Pale and Interesting

My mother-in-law gave me an Amazon gift card for my birthday. She asked what I'd like, and I told her that I have a ton of books on my wish list and that I'd love to be able to pick a few out from the list. Recently I read about the shop Pale and Interesting on My Black Book. I loved the images and went straight to the shop to see what they had in store. They have great linens, cushions, furniture, and so many beautiful home accessories, and I love the styling and photographs of their products. And I read on the site that they have a book as well. It's going in my shopping cart, and I can't wait to see more. 

All images posted here are from their site and appear to be by photographer Polly Wreford.

NY Times Home and Garden

I always like to take a peek and see what's in the Home and Garden section of the NY Times online. This week has two features I like, a renovation in Buenos Aries (above), and a cozy garden apartment (below). Just thought I'd share in case you might like some of their features too.

Moroccan Rugs

The jury is still out on the paint color, but the new landlord did say we could paint if we want to, which is great! The only thing is, the ceilings are fairly low (well, they're not especially low, but not really high either). I think the whole place, including the ceilings, would need to be painted in order for it to look its best painted, otherwise I'm afraid with only the walls painted it might look choppy and give the illusion of a shorter ceiling height. This is just my assumption based on nothing really. I should read about room size perception to see if that's true. So we talked about it and plan to leave the walls white for now. I'll keep the paint in mind though, but right now I've moved on to rugs. We have the Tarnby rugs from Ikea in our current place, which I like a lot, but I think I'm ready for something different, something more colorful. And my other half would like something softer. The Tarnby rugs are a bit coarse. I love the top image here and have it in my mind as my inspiration. I saw a great Moroccan rug in a shop on Portobello Road recently, but it was snatched up right in front of me by Alice Temperley. I didn't know who she was, but I was with my friend MN and she knew who it was right away. I had sold envy for sure! Right after she scooped it up, I just knew I should have bought it. I'll be on the lookout for another one. 

Sources for the images are in my pinterest. 

Or Green?

Well, I was thinking blue walls, but now I'm thinking green. I've had light mossy-sage green sort of walls before and loved them. Hmm, I think the blue is just making me nervous! Ah, we shall see. What's moved me more towards green is thinking of John Derian. I love his rustic, natural sort of flea market style, and I was thinking, what would he choose? I think he'd definitely go for green. We shall see. These few examples here I found on Katy Elliot's blog. 

Also, Kim asked me to tell you 7 things about myself. I guess I should choose 7 things you wouldn't already know because that's more fun! So...here are 7 things about me you may not know: I like to eat tomato paste out of a can, I prefer eating over cooking, my mom is one of my best buds, morning is my favorite time of day, I love cotton candy pink clouds, I think my husband is awesome (I just don't talk about him too much on the blog), and I make my bed every day. 

Hatching Ideas

It looks like we'll be moving soon! I haven't said a peep because it's not totally official yet, but it looks like it will be next week. We're just moving across town, north of the river, but I'm soooo excited. The neighborhood is great, and I'm excited to fool around with decorating a new place. We've been in our current place for a year, but I still haven't quite figured out what to do in certain places, so I just haven't. Instead of seeing it as a challenge, I've though of it as a drag, blah. It hasn't been too fun. One issue is choppy walls--walls divided by a lot of doorways and windows, which is the complete opposite of our last place. I just don't think I have the right stuff to work in the right places, if that makes sense, and I haven't taken the time to hunt for the right stuff. Ah, well, I don't have to worry about it anymore. Our new place is sort of boxy like our apartment in San Francisco, with two big, long walls in the living room. I felt sort of over that by the time we left San Francisco, but I'm looking forward to it again. I understand how to arrange my things better on walls like that. I'm also thinking of color. Our last place had neutral, beige walls, but I'm thinking of a very pale robin's egg blue. I love the way deeper colors look against that shade of blue--rusty orange, reds, navy, green, golden yellows, etc. Deeper, darker colors look really good with that color to me. Lisa has blue walls and I love the way all of her things stand out against it. Here are a few pictures I've come across for inspiration. These shades vary, but I think my favorite is the second one, just below. I like that it is a touch grey compared to the others. I've put them all in my pinterest, where you can see links to the sources. 

