I Spy Friday

This week it has been unnaturally sunny and bright here in London. I'm a rainy day kinda girl, and clearly I'm feeling a little over-stimulated, because my picks for this week are all a bit muted.

Also, I was feeling a little selfish after last week's orgy of birthday wishes, so I thought I'd stick to things for the (ahem, my) home.

I'm in very deep like with these China Cabinet Clocks from Anthropologie. Each one is special and unique and gorgeous (just like all of you!).

I especially like the blue version of this lovely Chrysanth Cushion from Not on the High Street. (Once again with the beigey/gray and blue combo that I loved in the Provincetown Dress from Mod Cloth.)

I love maps. A whole lotta lot. And if I didn't rent, and wouldn't lose my deposit if I installed this in my living room, this Hanging Vintage Globe would now be in my living room, and you would all be jealous. But I don't, and so it's not, and so you're not (but I am, of anyone who owns this loveliness). It's from Cox and Cox, a reliably awesome source for beautiful things.

 

Beautiful things like the Latte Milk Bottle. I like to have two batches of iced tea on hand during the summer (black and herbal), but the fridge in our flat here won't take my big American jugs (hee hee). So I sense that a few of these will be finding a home in my kitchen this summer.

 

The etsy pick of the week is this lovely light green linen table runner from Kain-Kain. Sweet, simple, natural. Nice.

Our wedding on OBB!

How exciting! Our wedding story was featured on Offbeat Bride!

Such an honor! I'm all verklempt.

Mini workshop for East London Craft Guerrilla

On May 13, I'll be doing a miniworkshop for East London Craft Guerrilla. Learn how to make a fringe flower headband, details on the ELCG website!

I Spy Friday

I love birthdays. When I was a kid, I would get so excited for my birthday that my mom made a rule: no birthday talk until a month before the date. So I would get almost as excited for April 15th as for May 15th.

Well, we are officially within a month of my birthday! So, this week's I Spy is my dream birthday wishlist. Some of the things on here are a little (erm, a lot) out of my league. But that's what wishing's all about, right?

(To keep this list somewhat brief, I've eliminated anything from previous I Spy posts. But, you know, I'm open to, say, an Amanda Archer dress or an Ork poster. Or just about anything else.)

I have been on a hunt for the perfect pajamas for a year or two now. I hate shopping with an exact image in mind, because it's so rare to find something that lives up to the ideal in my head. I've been wanting crisp, cool, cotton summer pajamas, with a short-sleeved buttondown shirt and shorts (or capris), in an understated, classic stripe or check. These pajamas from Brooks Brothers will do; they're about 98% of the way there (gingham isn't my idea of understated).

I kind of like red shoes. Actually, I kind of adore them. And I also kind of adore the combination of light blue and bright red (our wedding colors). I'm so glad that Kitty Cooper's new shoe line didn't come out before our wedding; these would have been too much of a temptation.

I haven't made any new additions to my vintage apothecary collection in a while, and I'd love this amazing vintage prescription cabinet from LuckyLittleDot, one of two etsy picks of the week.

I'm a big fan of vintage maps, and I really like this one of the mid-Atlantic states. It comes beautifully framed from revamp boutique's etsy shop and would look so lovely on our bedroom wall.

She and Him is a great little band. They have a new album out, Volume Two. From what I've heard of it it's not as fantastic as Volume One. But it's still pretty awesome. Check out the first single above.

There are two books on my must-have list right now: The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag and The Girl Who Played with Fire. I picked up The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, the former's prequel, last year on our honeymoon and I've been looking forward to the next book ever since. And everyone's reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy these days, but I only got around to the first book a few weeks ago. An intelligent thriller? Fabulous. I can't wait to read the second installment.

Weezer's great, aren't they? I never really got on the Nirvana bandwagon; Weezer is my Nirvana. And yet I've never seen them live! How can I have gone so long without seeing this kind of mashup live? They don't currently have any shows planned in the UK, but this list is all about wishes.

I love Regina Spektor. If all I got for my birthday was a ticket to a Regina show, I'd be super happy with that. This video is of her playing Real Love (our wedding song) live at Bonnaroo a few years ago. So you can see for yourself how damn cute and amazing she is.

My workspace today

Today I'm working on two pink and printed word rose bouquets for a bride up in Scotland. Here's what my workspace looks like at the moment:

Paper in various stages of preparation. And the ubiquitous Blistex.

Audiobook playing on the laptop, tools at the ready, caffeine on hand.

120 roses to make.

Shiny happy bouquet

The bouquet for the first of my Offbeat Brides is ready to go out the door!

In a way, I'll be sad to see it go. Today is the most depressing, chilly, gray day, and this bouquet is providing the only sun in our flat today.

