Archive for the ‘Products’ Category


Posted on October 9, 2011 - by

DwellStudio

Some might argue that our home is done and decorated but others would say that will never be true! A home evolves over time as you collect great things and receive wonder gifts (our anniversary was a case in point, I now own this). DwellStudio just started offering home accessory items according to some Twitter friends and so I went to check them out – they didn’t disappoint!

I love the shape of these little urchin items. Too weird for Christmas decorations, I’d leave them out yearround.

Or use one all on its own.

This diamond cut vase reminds me of Epcot as well as many of the paper cutters I’ve been looking at lately. I wonder if this is made in a mold or handcarved. Either way it’s affordable ($48) and super cute.

Love this – they’re supposed to be pebbles but they look like ibuprofen to me – should I be worried :)

This was the piece that first caught my eye. Their orb object is made of iron and brass – I wonder how heavy it is. It reminds me of the work of Jordan Taler.


Posted on October 1, 2011 - by

Mollie Flatley

I’ve been so deep into StumbleUpon and Pinterest lately I’ve not been spending too much time on Etsy – but today on a pinboard I saw the stamps of Mollie Flatley and went straight to my favorite source for more info.

Mollie’s stamps are adorable and in my love for all things repetitive and mind-clearing, stamps seem to be something I’ve overlooked. Many of the artists I look at painstakingly recreate the same shape or image over and over and hinge them together – stamps would make all that a lot easier – though of course process trumps efficiency often!

Mollie’s Etsy store is called NoraJane and it says that she lives in North Carolina with four children!

I love the little animals and animal tracks her stamps leave behind. I can’t tell but I think Mollie must be carving all of these images herself.

She seems to have an affinity for antiques – as with the bicycles and keys above as well as animals, which is fine by me.

Another big win for Mollie is her awesome presentation. Her pics are simple but easy to see the results of, you know the size you’ll get and everything.

I love dots…and snowflakes so this makes perfect sense.

Open stars…beautiful – at $3.50 they’re one of the most affordable things I’ve ever posted about and I love them!


Posted on September 18, 2011 - by

Tom Price

I’m all about being able to make things in the most efficient manner possible. A lot of my crafts projects don’t turn out quite perfect as a result but they’re functional. When I first saw Tom Price’s chairs I thought that must take so long to get the seat / bowl shape so perfect. Then I read his site!

Those are cable ties, made into a chair. It looks like an urchin to me – hence my initial interest. It also sort of looks like a hedgehog.

Close up of the melt – as I was saying before – how would you streamline this process of melting a chair shape into a pile of cable ties? If you’re Tom you’d heat up a chair mold and just push it into the ball of ties! It makes so much sense when you hear it but I really would not have thought of it…and I’ve taken many casting classes, which functions under similar principles.

These are common plumbing tubes. Interestingly, if you go to his site you can see he’s started making these where he cuts the tubes and they’re more chair like but I like these ones that are larger, more aggressive and look like they could protect you.

He uses slices of these same tubes for phenomenal, cloud-like installations! I love how that looks and it’s taken over a whole room. We’ve hung a lot of art and stuff on our walls lately – maybe I need to start considering the ceiling!

Another chair, this time of hose. I like how this one burned. The interesting things about recreating the same technique on multiple materials is that each material acts differently. I can imagine burning tolerance is one thing that is pretty unique to each materials.

I saved my favorite for last – the blue rope. I like how this one melted into a smooth capsule. My first thought was, are these weatherproof? If so I could see a bunch of them in a meadow around a bonfire pit. I love the color and the knotting – very cool. We’re getting up now and heading down to the SoWa Open Studios here in Boston – I’m sure I’ll have more to show later!


Posted on July 29, 2011 - by

Allison Patrick

Normally I hope to find artists under little hidden rocks or from link digging so deep I don’t know how I got there but today I came upon Allison Patrick in one of my usual and very public haunts, Etsy! I love looking at things for our apartment on Etsy and a lot of our artwork and furniture has come from the sellers and artists on the site. Allison started a design firm after graduating from architecture school. She also makes fabulous lamps!

Allison lives and works in NYC and her studio space looks really neat. She spun off her lamp business into Zipper8Lighting as the collection expanded.

I like how repetitive her pieces are, and meticulous!

Allison was a Featured Seller today on the homepage, which is a great thing for her business. I just think her pieces are so spectacular. This one is of fortune tellers like you play with as a child. She uses existing lamp frames so the pieces end up being about 12 inches across.

