i have a thing for good fabric...

I bought a few yards of this Sunbrella fabric almost four years ago when I worked at a local bolt store part time. I loved the colors and always had big dreams to do something really cool with it in my backyard. So I put it in my fabric tub for another day and forgot about it.

It sat in that fabric tub until we went to the Dominican. One of the outdoor restaurants/bars at our resort used this fabric as the upholstery on all of their large scale booths and as the accent pillows on the sofas down the veranda (paired with linen colored cushions and espresso wicker furniture - it looked good).  I got so excited about how great it looked (every single time we ate at or walked by the restaurant) that as soon as I got home, I pulled it out of the tub and went to work.

Slowly, went to work that is as real work and other things like the kitchen got in the way. But I made a couple of pillow covers for our front porch swing and am about to tackle cushion covers for the dining chairs we have in the back yard. Lucky for us the fabric looks really great with our umbrella and looks good with the blue of the house (nothing looks good with the green on the house and that's why it's got to go).

So if you're in the market for a good outdoor fabric, Brannon Whisper is a good way to go. I can't find it locally anymore but you can find it here, here or here.

I'm excited for summer this year. Well I am right now. As soon as it hits 108 degrees, I'll be crying for fall but with everything turning green, new flower pots just waiting to be filled and new pillows waiting to be used outside with a good book, I can hardly wait!

Salt = comes to us from Latin sal, which evolved into French sel, Italian sale, Spanish sal, and Romanian sare...

My current read is Salt.

I know what you are thinking, I'm joking right? Right before we left for our last trip, we made a quick stop at the B&N to snag something for me to read by the pool. Paul picked it up as a joke, teasing me about all of the salt I eat, but after I saw the quote on the front of the book from Anthony Bourdain (actually not shown on the book cover to the left), I knew it could actually be quite good.

My sister-in-law, the one that loves to read, and I were talking about how commodity history has really taken off in the book market lately. People love to know about their stuff. Where it came from, who had it first, who took it from who and what part it played in the history of the world. That's what this book does. It's a Tulipomania (which was also a great commodity book), but for salt.

It's fascinating what you can learn about something you don't even think twice about. I had never pondered where salt came from or why we have so much of it, why it was even called "salt", and what it would be like to live without it. I also forget that it's technically a rock, the only rock that can be consumed.

Paul wasn't really joking when he was talking about how much salt I eat. I love the stuff. In fact we currently have five different types of salt in our kitchen and I'd have more if I had somewhere to put it. I've been eyeing this for quite some time and am just holding out for a birthday or a gift receiving event because really, do I need to spend fifty bucks on something that the current salt box is already doing? And who am I kidding, if a big event comes up and I get a salt box, would I really be as thrilled as I would be if I had gotten jewelry? 

And, for my sister-in-law who has probably not gotten over the fact that I am still reading this one book when she has probably put away 15-20, we have cable television and lots of things to do around the house. I'm chipping away at it though, so stop with the judging.
 

Emily is making a difference - help her out!

Do me a favor and check out Emily's blog, please and thank you.

We go to church together and she is so incredibly funny and deserves tons of readers anyways but the real reason I'm sending you over there today is because of her post about making a difference. BlogHer and KFC have teamed up in order to make a donation to the Susan G. Komen foundation and for every comment she gets on her post about what people are doing to help make a difference, they will donate a dollar to the cause.

Her aunt has breast cancer and is fighting to be a survivor. How amazing are people that survive? And how amazing is it that in such a short period of time, technology and research have come so far to help them?!

My dad's mom died from having breast cancer when he was in elementary school (in the 60's) and I wonder how much easier it would have been for her to fight and possibly beat the cancer if they knew then what we know now (more on that whole situation to come later). It's all because people haved worked hard (and donated a lot) to help make it easier.

Also, since I've been working on OU's Cancer Institute, I am fascinated by what I have had to learn about modern medicine. Do you even have a clue how fascinating cancer treatment is?!

Really, go read her post and leave a comment. Oh, and buy a pink bucket of KFC. How hard is that?

mossy monograms

I've always liked moss covered accessories. Accent balls, floral arrangements, topiary pieces and lately, monograms seem to make me smile. I decided Thursday that I wanted a moss covered "R" for our front door for a party we're going to have soon. It would fit the theme nicely. So I got online and did some searching and found multiple places that sold them including a number of sellers on Etsy (like the one seen below).

After looking at quite a few plant covered wood pieces, I decided I could make one. It couldn't be that hard. A wooden letter, some moss, a hot glue gun and ribbon.

I was right, it wasn't that hard. I got the moss, ribbon and letter at Hobby Lobby on my lunch hour and used my trusty hot glue gun to put it all together. I spent $8.00 on the project and for the same sized letter from the cheapest Etsy shop I could find, I would have spent $25.00 plus shipping.

I saved $17.00 on something that I would have bought just for ease. And that would have been an awful reason to buy it too since it was one of the easiest projects I've ever made. It was definitely not hard enough to have to pay someone else to do it for me.

Saving the 17 bucks made me feel good as I ate out for all three meals on Thursday (please understand that was said with shame) and I dropped quite a few hundred on a slab of marble that morning too. I like saying that. I bought a slab of marble.

Side note: This also qualifies for number 93! Slowly chipping away at that one!

Oh yes, yes I did...

My OCD tendencies took over today, never mind the fact that the labels are kind of crooked.

Can you tell?

I have always hated unorganized spice drawers. How is it that something that smells so good is always so disorderly and junky? None of the bottles match, even when I buy matching bottles. I also seem to always buy something I don't need because they aren't in alphabetical order and I don't take enough time to read every single bottle.

