I am sooo excited to have found time to add to the Etsy shop. Even more excited to share that I have finally found what to do with at least part of my vintage linen stash.
This long lovely, super soft spring/summer scarf is made from real, antique hankies. The perfect patina of well-worn cotton and faded floral prints are simply divine. I have always felt that hankies are far too pretty to just sit in a drawer and instead should be worn and enjoyed.
I’ve made one for myself and am in love. Looks like it drifted right out of the spring Anthro catalog. Wearing it feels like waving goodbye from a train platform in some classic black and white romance.
Keep an eye on the shop for more hankie scarf listings. I will list as many as I can match up. Finding enough hankies to that match in perfect size and color is tougher than you would think.
A friend has asked me to create a special scarf made from a collection of hankies that belonged to her grandmother. If you have a collection of hankies you would like made into a sweet scarf of your own. Email me.
Of all my moaning about the shortage of Polaroid instant film (an exciting update on this here), my brilliant and super hip friend Jim turned me on to the Hipstamatic app for iPhone.
I have yet to truly expand on how much I adore my phone. But this post is about how much I adore this app!
Hipstamatic turns the iPhone lens into a fabulous plastic throw back analog camera of days past. A series of lenses and films to choose from allows me to create awesome Polaroid-esque pictures. I can choose from bold contrasts with a perfectly imperfect border, a late 70’s red cast or yellow blownout effect and they all give gorgeous results.
On a bright sunny day….
Or from the darkened back row of an awesome dive-bar…
This app epitomizes love of cheap frills.
A few weekends back, a sleepy lab named Sky rested on the cabin porch next to me as I enjoy a soft breeze, mellow sun, red wine and a comfy Adirondack.
The boys and I had escaped to the Granite Rose at Juniper Well Ranch in Skull Valley. This is by far the most beautiful place in Arizona I have ever been.
See for yourself by clicking here.
Each morning began with a photo walk, the boy and I each with a camera in hand. A detour to feed the horses carrots, hay and oats and then a drive up the hill for breakfast at the Dinner Bell Café.
One afternoon was spent touring Peddlers Pass a great local flea market where more than a little pocketbook restraint was required. Black walnut ice cream on a bench in town-square and slow drive back down to the ranch for a late lunch ended the afternoon.
Dinner was paired with and wine grown and vinted right there on the ranch, with our dear friends Dave and Linda on the second-floor porch of the Inn Keepers cabin
I love this place. I love this time with my boys. I cannot imagine a more perfect day.
“A spoonful of sugar, makes the medicine go down” – Mary Poppins
To play and do nothing but eat and craft all day would be a dream. Regardless, daily chores and some semblance of work also require a place. It’s finding the balance between life’s haves and wants that can be the tricky part.
A few weeks back I was baby-shower shopping for a dear friend and came across the prettiest clothespins. They had been decorated with antique papers and German glass glitter. Proud of myself for keeping my pocketbook on task, I left the shop with only the baby gift, but with the pins in future mind
In my design space above the worktop, are strung to lengths of picture-wire where I have clipped postcards, Polaroids, bits of ribbon and ephemera.
At the end of one particularly desk-filled day, I broke out a stash of old book pages, glitter and glue to create my own. What you see here is the result.
A new bit of pretty to distract from the frustrations of the daily work.
My newly decorated pins are just the thing I need to bring a smile the next time I am in a fight with the fax machine.
It has been an entire month since I’ve posted to this space. These last weeks have been spent designing for clients and creating small beauties for myself and the Etsy shop.
In the interim, somehow an important date has avoided me. My two-year blog-iversary has passed without trumpets or cake. I cannot believe it has been two years already. Instead, belated anniversary flowers, St. Patty’s Geraniums, (at least I think they are Geraniums).
I have changed the format of the DSP blog and am loving it. A new look, more links and so far, photographs entirely my own. It feels DSP has graduated sophomore year and am growing it’s own.
Until recently I have been reluctant to reach out to other bloggers, intimidated about sharing this space with anyone other than my grandmother and girlfriends. This is strikes me as ironic, because that isn’t that the whole reason we blog in the first place?
Maybe it’s an artist thing… the fear of critique or something.
I have never been quite sure how one approaches another in the blogging sandbox and says “Hello, wanna play?”.
In rounding a corner both literally and figuratively, I have begun to make wonderful blogger friends with gorgeous sites of their own. They have been generous in permitting me to link to their blogs as well and I will be sharing them with you in future posts and in the links over to the left!
Cheers to you my cherished readers, new friends and many years of cheap frills to come!
I fell in love love love with this giant boston cream doughnut at Joe’s Coffee Shop .
The kid doesn’t know it yet, however I am pretty sure his 6th birthday cake is going to look something like this.
Sunday, the boy visited his grandparents and the Hub and I had some time to venture out on our own.
We took the opportunity to visit a family owned farm and diner I had seen on Food Network, Diners Drive-Ins and Dives.
