Mirror, mirror, on the wall

From time to time we find some great little treasures on Craigslist. Now, don't get me wrong, you can find some really hideous stuff on there, but if you are patient and are willing to wait a while, you may uncover some hidden gems. It's very similar to going to garage sales or thrift stores. For every hundred links you click on, ten will be something you are interested in. And of those ten, one or two will be in your price range. We've really utilized Craigslist since we bought our house, as we suddenly had a bunch of rooms to furnish and decorate!



One of our most recent finds was this fun and funky mirror. We already have a very similar one in our master bedroom,  and as I am slowly collecting stuff for the very far-off date when we will be decorating the basement, I knew that this mirror would look great anywhere we put it. My initial idea is to use it in the basement bathroom, but we will see. :-) My decorating ADD might kick in before that. :-) Anyways, what I love about this mirror is the intricate scroll and detail in the frame. It makes it more like a work of art than a mirror.



Just for kicks, I put it up on my mantel to see what it would look like. It looks pretty nice there, and it is always good to know that I have lots of options. :-)  I liked how it filled that whole space of the little jut out part.



I picked up this mirror a few months back, I think there was still snow on the ground. I had to go into the city to get it, and when I went to meet the seller, she lived up in the third story of a house so she had to come all the way downstairs to let me in the main door. As we were walking up the stairs, she mentioned something about her dog.  Then, when we finally reached the third floor she yells "Oh no! She did!" and I was like, um what? Turns out her dog loves to play with the door, and had locked her out of the apartment on multiple occasions, this being one of them. So, I went and bought a hot chai while I waited for the girl's boyfriend to come over and let her back in. So funny. Anyways, just a little bunny trail there. :-)

So, considering that this mirror might end up in the basement, and definitely needs a paint job, I had some fun in Photoshop envisioning what colors might look best. I could always go the safe route, and paint it black. I know it looks good, because my bedroom mirror is black.



Or, I could update that dingy gold color with a fresh coat of white, which would also be nice, albeit a bit predictable.



I could let down my hair and paint it red, which could be really fun,



Or, I could really go wild and paint it green,



yellow,



or my very favorite color, turquoise. :-)



What do you think? Without regards to where this mirror will end up, or what color scheme it will need to fit in with, do you have a favorite option?

New Look for de Blog :-)

My decorating ADD has set in once again, and I've changed things up all over again. I like the simpler look of this template, and it is way easier to use. :-) This is actually the same template that my friend (real life and bloggy!) Jenna uses. I'm obviously tweaking this a bit to fit my needs, but I like the simple clean lines of this template. Much less cluttered. What do you think?

Our Wedding

Yesterday we celebrated our fourth wedding anniversary, so I figured that today would be a great day to show you some pictures of our wedding. I won't go into a lot of detail, but I wanted to show you some of my favorites from the our special day.

Wedding planning is so stressful, but it was all worth it once I was walking down the aisle, about to marry my best friend!



During the ceremony, our pastor asked us to take a moment and look around at all of our friends and family, gathered there to celebrate us. That is one of my favorite memories of the whole day!



Some shots from the ceremony...

Heidi sang From This Moment On, so beautiful. :-)



We exited the church under a canopy of beads, so pretty and fun.



Aren't my girls pretty? They carried Spanish fans, and all four of us were barefoot for the ceremony. Between bare feet and their little flower hair wreaths, they looked like little fairies going down the aisle. :-)



I bet you can guess which of these guys I think is the most handsome. (The one second from the right :-)



I loved, loved, LOVED my dress. It was spectacular, and I felt absolutely gorgeous in it.



We had a quick, sweet little reception, and then Lover gave me the best surprise. I wanted to go somewhere pretty for pictures, and he had booked a private garden for our wedding pictures. It was just Lover and I and the photographers, and it was incredibly romantic and relaxing. The perfect end to our perfect day.



It was like a perfect little secret garden, hidden away from everyone.

They don't normally allow bridal parties in, but they made an exception for us. So our pictures are one of a kind!

Man, I really love this guy. Kind of ridiculous how much. :-) This next one is one of my absolute favorites of the whole day.



Oh, and this is the picture that inspired my birthday gift painting. So pretty.

I know you are all now jealous of my awesome husband and our wonderful life together. ;-) What can I say, I am blessed beyond measure. Hope you have a wonderful weekend!

Day 4 in the month of creativity

Heard of Wordle? I spent a ridiculous amount of time today making word clouds and getting them to look just like I wanted them to. :-)  It was very fun. ;-)

One of a Kind, Original, Singular Art

Back when we moved into Wendhurst Castle, Lover and I made an agreement that we would not display anything other than original art in our castle. Well, art, and photographs of course. Which I guess are a type of art. So, yeah, only original art. :-) We entered this agreement knowing that it would take a while to find stuff we agreed on, and it would take even longer to be able to afford our own original art. But, we made the agreement, and it has thus far stood the test of time, like many of our other agreements. Some other time, ask me about the day I agreed to never bring anything Muppets related into the house, in exchange for being able to watch It's a Wonderful Life every Christmas. :-) Okay, now back to art. For quite a while, the only painting displayed in our home was the one over our mantel, that you've seen before.