Can’t wait to see what she makes next!


Posted on April 28, 2011 - by

Tamara Magel

Two weeks have gone by in a blink! I’ve been busy on projects for our home, which include sewing curtains, cleaning the oven (it was a process), patching holes in the master bathroom (after therapeutically removing the drywall mollies), and more. But I’m back and in the time I was absent from posting, Tamara Magel’s online shopping site went up. Tamara is one of the coolest people I’ve met through Nest, a micro-bartering non-profit I volunteer with, which is saying something as the group attracts the coolest women out there. Tamara has a great showroom in NYC and when I visited in January I wanted everything – Tamara assured me it would all be up online soon and she wasn’t lying. It’s here and I love it all!

As someone not very familiar with interior design officially I can’t imagine defining Tamara’s style but she has some really cool table top items by artists that I absolutely adore like the long grassy ones above. They remind me of a meadow.

The above and below are pierced stoneware vases. I don’t think they’re lined so can’t hold water I don’t think but dried grasses would look great in them. They really are prickly to the touch – I saw them in person and they’re beautiful!

My mom has many an item that fall within what she calls her “useless vessel” collection including 100s of pitchers, vases and bowls. While these vessels too might not serve a functional purpose they are so awesomely cool. The prickly one below would be a great juxtaposition with some elegant flowers.

And as always, I’m still on the hunt for the perfect pendant light for our living / dining room. The more I think about it I feel we need something that has multiple bulbs as the room is so big and the ceilings so high but this industrial one is still tugging on my heartstrings.

Since we ended up going with more subtle fabrics for the curtains, no maze / trellis patterns were bought, I’m thinking more and more that we should get these pillows for the guest room to satisfy the craving.

Now I just need to figure out where to put the toile in the house to satisfy that need of a certain someone…


Posted on April 7, 2011 - by

Daisy Knights

I’m back on the jewelry bandwagon and recently learned about the young and awesome, Daisy Knights, a British jewelry designer who has had a quick rise to fame it seems like. Her work is sold all over, including on Net-a-Porter, which is really awesome as it’s so popular for shoppers!

People probably know by now that I love animals and their parts too, in jewelry form. Gogo Ferguson was when I first really got into this stuff and Daisy’s antlers are equally beautiful.

Shells and the sea are just as critical to my happiness. I love jewelry that incorporates shells – I wear a sterling sanddollar on my left hand every day and have for years. Daisy has a collection of shell pieces and these studs are great. They remind me of the mussel necklace that I loved from Twigs & Heather.

Anemone? Not sure, but I’m going to think of it this way in my mind. I like that Daisy makes sets and sticks to an uncluttered line of just a handful of subjects for them. I like this anemone-like one in both stud and ring form, below.

I adore a thin banded ring. It makes the subject or the ring or stone look so much larger and it makes your hands look so much dantier. Daisy’s pieces seem delicate but durable.

Love!


Posted on April 5, 2011 - by

Tie Backs

Sunday marked our one month anniversary in our new apartment! While exciting as that is, and while the progress we’ve made has been awesome, there are still some serious things missing. Don’t even get me started on our dining room chair / backorder debacle – we’ll be seeing those in May now thanks to Restoration Hardware. The other thing that continues to be up for discussion is curtains. I decided that I’ll make them (as I did four awesome throw pillows this weekend), now we just have to pick a fabric and get them going. I see another trip to Zimman’s in our very near future. Even before we get the curtains done though we’ve started a conversation on tie backs – as if curtains weren’t enough! Who knew there were so many different ways to hold them back.

Everyone knows I have a nautical angle on life, hence the rope and shell tie backs above. The rope tie back come from a British company called Stair Ropes, which is really cool – I know I’ve seen rope banisters before and I really like them. The shells are a DIY project in the making, get some drilled shells and have at it says Completely Coastal. The other two are much more traditional tie backs, a tassel and embrasses. Number 1 comes from Designers Guild, the Briati tie back, which is beautiful. Where else in your house is it okay to have pom poms? I can see the tie back item becoming a hot topic for a time for us. The simplest are the embrasses with little adornment but that get the job done. We’ll see what we end up with as time goes on, first stop is fabric though.


Posted on March 25, 2011 - by

Jamie Joseph

In preparation for our impromptu Chicago trip this weekend I, again, trolled through the Elements Chicago website, which I feel like I should just go see in person since I spend so much time oggling their items. More jewelry caught my fancy in my little jewelry binge today. This time I came up the beautiful stones / jewelry of Jamie Joseph. I’m fairly certain I saw one of these sparklers on my friend Kathryn the other night too and was blown away by the quality of the stones in person.

