I’ve pinned this as well, but just have to repeat it here. I love, love, love this interior:
I’d change the artwork (not a big fan of non-figurative art, on the whole) and though I think the zebra skin rug looks stunning I wouldn’t actually want a real one on the floor, but a BIG yes to those laquered walls and the frankly gorgeous sofa.
More detail in the article in Architectural Digest.
(via)
I seem to remember promising to post something about the Gambia photobook once I’d received the finished product. Which I did a couple of weeks ago. And I finally got around to taking pictures of it in daylight last week. So. Here goes, prepare for rather a lot of images:
I sort of forgot that I needed a cover. So I ended up just pulling out four random images that I’d not had occasion to use inside the book and plopping them into the spots suggested by the default layout. With hindsight I should have spent a bit more time investigating the options, I’d probably have preferred another base colour than white, for example, but it works, and I guess that’s the important thing.
I ended up with close on 80 pages, and it’s printed on photo paper which makes it even thicker. However, it’s slimmer than I feared, I was a bit worried that it would be so thick as to be unmanageable, but it’s not. Far from it. It feels hefty and lovely, but is not so heavy that you need a reading table.
Another benefit of the photo paper version: The two facing pages are actually printed on one large sheet, and the sheets are glued back to back to create the book. This means that the book opens completely and no part of the page is lost “in the crease”.
It also lies flat on the table (or floor in this case). No need to hold it open.
I’m normally more of a maximalist than a minimalist, but just when it comes to photos I find I like as little noise as possible around them. I considered serveral design options for this album, and was planning, at the very least, to choose a colour scheme that I’d use for a few frames, titles and brush swirls. But once I started pulling together the pictures, I realised they worked so well on their own that embellishment would distract rather than add, so I discarded the idea.
The one digital scrapbboking supply I used was a set of templates called “Off to Press” by Paislee Press, available at Oscraps. The templates are for an 8×10 album, so I’ve gone through them and resized them to 12×12. I’ve also moved photo and text spots around a bit on quite a few of the pages, as well as resizing or even duplicating photo spots as needed. I really love this template set, as it helped me keep the look reasonably consistent and encouraging copious amounts of white space while being simple enough to be exceedingly flexible.
I’m really glad that I went for the photo paper option and didn’t fall for the temptation to save a few kroner by choosing a less expensive format. The clarity is really outstanding, any blur in the images is my fault entirely.
The other supply I used was a couple of actions from Pioneer Woman’s free action sets. Every image has had either “Boost” or “Define and sharpen” run on it, though on some I’ve reduced the opacity of the action layer(s) to avoid an overly processed look. In a few cases I’ve also used “Slight lighten”. Actions are a great way to get quick results for us lazy people, and I don’t think I’d have been able to finish the album on time without them.
I normally date all my digital pages (with the date of the photos/subject, not date of creation), but since this is a cohesive album of one week’s trip, I only kept the date on the first page for each day.
All in all, I’m really thrilled with how this turned out. I had a serious attack of “Squee!” when I unwrapped this. The book, by the way, is printed at Japan Photo, who use a system called CEWE, which I suspect is available through other chains in Europe also, though I don’t know for certain.
Now all I have to do is get all my other photos into proper photo books. Yup. Well, one step at a time…
I’ve been drooling over instant cameras for some time. I was on the verge of buying a polaroid camera off ebay when it was announced that film would no longer be produced and I decided against it. Then the Fuji Instax appeared and started making the rounds in the blogosphere. It’s ages since I decided to buy one, I just haven’t gotten round to it, mainly because it’s not available in Norway (don’t ask me why, I have no idea).
So when we were in Dublin last weekend, I knew I had to grab my chance. I’d found one retailer on the net that appeared to stock it, so off to John Gunn we went. I’d planned on getting the mini, but they were out, and also claimed that it was being discontinued. I don’t know whether that is true or not, but it doesn’t matter much, I got the Instax 200 instead, and I’m quite happy with that.
The pictures are about twice the size as the ones from the mini, which is a plus in most situations, and I fell badly for the look. The woman who helped me in the shop had one herself and she said it always gets a laugh when she brings it out. I can imagine, it’s humongous and also looks like a toy camera, and she was a petite lady of at least 50 years of age. “They laugh and then they steal your prints,” she claimed, and I can well belive it.
I haven’t really had time to play much with it yet, but I did buy quite a lot of film, so I’m all set. This weekend, perhaps?
Norwegian’s new concept: Nano-trips.
In mathematical terms nano is one billionth of something, so a nano-trip must be one billionth of a “normal” trip. If we assume a “normal” trip to be two weeks and one extra weekend (to be generous) – that is: 16 days – a nano-trip would be all of 0.0013824 seconds, if I’m not mistaken.