Life changers, part two

In the second part of this little series, I want to tell you about a stranger who changed my life utterly. We only met two or three times, but my life is still affected by this lady on a daily basis.

This lady is my lovely florist, Sharon from En Masse (in Frederick, MD). As I may have mentioned before, I don't really like flowers. This is kinda gross, but I've always viewed cut flowers as just dead things. So, when it came to my wedding, I submitted to the idea of having flowers only at the mother's and my sister's insistence, and because they had agreed to do all of the flower work for me and to keep them as simple as possible.

But I still had to meet with the florist on a wedding-planning weekend down in Frederick. (By the way, if you ever go to Frederick, be sure to make it the first weekend of the month, so you can enjoy one of their monthly city-wide festivals.) Sharon was very sweet and lovely and showed me all kinds of flowers that my mom and sister cooed over, and which kind of left me cold. We sat down and she showed me a book with possible floral arrangements. That's when I got excited.

The paper in this book was sooo cool. It alternated between a ribbed (!) matte paper and a beautiful gloss. Both of them were gorgeously thick and heavy. I went on and on about how much care had obviously gone into this book, because printing on alternating types of paper would be very expensive and would probably make layout difficult. Frankly, I wouldn't shut up about it and completely ignored anything flower-related from that point on.

It would have been so easy to get pissed off about this. After all, we were in her shop, taking up her time, for me to squeal about something unrelated to her work. But instead, Sharon smiled at me and said, "Have you thought about making your bouquet from paper flowers? We could arrange them into a bouquet for you."

I had been thinking about paper flowers, but my fiance and family were doubtful. They were still doubtful. Sharon assured them that if it ended up being too much work, or didn't work out for whatever reason (i.e., if I sucked at flower making), she could always make a traditional bouquet for me.

Well, I didn't suck at flower making. I sent my loose flowers off to Sharon a few weeks before the wedding, and on the day I was greeted with this:

Needless to say, I was pretty damn pleased. And my bouquet was kinda the star of the show that day. In fact, it got so many compliments that I decided to seize the opportunity of moving to London to start a business. And that's how Bookworm Eats Flower was born, and how someone who I met twice changed my life.

Has a relative (or complete!) stranger changed your life? I wanna hear all about it!

Pick-a-nick

Yesterday I had fun working on a bouquet for a picnic wedding. Not picnic-themed: the ceremony will be outdoors followed by a picnic reception. There will be games and fun for all, and I really wish I could go to such a fun-sounding wedding!

At least I get to make the bride's bouquet. A picnic wedding made me think immediately of bright, vibrant colors. The bride asked for lots of red, and I decided to complement the red with the colors every bride wants for an outdoors wedding: bright blue sky, sunny orange and yellow, a little brilliant cloud white, and deep green grass.

Thursday I went out and got a bunch of paper...

...and yesterday I got down to work and started having fun. My favorite part of making bouquets is when I have all of the flower parts cut out, and I can start mixing and matching layers, changing buttons in and out, and just generally messing around until things are arranged to my satisfaction.

I Spy Friday

Last week I was having a wander 'round Liberty, sighing copiously and wishing I could afford beautiful things like these:

Necessity Framed Screen Print

 

Wild Pigs Lampshade, Lush Designs

 

Cream Birds and Trees Cushion, Charlene Mullen

Pendel two-seat sofa, Russell Pinch

Unfortunately, all of these items are waaaaay out of my budget (some more than others). So, I decided to write a post about cheaper alternatives to Liberty products. But Liberty beat me to the punch.

They've introduced a new line of clothes and home products to be sold at Target, called (of course) Liberty of London for Target.

Here's a very tiny little taster of the many wonderful things available:

Leaf Print Umbrella

Multicoloured Floral Print Chair

Garla Print Ladies Bicycle

Sixty Print Prep Bowl Set

 

Therberton Black Frame

It seems like there are some things from this line available in the UK but not in the States, and vice versa. It also seems like, as usual, the products available over here are a bit more expensive. Oh, lovely VAT! But either way, this line is a wonderful way to get some Liberty style in your home (or your closet) on the cheap.

Life changers

I couldn't sleep last night, so I tried to sleep in this morning to make up for it. That didn't work too well, either. While I lay there trying to sleep, I started thinking, for some strange reason, about my friend Grace. Grace was my roommate for a short time, and during that year or so she had a big effect on my life. Which started me thinking about life changers in general. People about whom you think, "If I had never met her, my life would definitely be completely different."

I think they fall into three categories: those who have a passing but profound influence, those who stick around forever, and something in between. So I thought I'd do a little series of posts about three big life changers I have known, one in each categry. I'll start with Grace, since she's the one who got me thinking about all of this in the first place.