Oooh Peridot, you are such a great color green. I’m not sure if it’s in fashion right now but I do love green these days.

The above stone is Swiss Blue Topaz – unbelievably rich color. I love big cocktail rings and this fits the bill. The coolest thing I think about this line is that it’s made by a duo, Jamie and Jeremy and Jeremy is a woodworker / craftsman turned stone cutter. I think I have a lot of rocks in my craft room but I bet I’ve got nothing on him.

I love that these rings are sometimes punctuated by diamonds. The variety of metals used within each ring reminds me of another favorite jeweler of mine, Nava Zahavi, though her pieces are more organic / rough looking.

Oooh Moonstone – a constant favorite. Also, notably, compared with other jewelry I’m written about the Jamie Joseph line is more affordable – the rings I’ve seen online are in a range but really large beautiful ones can be under $1,000.

Not everything they do is rings too – they have a honeycomb collection, above, that I think is fabulous. My bee / hive obsession can now spread through to jewelry.

So elegant…I love all of their pieces!


Posted on March 25, 2011 - by

Pomellato

After weeks trapped in the decorating mindset we’re taking a mini-break this weekend and heading to Chicago. The impetus for the trip is the hockey game tomorrow but in the spirit of leaving our “nearly there” apartment behind, I’m scamming only on jewelry today – specifically Pomellato jewelry, which was featured in the Financial Times’ special section on watches & jewelry this morning.

Their jewelry is like candy! Readers here know that I love stones set without backings so that the color of the stone can come through.

These rings, the Nudo, were the ones in the newspaper today – they are so simple but really elegant! I like how raised the stones are but yet smooth so they wouldn’t snag so much on sweaters.

I don’t really wear necklaces that often but these are so pretty I had to include them.

The thing that I really like about their designs, which are out of Milan and have been made since the 60s, are that they used contrasting semi-precious gemstones. The purple and green combo in the above picture is a favorite…and it is my birthday in 2 months!

Again with the contrast! How cool? I love the turquoise and purple and the green and blue ones – they are so gorgeous and the facets, while regular, still look pretty organic.

Their settings are great and very sculptural. There are a few setting I saw on the site that look like horns or thorns around the stones themselves.

And again…with the contrast. I just love them and I’m not that into gold!

I love the stones running up the settings too – very cool and not something done all the time. They have a section of more ornate, over the top rings though and this seems to be a specialty of theirs – see one below!

That’s a LOT of diamonds!!!

I should probably stop with the pictures but I just can’t get enough – the colors are so bright and saturated they make it feel like summer here in the freezing cold of Boston! Just one last one :)

Perfection!


Posted on March 22, 2011 - by

Quadrille Fabrics: China Seas

There are times when I post things where I feel very, very late to the party. I feel this way about the fabrics from China Seas, which apparently everyone already knew were in existence and awesome. We’ve been looking at fabric every weekend. We drive up to Zimman’s in Lynn and paw through rows of different things to reupholster with and love every minute of it but we always seem to pick the same types of fabrics: ikat, stripes, and trellis / lattice prints.  Low and behold we stumbled upon China Seas, not at the store but on One Kings Lane.

I tried to pick out just a few of my favorites from this collection but it got out of hand so I picked a few colors in a row from each that I loved…even though I sort of love them all. The above is called Java Grande and you can get these fabrics in indoor or outdoor suncloth.


Macoco II, above, I also love. It reminds me of some of the repetitive drawings I’m a fan of, just going back and forth, over and over with hashs like you’d find on a dodgeball.

I can’t stop myself from wanting these cool patterns all over – this seems Egyptian to me. Called, Ziggurat Reverse. I have no idea what I’d put it on but something tells me this reupholstery phase is far from over.

Maybe at our next house we’ll have outdoor space and we can get some groovy porch furniture outfitted with the above pattern, Aga Reverse.

Or this…Edo Grande. It’s alarming how much I like all of these. Maybe it’s the fact that we had dreary snow / sleet here in Boston yesterday and so I’m itching for some brightly colored somethings in my life again.

And Bali Hai to round this little snapshot out. Really though I would take any of the fabrics from this collection. I just poked around on Ebay and there are some remnants up there – hopefully I can get a hook up to get some yardage and make seat cushions. Our chairs are backordered til nearly May so I’ve got time!


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