Celebrate!

Above is a new party invitation that I created this week.

For more info or to order, visit my etsy shoppe: Paisley Prints Etc.

Have a great weekend!

Rainy Vacay

7 days of vacation. 

2 days of sun. 

bummer.

It's always sad to unpack after summer vacation, but it's especially sad when you can put the large supply of packed tank tops and shorts directly back into your drawers, while it's debatable if you should launder or just burn the one pair of jeans, sweater and socks that you had packed "just in case". All you have to do is look at our photos from throughout the 7 days to see that we were wearing the same thing in all of them. Ha!

Record low temps for the highs. Great. That's one record I didn't need to live to see... especially while on vacation.

Yes, we still had a ton of fun. It's always fun for my husband and I to hang out with my brother, his wife and their two kids. We will definitely be going back again next year, although I'm sad to say that we will be changing our week from July to late August next year. We just didn't think we wanted to squeeze the 6 of us into our 4-person cabin again next year and couldn't get a larger cabin during our usual week. 

It's a sad change - I'll miss our cabin neighbors who will all be going in July again next year and the traditions that we've started with them over the past 3 years. Who will we have a BBQ smoke-off competition with next year?! 

It is also a GREAT change though, too. I will not miss our lack of doors on the bedrooms (short curtains across doorways do not block the giggles and cries of small children for those of us who like to sleep in!!), or the fact that my sister-in-law had to sleep on the couch in the livingroom because the second bedroom was filled with her 4.5 y.o. on the bottom bunkbed, her hubby/my bro on the top bunk and her 1.5 y.o. in a Pack-N-Play which took up most of the walking space in the room. Our new cabin is a 3-bedroom with the bedrooms upstairs (with actual wood doors) and plenty of room to sprawl out on the main level. Hooray! I can't wait to go back!

Oh yeah, for those who read my pre-vacay blog post.... My hubby, Rich, won the BBQ smoke-off competition for Brisket this year! I'm a lucky woman with a guy who knows how to make good eats!

like a kid before Christmas...

The "kid" I'm referring to is myself. In less than 48 hours I will be up at the lake cabin that my husband and I annually rent with my brother, his wife and their two kids. Woo-Hoo!!! This will be our 3rd annual trip to Pelican Beach Resort in northern Minnesota, but for some reason it seems more like it's our 13th annual. It just feels like home -- a very small home -- and I now can't imagine a summer without the trip. Our "neighbors" at the cabin have been going to the resort for 27± consecutive summers and every other cabin in the resort have similar histories. After you go once, you get hooked. We did.

Why do we love this place so much? I'm not sure exactly. I think it's a combination of a lot of things: a beautiful, clear lake; a clean, sandy beach that you can walk out forever in before it goes above your waist; great cabin neighbors; great resort owners; great towns nearby with fun shoppes; and great company in our own cabin. It MUST be good for us to be thrilled with the idea that we are shoving six of us into one very small, humble cabin. Especially when you consider that two of the six are under the age of five! It's aaaaa... cozy. We have our request in for wanting a larger cabin, but until one becomes available during our same week, we'll keep stuffing ourselves in our small one.

For the past week, I've been making lists of everything that we need to pack - basically updating the list that we had from last year. Speed boat - check, Kayaks - check, cooler full of yummy beverages - check.... I guess that's all I really need for the week, right? Oh, I can't forget that we need to bring our BBQ smoker. This year will be the 2nd annual smoke-off competition between my husband and the neighbor from Kansas who is a semi-pro smoker. Last year my husband smoked the competition (sorry, couldn't resist) and won the taste-test for ribs. This year it will be brisket. We even have a trophy that is a garden gnome named, Rayski.

Another thing about the cabin that I hate and love at the same time is the inability to go online. **GASP!** I am so dependent on the internet, especially since I have a web-based business. It will be good to be unplugged though and I think we should all do it more often. That just leaves more time for hanging out in the boat and sipping on umbrella drinks!!!

Cheers!

Invitation to Grandma's Birthday Party

I was recently commissioned to create invitations for my grandmother's upcoming 80th birthday party. What I came up with is this double layered 5" x 7" card held together with a pink satin ribbon. I do not currently have this style available for purchase on my etsy shoppe, but would be more than happy to offer this design, or something similar, upon request.

I love this quote.

Every time that I see it,

I read it several times to make sure it sinks in.

