I love creating “desk-scapes” that represent important pieces of my history in my everyday as inspiration. My current desktop is below.
The tree stamp frame I bought in Paris on our honeymoon and the stamp itself I bought on ebay in the middle a hectic bout of wedding planning. It represents serenity and strength to me somehow. The clock my father gave me on my 13th birthday — it seemed so grown up and elegant (I still think that!). In front of the clock, the vintage brass frame that I picked up last year at my favorite thrift store in VT holds a scrap of a Bishop poem from the New Yorker that represents the best of love to me:
“Close, close all night
the lovers keep.
They turn toghether,
in their sleep,
Close as two pages
in a book
that read each other
in the dark.
Each knows all
the other knows,
learned by heart
from head to toes.”
I bought the gold frog at Swallow the first year I lived in NY and hadn’t figured out how to merge my work life and my creative life. The dish with clips was my great grandmother’s and the paperweight next to it was my grandmother’s. The tiny “stamps” box was given to me by my mother in-law after I blogged it here. And the tiny red chair I bought at an antiques store on the Cape last week.
I was inspired over vacation to finish a project that has been on the back burner for years: framing my favorite vintage bits in tiny frames. Here they are! I’m really pleased with how they came out. The top two are vintage 6 cent US postal stamps, the second two are vintage Wills cigarette cards from the 1930s from New Zealand and the last row is another vintage stamp and my personal favorite, two elephant chromos from the 1900s from the Paris flea market! They are all up for sale on Etsy so tell your friends and start your own desk-scape!
This past weekend, one of my closest friends, Emily, married her sweetheart Mike on a beautiful farm in New Hampshire.
First, the lovely wedding invitation that T. and I helped Emily design and print on the Gocco! The icon is of a marsh marigold, which was the flower of the wedding. Emily grew them in her garden and recruited friends to do the same.
The setting in New Hampshire:
As the bride and groom rolled up to the reception in high style, the farm’s other loving couples checked out the party.
Inside the tent, tables were set with vintage linens that Emily had found through months of scouring thrift sales and vases filled with wildflowers grown in friends’ gardens or picked on the road side. Guests cooled down in the afternoon sun with lemonade, sun tea and ice water served in mason jars.
After a delicious dinner of local organic ingredients….
….the party got into full swing and we danced into the night.
Congratulations, Emily and Mike!
I came across this vintage tiny photo album today on Etsy for $4 and I stupidly didn’t buy it — when I went back tonight someone else had snapped it up. Why is it that the terrible sensation of losing something wonderful is equal to the thrill of finding something wonderful? In other news, I’m back from vacation with lots of thrift finds, some new Abigail items that I’ll put up on Etsy this week and most of all, amazing photos of Emily’s wedding that will inspire you: think vintage table linens and an amazing farm and a perfect August day.
We’re on the Cape for a few days and then off to Emily’s wedding. It is beautiful here and there is bountiful wi-fi so I get the best of both worlds. A few snaps of thrifting/antique stores:
Suddenly I’m seeing elephants everywhere — trend in the making?
 
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In writing this post, I realize that I’m drawn to this naturalist style of display in magazine spreads. One of my favorite layouts from Martha Stewart Living from my notebook:
If my childhood was boiled down to a couple of influential books, A Practical Guide for the Amateur Naturalist would top the list (others: The Flowering of American Folk Art, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Tamarack Tree, The Witch of Blackbird Pond). The first two really informed my “design eye” and curiosity about the world and the last three really informed my sense of what bravery and being “grown up” would mean. What were your favorite childhood books?
Gerald and Lee Durrell’s book is a beautifully illustrated guide to becoming an amateur naturalist and encourages readers to explore the world of nature first-hand. The book mixes practical tips (such as what to pack in a naturalist’s daypack, how to take plaster casts of animal tracks, how to garden for wildlife, and how to use a hand lens) with detailed information about a wide variety of habitats (chaparral, grasslands, desert, tundra, deciduous woodlands, coniferous woodlands, tropical forest, mountain, ponds, streams, wetlands, cliffs, dunes, shores, oceans and more).
I loved the photographs in this book and would spend hours pouring over them. I also converted an old bag of my mother’s into a specimen bag and ran around the woods picking up rocks, plants and generally getting dirty. I guess somethings never change. The book is out of print but available on Amazon.com and Abe Books. If you have young children — I’m sure you won’t be disapointed!
When it comes to DIY, especially of the putting-holes-in-the-wall sort, my darling husband is a big fan/enforcer of the measure twice-cut once rule.  A trip to the Better Homes and Garden website (via the always helpful Lifehacker) turned up some great advice I know he’d love on how to mock up up a picture wall before breaking out the hammer and nails.
 
