Valentine's Day

It's my understanding that approximately 70% of the country was affected by snow this past weekend.

Not us! Miles and I spent the morning in Santa Barbara at a stand up paddleboard demo hosted by Stand Up Paddle Sports. We bought our two boards from them, and we wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to try out some different ones! My next board is going to be good for cruising around and looking for real estate from the water. Miles wants a whole quiver of surfboards. Anyway, take a look:

[photos courtesy of Stand Up Paddle Sports]


Not a shabby way to spend Valentine's Day, if I do say so myself. Go ahead: it's OK to be jealous.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Dear Readers (all 4 of you),

My apologies for the dearth of posts this week; between tutoring and Valentine's week at the bakery, life was hectic! This week will be better (I hope!).

Since I haven't done or made anything of note to tell you about, I will instead share some pictures of the beautiful flowers Miles gave me for Valentine's Day! He's the sweetest. I know diddlysquat about arranging flowers, so I winged (wung?) it. The bouquet was gigantic; I actually have another vase-full that I didn't take a picture of. The bouquet had a rather untraditional palette for V-day; dusty lavenders and peaches, with shades of brighter purple tucked in. Take a look:

I have absolutely no idea what those tiny white flowers with the twiggy branches are. They have purple tips, and they smell divine. In fact, they remind me of the smell of Sausalito in the early morning, when I used to go for walks with my dad and a friend. Maybe that's a start for my investigation... Anywho. I like how romantic they look in a vase all alone. Without other flowers, it is easy appreciate their willow-like beauty (I'm so flowery today! Pun intended. I'm sorry.).

In love

Isn't he gorgeous?


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

To Market, to market.

On a whim this morning, I hauled myself down to the Santa Monica flea market. I always think about going, and when the morning of shows up, I make an excuse and sit in my chair all day. Today, I have nothing to do until 5:30 and no Super Bowl plans, so I got brave and went! I'm so glad I did. Admission was discounted because there wasn't a huge collection of sellers today (the girl at the gate said "a lot of vendors were stuck because of rain" but I suspect "rain" on a bright, sunny day is code for "Super Bowl parties").

I was particularly taken with one man's collection of vintage prints. He's retiring from the flea market circuit and was selling everything for $10. I regret not buying more; he had a fabulous collection of architectural prints, old maps, Audubon-esque prints, vintage fashion magazine pages... A woman rifling through things next to me mentioned that hummingbirds were special to her. I had a print in my hands that I knew probably wasn't going to make my final cut, so I gave it to her; she was so moved she nearly cried, and when she mentioned my kindness (I didn't think I had done anything too spectacular, but I'm glad it made her happy), the vendor popped into his van and pulled out some even better hummingbird prints-- for both of us! This truck must have had a trap door to an alternate universe, because I have no idea where he was putting all of these treasures, but they were in there. And he could find them quickly. impressive!

Here's what I bought:

And a little something for my beau:

(he has a shark fascination)

Note to self, flea market shoppers: if you're going to take your check book, make sure it actually has checks in it! Nothing kills your momentum like having to leave to find an ATM.

My next stop was one of the stalls near the front that I peeked at when I walked in. The vendor had a very cool dress form that reminded me of a book that my friend Lizzie lent me, Recycled Home, by Mark and Sally Bailey. In Recycled Home, the decorators are all about decorating with "found" objects. While some of the rooms were very soothing, calm, chic, yada yada, some of them were SO undone that they looked like you might find a hobo roasting a squirrel on a stick over the fireplace. You know? ANYWHO, I digress. They use a lot of vintage dress forms in the rooms (ie. a bedroom would have a bed, a chair, and a dress form. That's it. I think the Baileys would have a coronary if they saw my room.).

This dress form was a little out of my price range, but I managed to talk the vendor down quite a bit, which I felt like was a real coup. Look, Miles-- I can haggle!  Here she is in her new home:

I think I'm going to put jewelry on her! And at Christmas time, we can move her upstairs, put a Santa hat on her, and pin our Christmas cards on her! Of course, this year we received 2 holiday cards, so we're going to have to make some more friends if that's our plan. But that's another post.

The Engagement Present, Part I.

I have been working on a top secret engagement present for my sister for the past three weeks. She finally received it yesterday, so now I can talk about it! Take a look:

Both the piped pillow and the frame (remember the painted frame from an earlier post? This is it, in its intended purpose!!) are silkscreened with a silhouette of Lissa and Greg. Making the silhouette was a bit more complicated than I anticipated. For starters, I requested a picture of them standing side by side. However, being as they are in the throws of new love, the picture I received is of them hugging. Not so good for my purposes. My brilliant Miles suggested I print out two copies of the picture, then cut out each person individually; then, once I had a piece of each, I put them together with a little space between each, so you can see their individual selves, and taped them to a separate piece of paper. Then, I traced around the new silhouette, cut it out, and used that cut out as a stencil.

Simple, right? Au contraire.

Spray Paint Magic Part IV!

My spray paint obsession has now grown to include mirror spray paint... I FINALLY received my Krylon Looking Glass spray paint in the mail yesterday. For some reason, it is not available in stores anywhere, so I finally bit the bullet and bought it on amazon.

Behold:

Pretty neat, I say! The vase on the right in both pictures received the heaviest coat of paint, the left, a lighter coat. I sprayed the paint on the inside of the vessels; this created a liquid situation on the inside that I didn't anticipate, and I spent a few minutes swirling the glasses around to get a semi-even coat on there. Then I took a spray bottle and lightly squirted some water in there to give it a mottled, antiqued mercury glass effect. Eventually i just propped them up upside down so the excess could run out (onto the newspaper I put beneath them). I have a similar mercury glass votive holder that I bought from Pottery Barn for about $12... my Pizza Hut vase only cost about $1! See Miles, I can save money! Sort of.

Cheyenne's bag

Cheyenne sent me pictures of her Christmas present! (Thanks Cheyenne!) Here they are:

The bag was actually a breeze to make (and I had MUCHO fun printing the fabric-- the purple fabric required me to stand on the stamp to transfer the ink adequately-- it was like Twister!). I've been thinking about making a few more out of the scraps of fabric I have around the apt and using them to store my various art/sewing projects I have going on. Perhaps I shall...