Not anymore. I bought these bottles for a dollar a piece at Bed Bath and Beyond and got myself some order. Turns out they fit 10 per row perfectly, which also makes me happy, because I hate it when they roll around in the drawer.

And then I found some free printable labels from Giver's Log, adjusted the colors in Photoshop so that they would fit our kitchen's new theme a little more appropriately, printed them off, and labeled away.

Too cute right? But not bad cute, good cute.

Side note: They aren't in alphabetical order yet, don't judge me. I'm not finished, I need five more bottles and then we will be in order.

Side note number two: I'm counting this towards my list, #93 ladies and gentlemen!

and dyson does it again

So, Dyson in no way cares about my opinion but this is the coolest thing in the entire world.

It's a fan. A FAN people. The coolest fan I have ever seen. No blades, no cage, completely safe from danger, but puts out air like no ones business. We saw it at Bed Bath and Beyond last night and I drooled over it for a while (and I hate table fans). 

Now only if I could get Dyson to care about my opinion and give me a free fan, I'd be set.

hanging plates - fabulous

Lately, I have been drooling over plate groupings. There is something so classic and clean about it but with the right plates and shapes, you can make a plate hanging super modern too. A few years ago, we were shopping at Moynihan Gallery (one of my favorite stops in Holland, MI) and they had taken a large collection of flower shaped monochromatic plates in all sizes and hung them down a wall that was so impressive. So like I said, I've been drooling. 

  

Since we've decided we are going to repaint the dining room, I thought we'd update the artwork while we were at it. Can you take a wild guess what I'm going to hang over the buffet? I wanted to flat out copy the first photo but have had some serious trouble finding an octagonal platter (rectangle not square) that was large enough and wasn't going to cost us a hundred bucks. So I've adapted my plan a bit and will pick up my last few platters today or tomorrow. 

I'm also going to cover the existing curtains that are in the room. They're the perfect length and have the perfect amount of opacity. I'd have a lot of work to do to get my fabric to have the same look, so I'm just going to sew my fabric on top of the existing stuff. We're also in desperate need of a rug in that room, but hate paying for a rug big enough for our table, so I'm making one out of carpet tiles from work. Here's hoping I can make it work because I typically don't love the FLOR rug look.

kitchen update

We have kitchen cabinets. Better yet, we have fabulous looking kitchen cabinets!

We're much closer than we were at the beginning of the week but still have quite a few things to do to finish up! I'll keep you posted. Hopefully the next few weeks will include a lot more kitchen action than the previous weeks have!

color can be too tricky

There's a Sherwin Williams paint color that has been floating around our office the last few months that has been getting a lot of negative feedback from us.

It was requested by a client and when we pulled the swatch, we all had a bit of a gasp moment. As we looked at each other we all knew what we were thinking. The name that SW gave it is more than appropriate. It is color Butter Up (SW6681) and it really looks like a stick of butter. I mean really.

Well, everyone (on the project at least) had given their two cents about it and we were at an agreement. It looked like butter. It was YELLOW.

I ended up taking a bunch of paint swatches home last week for multiple (personal) projects and didn't even realize that one of the colors I had pulled out my box had been Butter Up. I grabbed it because it went with one of SW's new trend sets that I liked and wanted to see if I could make any of the colors work in my house. Once I got them home and started looking at them, I realized I had the Butter Up and immediately threw it into the "not using" pile. After flipping through the rest of the paints and deciding on some and debating others I thought I would see how far off the Butter Up was from the color we painted our bathroom two years ago. I thought, this will be a good way to see just how yellow this paint swatch really is.

Insert cringed face here.

I threw the swatch up on the wall and to my astonishment it was almost an exact match.

I love the yellow color of our bathroom. It's not too cheery but not too pastel/Easter egg either. It's nice, it works, I've always liked it. So why did I hate SW's color swatch so much?!

It's always amazing to me how much color changes when it's on paper vs. the wall. Or under fluorescents vs. incandescent. I spend a lot of time looking at color, it's part of my job. So I'm now admitting I was wrong. Butter Up is not the worst color in the entire world and when it's on the wall, it doesn't look like smeared butter. Happy Sherwin Williams?

It probably would have been a good idea to Google image Butter Up to see if people had shown it in their spaces. They have and here are a few of them:

found at timesunion

found at apartment therapy chicago edition

found at porter house designs

some people have random thought thursdays...my edition tends to always be on fridays

I have decided that I have a cream-of-wheat thief in my office. I keep a box of instant packets in my desk for mornings like this one where I have not eaten breakfast and think I'll die if I don't eat something before lunch. This morning I only had one packet left.

Never mind the fact that it is entirely possible I ate them all and just wasn't paying attention to how many I had gone through. And never mind the fact that I leave my iPod out on my desk almost every single day/night and it's never gone missing. Nope, don't think about those things. Just agree with me here, we have a thief.

I am so thankful it's Friday. This week has seemed to drag on forever and even today feels like it will never end. It's only 8:45 in the morning by the way. I suppose you can say that's a bad way to start a day.

Last night, Paul and I and about a dozen of my co-workers and their spouses went to an event for another co-worker's non-profit organization, Smile Colombia. It was the organization's first gala, they've only been up and running for about a year, and we had a lot of fun (as our photobooth photos show).

We're doing dinner tonight with some good friends at a new place in town called REPUBLIC. We're also hitting it up for lunch tomorrow with another good friend. From everything I've heard so far, it won't disappoint and it won't hurt to eat there twice just to make sure we like it as much as everyone else does.