Friends of have been before and said the food is delish. I couldn’t agree more.
A great big farm in the back provides all the veggies for the menu that includes amazing salads, burgers and pizzas. Everything tasted incredibly fresh. I ordered the Food Network featured Fontina burger (YUM!) and the Fried Fresh Green Beans with Garlic Oil (YUM! YUM!). Seriously good food.
Being that Valentines Day had passed, I brought the big purse to carry along my Polaroid. I could not think of a better occasion to snap a few exposures in such a pretty setting. It was rainy that day and so all the bright greens and purples in the garden were deepened by the sky.
The Hub thought it fairly obnoxious when I took a picture of my burger basket before digging in. Unfortunately I was too close and it came out all blurry. I can see this is going to take some getting used to on both our parts. In any case, he loves me and was happy to to carry my exposures while we walked the farm and I snapped away.
More pictures from Joe’s to come.
While the rest of the country shivers, spring has sprung in my hometown. Birds are chirping, butterflies take flight and the weather outside is anything but frightful. Another Valentines has come to pass. The day was spent at the park teaching the boy how to ride his bike sans training wheels. The evening was warm enough for a walk and window shopping after our traditional Valentines meal of Chinese food.
I have a thing for birds. Something I will probably expand more on in another post, however for now it is enough to say that I fell in love with this stained glass bird cage. It is probably a good thing the shop was closed and did not allow me the opportunity to check the price so I do not continue to pine over a lovely I cannot afford. I snapped this photo with my iPhone as I considered the Hub’s opinion of me to be obnoxious if I were to drag my camera or Polaroid of my big purse on our night out on the town. Do you say “snapped” a photo when referring to an iPhone? I don’t know…again fodder for another post.
But I digress…This birdie in the window got me thinking about the time I purchased a butterfly net with the intention of catching, collecting and creating the kind of specimen shadowboxes I have admired in magazines and art shows. Armed with my net so many years ago, the Hub and I ventured up north to a place that I recall seeing butterflies in countless number. When my chance came to capture one of my very own, I just could not do it. I didn’t have the heart. Knowing their life cycles are short wasn’t enough justification for me to warrant ending it’s journey on this earth. In that regard, I don’t think I could ever own a caged bird. Even one hatched for that specific purpose. It just does not sit well with me, confining a winged creature to such a contained life.
A few days after we brought home our Christmas tree this year I found a bright green caterpillar inching its way across my kitchen floor. We were experiencing a cold and rainy snap and so instead of tossing it outdoors, we put it in a jar with a few lettuce bits. Each day we checked on it, waiting for the rain to end, until one morning we awoke to find it had cacooned itself. Life and science and metamorphosis right there in a pickle jar on my desk!
Not quite knowing what to do we waited…and waited. I googled the timeline of such a process and learned that it takes a minimum of 2-3 weeks for a chrysalis to hatch open. And so we waited some more. Again one morning we checked on our creature which seemed nothing more than a tiny brown bit and it had split completely open. No trace of butterfly was found. I had guess we had expected to find it flitting about our kitchen or resting on the breakfast table, but no, nothing. Terribly disappointed we went on about our day and daily chores.
Suddenly a flash of yellow shot before my face and as I yelled for my son to come and see, it darted out the back door in a fraction of a moment. Our butterfly had been keeping warm behind the coffee pot. All the better I suppose as we were not meant to keep it in a jar after all.
“Step through the door and a whole new world opens up for you.”
Last week I stumbled upon the HBO bio-pic Temple Grandin.
This is an amazing movie starring Claire Danes and Katherine O’Hara that depicts the life of Temple Grandin. Best known for the design of a humane system of transport for cattle from stockyard to slaughterhouse the film paints a portrait of her struggles to overcome the challenges of Autism. This film tells a story in a way that is real and honest that inspires us to work within our talents and make opportunities of our limitations.
Just a week prior I tuned into NPR and first learned of Temple Grandin . I waited parked and listened intently as she told her story in her voice and her words. Danes did an amazing job bringing to life the voice I pictured of Ms. Grandin.
Several pivotal moments in the movie are punctuated by Temple walking through a door, braving the unknown, moving beyond her comfort to discover the opportunities that await on the other side. Nothing great is accomplished without taking those kinds of steps.
As you can see the DimeStorePretty blog has undergone a great transformation of it’s own. Recent posts have eluded to such a change as I have been filling my head with other beautiful blogs and taking time to define for myself what I want my space to be. A pivotal moment perhaps? This has yet to be seen.
Much of Temple Grandin’s life and bio is set on her Aunt’s cattle ranch in east Texas. One of my goals with the new Dime Store Pretty format is to share more if not exclusively my own attempts at photography.
These are a few images of my favorite ranch at Juniper Well in Skull Valley, Az. Cheers to new doors, new worlds and brave steps forward into the unknown.
Flickr Photos
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