Grace is my "something in between." I met Grace at a time in my life when things were pretty crappy. I was in a job I didn't like and generally feeling not so good about myself. I was in school to change careers but lacked a lot of confidence. Also, my health kind of stank. Fitness? Eating right? Ha!

Grace is exactly the opposite of how I was then: she is very sure of herself, has a career she loves and is amazing at, and just generally projects happiness and healthfulness. The lady does Iron Man triathlons, for Lord's sake. And qualified for the Boston Marathon at the Boston Marathon. She's also super pretty. All of this makes her sound very easy to resent, but Grace is also an incredibly warm, caring, and funny person.

I went to college right along the Boston Marathon route, and watching the runners every year always made me wish I could be one of them. When we first met, Grace mentioned that she ran marathons, which resparked in me the desire to run myself. It seemed crazy for a girl who had never run more than a few miles at one time to think of running 26.2 miles, but Grace also introduced me to BostonFit, a marathon training program geared towards people like me (complete beginners). She encouraged me, offered tips on healthy eating and cross training, and answered all of my ridiculous questions (such as, How do you go to the bathroom during a marathon?). She was very understanding about my ridiculous timidity around big groups of strangers.

That fall, I completed my first marathon at Chicago. I have since run a bunch of shorter distances, two half marathons, another marathon (Dublin), and I'm training for Berlin this September. After two years with BostonFit, I helped to coach their half-marathon team during my third (and, sadly, final) year. I also don't think it's a coincidence that starting running and finding a full-time job in my new career coincided almost exactly. And, it almost goes without saying, I am about a million times fitter and healthier than I was before I met Grace.

Grace and I are still friends, although we of course aren't in nearly as much contact as when we were roommates. I think of her a lot, though, and especially whenever I'm running a race. And I try not to think what my life would be like if I hadn't met Grace.

I'd love to hear about your life changers... c'mon, everybody has them. Meet me in the comments.

Beautiful bouts

A lot of new clients have been requesting boutonnieres, so I thought I'd post a few pictures to give people an idea of what some of my flowers look like as bouts.

First up is the fringe flower boutonniere that my husband wore on our wedding day.

And here's a rose boutonniere. To give you a better idea of the size, below is a picture of it in my lapel.

I felt quite distinguished wearing this today.

Bookworm eats papercut

After seeing so many beautiful papercuts by Rob Ryan, Elsita, and others, I've been inspired to try my hand at a few myself. But, of course, I had to put my own twist on it, stripping down and simplifying and injecting some humor.

So, without further ado, here are a few of my papercuts (now available in the shop!):

I made this one day when I had Home, by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, stuck in my head.

This one I made when I was feeling lonely; my husband was away for 2 weeks on business. The looongest 2 weeks ever. It's called Every Time You Go.

This is a part of my campaign to make people accept tea as the sexy drink it is.

Well... what do you think?

Rawr!

Okay, so this is not at all wedding- or flower-related, but I'm so excited about it that I just had to share... My picture is on RunnersWorld.com!

After I got into running, I joined my team for a few years in volunteering at the Mile 21 waterstop at the Boston Marathon, right at the top of Heartbreak Hill. Last year Runner's World was there to take some photos, which I totally forgot about until one of my old running buddies started bragging about being in RW. So I checked out the article online and OMG there I was! I don't know if I'm in the actual issue, but that would be freaking amazing!

Anyway, here's the slideshow. I'm the one in the black hat in picture 8. Wahoo!

By the way, if you live in Boston and want to get into running, I can't recommend BostonFit highly enough. It's a part of the USAFit group, which has teams all around the country, so if you're not in Boston and want to get into running, you should still check them out.

Exciting times at BWEF!

No I Spy this week because I've been extra busy with a couple of exciting new things.

First of all, I've got an advertorial up on Offbeat Bride! This is sooo exciting for several reasons. It's my first foray into advertising. And also, OBB rocks! It's a site I turned to as a bride for inspiration and sometimes consolation (when my ideas were sounding a little crazy to those around me). Plus, although this is a paid advertisement, it's really a bit of an honor to be featured on OBB. Their editorial board is picky about who they'll give an advertorial to, and they picked MEEEE! So, welcome to any offbeat brides out there!

Also, Tik Tac Toe is this afternoon! I've been working like crazy to build up my stock.

Here are a bunch of the flowers I made, along with one bouquet, ready for market. I started making a new flower design this past week, which I'm calling pinwheel flowers because, well, they look like pinwheels, especially from a distance.

And almost ready to go in the pail with the rest of the flowers are about a bazillion roses, lined up here to dry after varnishing.

I've also got a bunch of hair accessories, as well as a new product type that I've been working on for several weeks now. I'll post later with pictures of the event, and a little feature on some new items!