To quote another smart cookie:

"Twenty years from now

you will be more disappointed

by the things that you didn't do

than by the ones you did do.

So throw off the bowlines.

Sail away from the safe harbor.

Catch the trade winds in your sails.

Explore. Dream. Discover.

~Mark Twain

These are truly words to live by.

I love numbered art…

No, I don't mean artist-signed and numbered, limited edition art - although I do love those too - I'm talking about actual numbers and letters being the artform. I don't think anyone has quite been able to define the decor style in my home. I received a catalog a few months ago from West Elm titled "Contemporary Country" and, although I cringe at the thought of saying my design style is "country", this was not your traditional wooden-heart laden country decor. West Elm sells primarily sleek and modern-styled home decor, but, in this particular catalog, they had mixed a lot of their modern pieces in with more rustic "character" pieces. Looking around my house, that's exactly what I've done - mix the contemporary with the rustic. I love things that look like they have a history behind them. Normally, I would say that I lean towards a Pottery Barn look, except where Pottery Barn has a lot of replica antiques, I like to go to flea markets and find the real deal. This is mostly because I want the authentic history factor, but also because, for me, it's always been a heck of a lot cheaper at the flea market than to buy from Pottery Barn! My mom passed her "thrifty" genes on to me I guess. =) 

Back to the numbers.... I've always been drawn to pieces that have some sort of lettering or numbering on them. I love anything adorned with fonts – from the tin "Good Eats" sign above my chemistry beaker spice rack in my kitchen; to stamped pottery; to my newly-started antique wind-up clock collection; to a framed vintage calendar from which one of my collection of 35+ license plates is hanging. I've even been guilty of having a preference for Frigidaire appliances simply because I like their logo! I know this last one drives my husband crazy, but I think he shares my attraction to typographic art. One thing that he does that drives me crazy though, is that he LOVES magnets with goofy quotes and pics and wants to plaster our fridge with them!! AAAAhh!! I'm constantly trying to arrange them in a neat orderly way that might make them look less tacky, but it's not working. Every once in a while a magnet mysteriously disappears. Shhhhh... don't tell.

so many colors!!

I recently decided to paint the guest room in my home. As is the case every time that I decide to pull out the house paint supplies, I first have the "dilemma" of choosing a color. Being a designer who works with colors all of the time, my husband thought (back with the first house) that choosing colors should be easy for me, right?? Wrong. He quickly learned that I'm ultra picky and obsess over finding the PERFECT color. I start talking "tint" and "shade" and he gives up even trying to help. Now living in our third "fixer-upper" house, I've had lots of practice, but it's still not easy. There are a few tools that I've discovered along the way, however, that have made the process a little less torturous.

First, I've acquired color fan decks from both Benjamin Moore and Sherwin Williams. Just go in and ask them for it. Both places gave one to me for free without a problem. This saves me from going to the paint store, collecting a hundred of those little paint chips and then having them get scattered throughout my house! Although I typically do buy one of these two brands, I could also take the chosen color chip from either fan decks to any paint store and they will custom color match to that chip. I've learned that if I stick with a quality (i.e. more expensive also) brand like Benjamin Moore, the coverage is so much better that it requires less coats of paint, which, most importantly, means less work for me! Plus, needing more cans of a cheaper paint (to put extra coats on) is not really much cheaper in the end anyways. 

The problem with the fan decks is that they have... oooooh... about 1,200 color options! And once I had it narrowed down to wanting to paint the guest room gray, that only narrowed my options down to about 100 slight color variations. ugh!

Another trick I've learned to help me choose paint colors is to use the Personal Color Viewer on the Benjamin Moore website. You can choose one of their stock photos of a room that looks similar to what you will be painting. Then you plug in the Benjamin Moore paint chip numbers that you are considering to see that color on the wall, ceiling, trim or wherever you designate the color to go in the picture you chose. Of course every computer screen shows colors differently, but it especially helps me decide if I like two colors together, if they have enough contrast between each other, if they'll make the room look too dark, etc. I used it this time to see how dark to go with the gray. I wanted it just dark enough to have a good contrast with white trim.

The paint was chosen (I went with "Mindful Gray" from Sherwin Williams), it's on the wall and it looks great! I still have to get the trim/moulding back up, but it's such a relief to have the color decision successfully made. So far, my track record is 19 rooms out of 19 (between 3 houses) painted without having to switch colors in mid-project. I hope I didn't just jinx myself.... I still have a couple rooms to go in my current house!