Thursday, May 5, 2011

Hungry like the wolf for birds, if wolves ate birds the way I devour pointless market analysis.

Since I've been all about nesting this week I thought it would be a great time to utilize puns talk about birds.  I happen to like our feathered friends but I'm sure we've all cried a little at all the inane shit with birds on it that's everywhere just as much as we've laughpeed a little at Portlandia's Put a Bird On It.  But that kind of stuff - the retail trend - is where trends go to die a slow and poorly-thought-out infectious death.  So when I saw the world's foremost trend expert Lidewij Edelkoort talkin that special bird talk on Trend Tablet I figured it was a nice way to illustrate the birth of a real trend.  The kind that can define a decade and not one that you can find at Urban Outfitters.  Honeysuckit can, well, suck it.  


BEHOLD the 'lifestyle trend' where the word 'trend' isn't a gimmick you get to feel superior for snubbing (she says as she reclines on her Anthro pillow that may or may not have a bird on it..) but instead a socio-economic commentary in the form of pretty pretty pictures that forecaster sell to retailers for thousands of dollars only for them to put a bird on it.  Damn I want that job!


"now that we have recovered from the worst and are experiencing a new fluidity of movement, the economy and therefore culture will take us to a higher plane for a new and even better perspective. in a positive and optimistic mood, fashion and design will take flight and give us wings on the road to new colours, more texture and exalting creativity.  the world of birds is therefore our source of inspiration, with their interesting behaviour patterns previewing the society of man. living in flocks they inspire us to congregate and share, building nests and inviting us to rekindle the love and care we want to give our family and friends; transgressing borders they install in us a new sense of freedom from convention and control; gathering food they initiate the idea of local produce and seasonal harvest.  the collecting of twigs and debris to weave birds’ nests will inspire us to rekindle a keen interest in artistic and crafted weaving, with designer yarns spun from opposing and complementary matter like mohair with silk ribbons and leather and lurex.
the rituals of courting and mating by the male specimens drive us towards a more erotic experience of the night and a more exotic take on rituals, using colour, dance and sound as essential attributes."

Sometimes overanalyzing makes me *eye-motherfuckin-roll* but when it's about pretty things and feelings it makes me squee!   


More fashion and people:



"as the nerd of the birds the owl will never stop to intrigue us.  the professor of birds teaches us a lesson in endurance, dedication and perseverance.he is designed to live a nocturnal life, just like an online nerd working through the night, hunting for virtual prey."
There is so much to read at the Trend Tablet page but I had to include the online nerd owl with its virtual prey because I think she's actually talking about blogging.  I'm on the hunt, y'all!  I'm hungry like the wolf!  Wait, that's a different metaphor...





mmhhhh... red.




The home and interior trends:
"A soft and gentle universe of clear and optimistic colour is inspired by the fluffed-up downy character of endearing baby birds..... Confident without being functional, basic without being boring and tender without being tedious, these colours are the basis of our range for 2011.  An endearing start to a new period of nesting."
I didn't say you had to like it but you have to acknowledge that it's out there.  Besides, "confident without being functional" is the most geniusly crafted observation I've heard in a long time.  


"Birds of a feather flock together in inner city clans and neighbourhoods enabling different societal expressions to be recognised by the group.  Living a make-do mentality that will dominate design with sheltering sanctuaries and squatted industrial buildings.  A survival sense of aesthetics will give the creative community a chance to express more freely and without boundaries.  Therefore the end of the age of individualism has arrived, allowing us to network and cooperate.  An army of dark neutrals will revolutionise interiors, becoming abstract and minimal."




"More than ever, our focus is on authenticity, honesty and local colour.  Inspired by the revival of a rural culture and the birds that roam the farm, the colours want to be trustworthy and traditional, with a slightly frozen and whitewashed quality to make them lively and vibrant."


"Nesting has become a contemporary keyword to describe our current and crafted lifestyle; open-ended yet cosy and comfortable.... The arts & crafts movement is making an important revival, inspiring objects made by hand in timber, hide, bone, ceramics and glass. Filling the nest with unique pieces.  The creative consumer is born."