I found it for five dollars at a garage sale the first summer in our castle, and I snatched it up faster than you can say "original oil painting" :-) I loved the fact that it was from another couple that had owned it for decades, and that it went perfectly with our color scheme while reminding me of my beloved Spain.  And, so, there it sat, for nearly a year, holding the singular, lonely position of  original painting in our home.

But then, Lover's mother took a trip to Bolivia, which is her beloved homeland, and she gifted us with this beautiful watercolor that she found there.



I absolutely adore watercolors, especially because I can paint something somewhat pretty if I am using watercolors. And I love the way that all the colors blend together into one cohesive picture. I also love the translucent quality that all watercolors have.  So that made Original Art Piece Numero Dos.



Then, while trolling for large frames at Goodwill, I stumbled upon this little beauty. I'm always looking for larger scale pieces for the mantel, because it is so freaking ginormous that it needs bigger pieces to fill it up. I thought this little painting would look pretty in the corner.



Again, it has a somewhat ethereal quality, like a watercolor, but it is oil. It signed simply, just "hugo". And I love the soft colors that it brings to that corner of the mantel.



Then, for our dating anniversary in May, I made over a store bought canvas from Target to create this little canvas to display one of Lover's poems. He had mentioned months ago that he wanted this poem up somewhere in our house, and I had been saving this as an anniversary gift for a while.



Shortly after we started dating we came across the saying "Friends Yesterday, Lovers Today, Soulmates Forever" and loved it, because it summed up our decades long relationship perfectly. We met when we were toddlers, and had been friends for about twenty years before we started dating. :-) We even used the saying on our wedding invitations. So when Lover wrote this poem centered around "our" saying, well you can imagine I was delighted.



In case you can't read the writing, the poem reads:

Friends Yesterday

Friendship is that depth of familiarity that sustains us through life.

Lovers Today

Love is that blessed fairy that when softly landed in our hearts breathes the inspiration of poetry.

Soulmates Forever

Soulmates share that singular blend of friendship and love that does not merely sustain and inspire but truly gives both life and poetry their only free expression.

And yes, I know that I am incredibly blessed to have such a wonderfully romantic husband who writes me poetry. :-) But, because Lover is constantly raising the bar, the following week on my birthday he gave me something even more spectacular.

He commissioned an artist to do a painting of my favorite photo from our wedding. The painting is so beautiful, and I love how it captured the mood of the picture, but has a definite artistic quality to it that was not in the original photo. Is that not the best birthday present ever?

So that's our current lineup of original art. Obviously there are no one of a kind Goyas or Monets in the collection, but they are so much more meaningful to us. Which one is your favorite?

The Month of Creativity

I'm really excited about August. Like, super excited. :-) I have voluntarily declared a moratorium on all things work related on the house, like demolition, painting, laying floors, taking out planters, etc. Instead, I am going to CREATE for a solid month. I have a million and one creative projects that have been sitting on the back burner for forever, and I am going to use the month of August to get some of them done. Oh, and some reading. And some sitting in the sun. :-) Lover thinks I am crazy, because he tells me all the time that if I want to spend the afternoon just reading a book, I should just do it. I shouldn't need to schedule it into my time. :-) But that's me. I blame it on overachiever-first child syndrome, and all that other baloney. :-)

I want to make some jewelry, maybe even some of the inspirational stuff I posted about a million years ago.  I also want to maybe, maybe do some more watercolors. Oh, and I want to print out some new pictures for our dining room. And alter a few shirts and dresses. And catch up on some scrapbooking. And.... hee hee. I am going to have a blast. I may blog about it, but then again, let's be real, the blog has suffered over the last few months. I'll try to at least post a few times a week. We'll see. :-)

Hope you're having a fun summer too!

Pearl Buck in China

I recently signed up for a review program for audio books, and the first one I received was Pearl Buck in China. I have to say, I really enjoyed listening to this biography of an early 20th century missionary daughter who became a famous fiction writer later on in life. Although I came to understand that Pearl Buck's life is quite famous, I had never heard of her, nor had I read any of her books.  So I really enjoyed the opportunity to learn about her life, and the events that shaped her vision of life and ultimately led to her writing some of the most influential books about China of the early 20th century, including The Good Earth.

I think that one of the reasons I enjoyed this book was because I too grew up on the mission field, although not in Asia! I found Pearl's life very interesting, as she dealt with the strangeness of being American in China, and being not quite American in America. She struggled all her life with fitting in, with only a brief period in her teen years where she was popular and content. Later in life, once her books made her famous, she was in high demand, but always struggled with relating to the society she was writing for.  She experienced so much sadness and loss in her life, but all of these things shaped her into the writer she was destined to become, and her books have touched people for decades.

The audio book itself is very well done. It is broken into chapters, each averaging about an hour to and hour and a half. The author, Hilary Spurling, does an excellent job reading the book, speaking in a very clear, unhurried manner that makes it easy to understand. At times her British accent is a bit distracting, as the pronunciation of a few words is so completely different from American pronunciations, but overall I had no trouble understanding her. The biography is well written and well researched, and was a very interesting "read!"

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this audiobook free from Oasis Audio as part of their Review Program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.