In three easy steps, from BHG.com:
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Trace pictures onto brown kraft paper and cut out. Label each of the papers with a description of the picture or a corresponding number.
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Using blue painter’s tape (which won’t pull up wall paint), tape the papers to the wall. Experiment with arrangements until you have one you like.
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Install picture-hanging hardware directly through the paper. Pull paper away and hang pictures one by one.
 One note: given the difference between where frame manufacturers place hangers, you should proably mark on the paper where the best point to hang the frame is.
The end result looks like you paid a professional to do it for you:
 
Since most of our framed artwork is currently resting on the mantle, this may be just the inspiration we need to try to fill out some of the remaining blank walls in our apartment.Â
It’s well established by now that I love paint color cards; no trip to any hardware store is complete without a trip down the paint aisle.
I just recently came across this nifty online tool, the GenoPal, an online color picker. While it lacks the physical satisfaction of skipping out of Home Depot with a stack of paint chips, it is pretty cool to play around with “regions” of color that are based on how we as humans perceive color. I’m not sure what to do with it yet, but I’m having fun playing with the color palettes.
I’ve been meaning to post about this “collector’s box” from Pottery Barn as another way to display collections — of matchbooks, toy cars, stamps, stones, vintage office supplies, marbles, 1950s costume jewelry. I could see this as the top of a coffee table or side table, covered with glass. And actually, I could even see moss displayed in here (after some waterproofing).
Martha Stewart’s Craft line has been getting a lot of press in the blogosphere and I’d been stupidly ignoring it (why?) until I read this post over at Wise Craft (my favorite blog at this moment) and finally checked it out. It lives up to the hype, of course. I’m going to order this glass frame kit because it will be perfect (the little brown one is my favorite) for framing various paper ebay purchases of late (like these butterfly cigarette cards).
Our apartment is coming together! I’ve blogged about pieces of it in the last 6 months, but thought it was time to post an overview shot of the living/dining room. (There will be more to come, I promise.)
Because the room gets sooo much sunlight in the morning and late afternoon, we wanted to find a way to filter the light during the day and have some privacy at night. The folks at Apartment Therapy pointed us to the Shade Store at the Conran shop. With some assistance from the super friendly staff there we picked out simple but elegant solar shades. The shades arrived in under a week and we put them up ourselves with little effort (well, the effort was in measuring ahead of time). As you can see in the photo below, when the light hits just right in the morning, we get some lovely silhouettes from the container gardens on the terrace.
My favorite part of the room, however, is a plant sanctuary we made from a green table salvaged from my parents’ house in Vermont and a copper plant tray my mom was going to discard! A painting of my great aunt is peeking out from behind the clover.
I’ve loved the shop window of Flessas Design from the first day we moved into the neighborhood. It turns out that the store has been in the family for a hundred years (most of that time as a florist). The owner always has just perfect objects in her window and last weekend, I fell in love with a little white leather bench that would be the perfect coffee table to the blue couch (!!). One of my core requirements of a coffee table is that it be padded so when my feet are up on it inevitably, there isn’t a harsh edge cutting into my leg. Which really eliminates 80% of coffee tables on the market so I’ve had my eye out for something lovely, small and padded.
Flessas is only open by appointment in the summer (love the lifestyle, sign me up!) so after an almost sleepless weekend full of anticipation I called first thing Monday morning to see if the bench was still for sale and if so, what the damage was. Daria, the owner, couldn’t have been nicer or more helpful. $1250 was definitely more than I wanted to spend on a bench, no matter how beautiful. However, she did tell me that the legs were vintage 1960s Danish modern but she’d had it recovered in white leather (sheer genius if you ask me and worth every penny… just to someone else). Never one to let money stop me for achieving style, I turned to my faithful foot solider Ebay and the hunt began.
And last night, the ebay delivered! After watching this for a painful week, we won an identical bench for (yes, I’m bragging) $103. Granted it’s not white leather (but we can get it re-upholstered…). Somewhereintime2 is a great seller — check our her stuff!
I’m addicted to Design*Sponge’s sneak peeks and today, I’m addicted to Rebecca of Moontree Letterpress’s home. I love, love, love her simple and totally elegant way of displaying her collections of stamps, movie ticket stubs and train tickets. I think that collections should live and be part of your everyday life in some way. I’m always sad to see the collectors who squirrel or hoard stamps, plates, linens away in the dark. How do you display your collections? Send them my way and I’ll post them on in this Flickr group Displaying Collections! Here are some ideas from Martha below, but I like Rebecca’s the best:
You’ll notice a new look around here (I’m infatuated with my updated header, created by my amazing husband who integrated our amazing blue velvet couch that has marked our transition to adult furniture ownership), with some more relevant categories (furniture fever to address my seemingly constant ache for it, irresistible to address my ebay addiction, DIY as a home for my endless projects). This is my 100th post, and it seems fitting that I’ve started to figure out what I’m really doing writing this blog (for those of you who’ve had your doubts). It started as an online version of the paper journals I keep full of magazine clippings that inspire me. When I got into the Cooper Hewitt Master’s Program, the blog become a place for me to synthesize and connect what I was learning in class to my life: building a life with my husband, finding inspiration for my stationery business, articulating my personal style: I’m design scouting. I hope you are too, and that you’re enjoying the site as it evolves along with me. Thanks for reading and I hope you are inspired by what’s to come!
Abbey
(gogoabigail [at] gmail [dot] com)
