shamrock) on my desk. Strangely, the cats are not interested in the catnip until it is plucked and placed in front of them. Not that they are lazy or spoiled, or anything. Really.

What, again?

The mid-century modern fairy must be trying to get me into bed or something. I found these amazing (knock-off, but I don't care!) Saarienen tulip chairs at a vintage shop for $50 a piece. Four of them. And these chairs? They are in. Perfect. Condition. Now, I know, I know. . . I could have saved up and bought a genuine vintage set for $4000. And anyone who is really chaffing at the thought of vintage knock-offs is free to send me said amount and I will rectify the situation immediately. In the meantime, I am going to recover the seat cushions with this fabric. And gloat. Hee!