Even in non-nerd-speak, the nano as a prefix is currently most often used in excited talk about nano-technology, a lot of it from people who have very little idea what they are talking about, but I think most people have grasped that it concerns things that are so small it’s hard to see them.
Blink and you’ll miss it.
Just what I want for my next adventure.
I had a bit of time this morning while the lass was playing happily on her own, so I tore down some panelling along the wall running from the kitchen to the living room. We’re planning to put up the “magic” wall-smoothening wallpaper here, and paint it white, before hiding the whole thing with shallow bookshelves. I wonder, of course, whether we shoud dispense with the wallpaper and the paint and just put the shelves up, but figure we might as well do the job properly.
Also, note the use of floorboards to construct the wall. Interesting choice. Considering the price of floorboards vs. mdf I know what I’d have chosen, but whatever.
While we’re at it we should probably substitute those glass inserts with something else. Like, I dunno, wall? That seems slightly complicated, though. It’d be easy, of course, to just slot some pieces of mdf or something in over the glass and paper over that. It would look ok from the living room side, but probably quite nutty from the bedroom. On the other hand, who cares what it looks like from the bedroom?
I’ll think about it.
1. The bloodbank has Moomin mugs again! My visit yesterday resulted in 0.5 litres less blood but in return I got this:
Yay!
2. I registered at Pinterest. My username is Lattermild. There isn’t much to see, yet, but that’s bound to change. If you have your own board(s) or suggestions for whom I should follow, let me know.
3. We seem to have succeeded at getting the lass a place at Birralee as of this autumn. It’s for pre-school (or nursery school), and doesn’t guarantee a place at school proper, but I am quite delighted in any case.
4. If you read Swedish you should go read this entry by Ketchupmamman, which says all the things I’d like to have said about why genderised clothing for kids bothers me.
Or happy unimaginative, consumerist-oriented and entirely arbitrary, manipulative and shallow interpretation of romance day, if you like. It’s windy here in Trondheim, so perhaps I should say Happy Windsday!
As someone who’s never “celebrated” valentine’s day due to, well, finding the idea of synchronised romance completely silly, I find the increasing amount of exposure here in Norway plain irritating. Because it seems to be on the rise. The shops are full of it, obviously. Facebook is full of it. Twitter is full of it, too. I’ve had it up to here. And, yes, even the papers. Adressa was kind enough to tell us that even if we’d forgotten there were still a couple of restaurants left that had tables available tonight, but not many, so we needed to hurry. Yeah. Because going out for a romantic dinner on the same days as absolutely everybody else is sooooo appealing. They probably even squeeze a couple of extra tables in, just to make the most of the mad spending spree. I’d probably be about as comfortable as Harry was at Madame Puddifoot’s with Cho, even if I’d be somewhat more confident of “what to do” with my date (assuming I’d get the husband to come along in the first place, which is doubtful, I’d probably have to go on my own, and what fun is that?).
Which all reminded me of an earlier post on media antics in relation to valentine’s: A rose by any other name. I wish I knew what happened to the poor “winner”.
Oh, and I got roses this weekend. And tulips. Though the husband was very clear on the point that they were for Sunday – which was mother’s day here in Norway – NOT Monday. We sort of celebrate mother’s/father’s day, though rather half-heartedly. I did remember to send my mother a message – at 9:30 pm. Not so impressive.
The flowers are nice, though.
PS: I do. Truly, madly, deeply. I try not to wait for some random Monday in February to tell him, though.
To start with, let me just say that though I’ve been craving a dedicated crafting space for years, I had no idea how ridiculously happy it would make me. I’ve been sewing today – in my new Dedicated Crafting Space – and every so often I would pause and just… savour the feeling. I’m either mad or just counting my blessings.
Anyway, this is what it looks like when I’m in the middle of something:
Furnishingwise I’ve mostly been working on details today, figuring out what goes where on the shelves, hanging another picture and so on. Some details, therefore:
The top print is from The Black Apple on Etsy, and was purchased about a year ago, I think. I’m thrilled to finally have it up on the wall. It’s been languishing in its shipping envelope since it arrived, as I really had no place to hang it, but I just had to have it anyway. The quote, by the way, is attributed to Morrisey. The bottom one is also from Etsy, from Industrial Fairytale, and arrived only last week – and it’s still available, so if you want one for yourself, go get it!
I’m liking the way this is working out so far, the plan is still to fill the wall with book-related prints and such. I’m expecting to stick to black frames to create some sense of order, and I’m also expecting to take my time filling the space, waiting to find pieces that I really love instead of falling for the temptation to buy things just to fill it. I also know I have several things in boxes and such that might work.
The frames are Ribba from IKEA, and the one problem I’ve discovered so far is that the passepartout in these are for A4, whereas the prints, naturally, are American letter size. If you click one the images to get a larger version you can probably see that there is a gap on either side of the print. I’m going to have to get new passepartouts done, in other words, but in the meantime this will have to do. Having them on the wall makes me happy, gap or not.