I like Pinterest

My new favorite thing (fairly new to me anyway) is Pinterest, an online inspiration board of sorts where you "pin" favorite images. I'm not totally sure of all the ins and outs of Pinterest since I just recently joined, but if you love online image eye candy and are like me and have messy folders on your desktop of random saved inspiration images, you will LOVE Pinterest. When you pin, it credits the source of where you found it (though often that's not the original source of the actual image, and I imagine this could be an issue for pinterest at some point, hmm). I hope source issues don't cause too much trouble because I really like the service. Here's the link to my boards. Right now I've just focused on pinning images of interiors, but other folks have boards of so many other things. Below are a few things I've pinned to my board this week. All the sources are linked to the pins on my boards. (The image above, "things I like" is by John Derian--possibly my favorite designer, one of the few whose name's I can even remember!)

Daydreaming of Wallpaper

I've been thinking of wallpaper lately, specifically Deborah Bowness's wallpapers. I love her bookshelves wallpaper. I might have to make a trip to Caravan to get a roll. I also love her vintage frocks wallpaper. Actually, I like all of them! They've made their way around the design blogs for some time now, but I don't get tired of them.  

Images: One, two, three, four. 

Decorating with Branches

We leave for Atlanta for Thanksgiving this weekend, and I won't be back until December 8. I'm staying a while longer than the hubbers to spend extra time with family and friends, whoohoo! I'm so excited! But that won't leave much time for Christmas decorating when I get back. Santa will be here before I know it, so I'm thinking something simple. I still have the vase with branches in our foyer, which will likely become the Christmas tree, and I just love the idea of some simple branches here and there to make things festive. Here are a few ideas for decorating with branches this holiday season.

1. Southern Living, 2. Country Living, 3. Country Living, 4. Country Living, 5. Casa Diseno, 6. Families Online. 7. Dottie Angel, 8. Emily Thompson via Little Love Blue. 

All Mixed Up

For a while now I've wanted to collect mixed plates and teacups. It's only taken me forever to get started! I'm not sure why. I see pretty plates and teacups at thrift stores and flea markets all the time. But these two above did the trick. One vendor had both of them, and they just looked so pretty together. I'd like to collect mixed plates just to use everyday but also to hang a collection on the wall. My colors are yellow, green, red, and blue, so I'm looking out for any plates that have those colors or combinations of colors. I also bought these teacup trios below.

More on teacups later, though, back to plates for now. I've seen lots of inspiring plate collections, and here are just a few. The last example from Patchwork and Harmony is my favorite, and she also has a good post on how to hang them using invisible plate hangers. 

From top to bottom, I found these here: one, two, three, four, five. 

Inspiration Notebook

I love our new little place, but I can't seem to get things right when it comes to arranging and decorating it. That's in part because most of what we have just won't work in the space and in part because I'm just tired of the same old stuff, blah. Some of our furniture is too large, and some pictures too small or just not right for certain walls. It's been a little frustrating for me because I can usually figure out what to do with what I have pretty quickly. But this time a lot of what I have just doesn't work. So I've been looking for inspiration in my favorite magazines (and asking people like Lisa for advice, which has been really helpful). Before we moved I thinned out my magazine collection significantly and tore favorite pages out. Last week I finally made notebooks of those pages. I have notebooks for interior spaces, garden and outdoor spaces, crafts, and table settings and cooking. I'm so happy I finally did this, and now that I have the books started it will be easy to keep it up. Here are a few pages of inspiration, some clean and fairly neutral, some rustic and colorful. I wish I could get our place to look like any of these!! Unfortunately I don't know all the sources for sure, but most of these are from Country Living, except for the one with the more polished living area with the black and white chairs--that one is from Domino.