love forever

Curtains For Me

Many of the windows in our new place are over old radiators and it was really tough to figure out curtains for them. I love a curtain that puddles on the floor but it just seemed like a scary fire hazard.
I had this one big panel I got at an Anthro sample sale and used that as my base, cut some of the details apart and then added canvas and lined it with a ticking stripe. The idea was that they would look like modern fabric wall hangings instead of curtains.
A little detail we added later: when we put our air conditioning unit in, we added eye hooks to the end of the dowels at the end of the curtain then hooks in the wall. You can pull the curtain up and see the striped fabric on the back.

Bedroom Progress Part 2

Before:Just your standard Malm bedframe

After: Headboard covered in vintage wallpaper

After After: Cut paper flowers decoupaged over the wallpaper




Several months ago I covered our Malm headboard with come vintage wallpaper. It was pretty cute but it needed a little something more. One person commented that they would want to paint all the flowers crazy colors and it sparked something. I decided to cut flowers out of colored paper and decoupage them scattered over the wallpaper. It was super easy- I used Neutral PH Adhesive PVA (basically your average white glue but acid free) and a small paint brush to adhere them. A super-easy, cheap and fun DIY!

House Tour on Phillymag.com!

The Philadelphia Magazine website recently did a little mini-tour of my new place in Philadelphia. You can check out the slideshow here.

I took all the photos so they aren't professional at all but I just wanted to capture the things I love about our place. They are going to do a real live shoot for the magazine sometime in the late winter so I'll be sure to share those too!

Getting Organized

On Saturday, Mr. Loveforever and I went on a little drive to the Lambertville, New Jersey to do a little flea marketing and antiquing. Lambertville is the cutest town ever! The Mr. and I found ourselves fantasizing about opening a cute little shop right on Main Street. We got a few things at the Golden Nugget Flea Market and then drove into town for lunch. A work friend recommended that we check out No. 63, a great little vintage/gift store that specializes in that mid-century/industrial look that we all love so much. 

Well we went in. And we fell in love with an industrial filing cabinet. And we bought it! That was the easy part.  The not-so-easy part was getting this thing out of the store and back into our apartment. There was a point when we didn't think it was going to happen and that we would have to leave our beloved filing cabinet behind. But we did it: dollies were borrowed, people were bribed, cash was exchanged and we got it home!

I spent all day Sunday organizing all my craft supplies and putting everything into my new favorite piece of furniture. Oh it was bliss.

How to Hang a Picture Just Right

I am not a person known for precision (I have a tendency to eye-ball things) so this isn’t so much about measuring as it is planning.

I have a ton of art, most of it vintage and inexpensive and I like to hang it in big collections gallery-style. Since most of the art is cheap and fun to collect I think more about the collection as whole rather than each individual piece. Every time I move, I spend a lot of time thinking about what I want to do with my paint by numbers. In our last place, we had them in a crazy meandering line across our bedroom walls. The room was really tiny and all the paint by numbers made it feel like a cozy cabin. Our new place has really high ceilings and feels more modern so I tried to come up with a more modern way to hang them.

I took most of the paint by numbers out of their frames, leaving just a few with the frames that I liked the most. I decided that I wanted to hang them in our living room in a square shape but that I didn’t want the square shape to be perfect. I started by laying out all the paintings on the floor and moved them around until I got the right arrangement, then I took a picture.

I measured the width and height of the arrangement and then figured out where on the wall this size square would work best, taking into account that I will probably buy a console table or bench for this wall at some point.

Starting at the bottom left, I hung the first painting on the wall and worked my way across the first row, referencing my digital photo. Since the square didn’t have to be perfect, I ditched the level and just went by what looked right.

Note the USA Paint by Number by Something's Hiding in Here, a nice variation in shape from the rest of the paintings and just perfect for this arrangement I think!

From the Top

When you move to a new place, you have to start somewhere. Since we had about 15 book-filled boxes cluttering up our living room (and my extremely helpful mom was in town this week!), bookshelves seemed like a good place to start. We have an industrial thing going on in our new place so super-cheap shelves for Home Depot were a perfect match. I know everyone is doing colored out books right now but I have been doing it for a while and honestly, I'm not sure if I can go back to anything else!

As always, Potato was there to "help", in this case to guard Mr. Loveforever's computer books. 

So: bookshelves=check! Now onto the rest of the place.

Me on Etsy's How-Tuesday!

A few of my favorite things

A friend dropped by my place on Sunday to drop off this vase that she found for me on one of her thrifting trips. It was a lovely surprise and looks perfect with a few of my other favorite objects.

Pretending to move

Anyone who knows Mr. Loveforever and me at all will vouch for this: we pretend that we are going to move all the time. A few years ago, it was the northwest, then Providence, then Beacon and yet, in Brooklyn we stay. Secretly, we love it here but we both have intense wanderlust.

Recently, we started plans to simply move to another Brooklyn neighborhood, but, with the economy tanking before our very eyes, we started to think even that was a silly idea. The ultimate compromise: a move within our existing apartment.

The Mr. and I live in a railroad apartment, which is basically a very long and thin hallway. The back room, which is currently our bedroom is the largest of the rooms and the most formal, with cool molding and architectural details, while our living room is the smallest of rooms, fitting only a couch and coffee table and making it impossible to have guests. After two years of this nonsense, we are going to switch the bedroom and the living room.

Since I have constant decorating Attention Deficit Disorder, this will give me a chance to redecorate and move furniture around without spending a lot of money. I am so excited to get started!

Here are a few of my inspirations below. I am constantly struggling between a formal, luxe decorating style and one that is more Pop and fun. Usually, my apartments end up somewhere in between these styles with a little bit of "I don't have any money right now so this is just going to have to do" thrown in.

Images from Domino Magazine, Elle Decoration UK, Flea Market Interiors, Vogue Living and Decor8.

Hyberbolic Crochet Coral Reef

Linda was in town this week and we got a chance to see the Hyberbolic Crochet Coral Reef at the World Financial Center on Tuesday. Isn't it nice to have visitors? You get to do all the fun things in your city that you never make time to do for yourself.
Here are a few pictures of the reef. Linda commented that it was too bad we couldn't go in: the whole scene looked like a giant Muppet playground.

The bottom two pictures are of the Rubbish Vortex by the ever-talented Hella Jorgensen. It was hard to get pictures due to the glare but it was really beautiful.