Another detail to note is the lovely little pillow, which is from Syko. I’ve been a faithful reader of her blog for quite some time, so I had to have one of her creations – I also bought her book, Scandinavian Stitches, which is quite wondeful.
The curtains, by the way, are moving into the lass’ room when we get a rod up in there, and I’m making new ones for this room. If she ever “grows out of them” though, they might well be moving back, since I’m still as much in love with them as I was when I bought them before she was born.
About a week ago I started putting up our old Ivar-shelves in the office, and found to my annoyance that we were about 1 centimetre short of fitting five widths in there. We considered several solutions, one of which was to shave 1/2 a centimetre off each end. However, I suddenly remembered that once we get around to redoing the bathroom we will want to take 40-50 centimetres out of this space anyway, so there was really no point in going for a perfect fit.
So we just put up one height using the narrower shelves. All was right with the world again.
Then I spent a few nights (well bits of a few nights) getting the Hemnes daybed together. And today we went to IKEA to get a mattress for it, and to look for useful bits in the “rejects” corner for the desk arrangement. I decided a while ago to go for kitchen tops instead of “desks”, as I suspect they’ll be more hardy and take kindlier to any messy crafting we might want to do in here.
So with that all in place we started constructing a desk. I got adjustable desk legs since I wanted something a tad higher than 70 centimetres, but wasn’t entirely sure what to do to get the kitchen cabinet to the right height. However, a search of the flat unearthed some shelves that we removed from the kitchen cabinets because they were not needed, and with those screwed on to the bottom (and edged with duct tape to avoid the raw edges becoming dust magnets) I had myself a hack:
Then it was a simple matter of connecting the desk legs to one end of the long countertop and the hacked cabinet to the other, and voilla, a desk:
Because I hadn’t quite worked out in my mind how this was going to work I only got two desk legs today. So the idea is to get two more and connect the shorter countertop to the other half of that cabinet to create one long desk. And, yes, the desk runs the length of the shelving – in front of it. It’s going to work pretty well, belive me. I’ve already started getting stuff onto the shelves, and it’s perfect.
That office chair, by the way? Also from the rejects corner, at half off. Purchased a couple of weeks ago. Have I mentioned I love IKEA?
I’ll snap some more pictures tomorrow, in daylight.
Juhu!
Fra Deer Darling, som foruten en svært lesbar blogg har en nettbutikk full av lekre saker :)
Med det følger det selvsagt en utfordring, nemlig å svare på følgende spørsmål:
1.Ta opp nærmeste bok og slå opp på side 18, linje 4. Hva står det der?
Shoreditch, Hoxton and Hackney are three conceptual entities jostling to occupy the same physical space with residents of the area altering their addresses in line with current fashion.
2.Hva var det siste du så på tv?
Jeg husker faktisk ikke, det var forrige helg (hvis man ikke teller det jeg overser av barnetv, da).
3.Bortsett fra datamaskinen, hva hører du nå?
Mannen som puster. Snart: På spåret på svensk tv.
4.Når var du sist ute og hva gjorde du da?
Var på jobb. På vei hjem hentet jeg Gambia-albumet. Mer om det senere (but I løøøøøøve it).
5.Hva har du på deg nå?
Mysbyxer i velour og en svart t-sjorte.
6.Hva var den siste filmen du så?
Eh. Halve Stuart Little 3 her før barnetv. Skjønt “så”, jeg prøvde vel egentlig å la være å se på. Ellers ser jeg utrolig lite film for tiden. Den siste jeg husker å ha sett på, i forstand “fulgt med på hele” er Toy Story 3 (som var FANTASTISK).
7.Skulle du overveie å flytte til utlandet?
Tja. Vi tenker på en måte på å ta et år eller to “ute”, enten i Storbritannia eller (når snuppa blir noe eldre) i Afrika noe sted. Det siste forutsatt at vi kan finne noe å gjøre der vi gjør nytte for oss, men ingen av oss er akkurat Norsk Folkhjelp-kandidater eller noe yrkesmessig, så jeg vet ikke hvor realistisk det er. Men jeg vil ikke flytte til utlandet permanent, nei. Jeg har bodd i andre land enn Norge og vet at før eller senere blir hjemlengselen for stor.
Awarden skal så sendes videre til syv stykker. Der sliter jeg litt, særlig siden maaaange har fått den før. På den annen side er det kanskje bare hyggelig å få den igjen? “Beautiful” på hver sin måte er følgende blogger(e):
Man står selvsagt fritt til å ignorere tildelingen, jeg er selv kjent for bekymringsløst å bryte kjeden dersom noen er gal nok til å sende meg kjedebrev, så jeg har forståelse for slikt.