"A new and soft range of coquettish cosmetic colours meant to be used for an elegant and sexual purpose, giving a refined and genderspecific meaning to paint.  Caged birds of exotic origins are inspiring a highly-charged and erotic sense of aesthetics, drawing on the idea of the liberal bondage of beauty. Translated to the real world with the concretisation of female fantasises in private spaces like the personal bathroom, the secret walk-in closet and the remarkable revival of the boudoir—the ultimate female sanctuary."

That's pretty smart commentary for a look I find pretty blech.  But maybe that's YOUR lifestyle - we don't judge here at the Sauce.  Except when it's ugly.  Or dumb.  But most definitely when it's dumb AND ugly though...




"Highly intelligent and powerful birds have been dark symbols since the beginning of man.  Resourceful and operating with a strict hierarchy in a large flock called a murder, they have become icons of the gothic movement, living often in cemeteries and believed to assist the transition of the spirit to the after life.  Standing for dark and almost dramatic environments, so much loved by the avant-garde, and therefore introducing much darker colours for the home."

I already liked crows anyway so I'm totally trendy in my lifestyle.  But now I want to knit and paint something black.  And collect wolves.  Wolves are the new birds for emo hipsters.  You heard it hear first.  If we could somehow crossbreed them we'd be millionaires.  It worked for Dr. Moreau.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

This makes me exceedingly happy...

…that this is the worst of the debris that made its way into my yard after the terrible storms and tornadoes of the past week.   My house and neighborhood are okay – many downed trees and power lines but nothing that isn’t fixable.  Many fared much worse.

Getting back to a normal routine seems harder to accomplish not only because I don’t have an internet connection and am typing this at a Starbucks with 150 of my closest neighborhood friends, but because I drive by absolute devastation every day.  It’s a wholly different thing to see tragedy in person rather than see it on the news - especially if it's a place where you spend a lot of time. My friends and family closer to the damage don’t have power and have to boil their water – still lucky.   The constant background noise of sirens, chainsaws and helicopters around my house is just now starting to lessen.   Attempting to blog feels silly (nor do I really have the inclination to do so) and blogging about a brand new kitchen when my nearby neighbors have lost everything feels grotesque.   I was supposed to be having my final inspection last week the day the storms came so obviously that didn’t happen.  In addition, my contractor works with the fire department so I know he spent several sleepless days and nights helping victims.  And you wonder why I have a hard time being assertive with him when he is a HERO!  A hero with puppy dog eyes.

Pretty much the worst thing that’s happened to me is my power went out for a day.   I lost some food in the fridge, my house smelled like a candle store barfed and my delicate ladyperson sensibilities were offended when I was propositioned by a horny neighbor looking for a way to pass the apparently impossibly long night without tv.  Dude, calm your dick down and show some respect for me and, you know, the death and destruction a few miles away.  However he did throw in option of grilling me a pork chop which, I won’t lie, was rather tempting considering all I had at home was an apple and some stale crackers but um, no thanks.  I do draw the line at prostituting myself for food until the actual apocalypse comes.

Frankly all of those things can be considered kinda good – I still have a house that has the luxury of smelling like candle barf, I get to shop and restock my fridge, I spent some time huddled in a candlelit tub and I was deemed good enough for bored sex.   I’m on top of the world. 

Actually, the hardest thing I had to do was deciding whether it was more important to donate large amounts of tampons or peanut butter.  There are some things I would gladly forego a meal for if I had to make a choice...  But I opted for both.  And contact solution.  Nobody thinks of contact solution.  

So I spent the weekend in quiet domestic service (Time to get a smartphone!  And a battery powered radio…) here at the Ranch.  Washing windows, picking up candy-colored insulation from my yard blown in from gawd knows where and gratefully cleaning my baseboards.  I never thought I’d ever type ‘gratefully cleaning’ and ‘baseboards’ in the same sentence but a little perspective does that to a person.

So please pardon me while I try to find my internet connection and my sense of normalcy again.  I imagine it’ll be spotty for a time.

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

The Madame has cabinet fever in Alabama

My kitchen remodel must have been so stressful that Nick had to take an immediate vacation to Vegas to recover.   He didn't invite me to go to the Kitchen and Bath Show 2011 debauchery and drunkfest of 2011 but he was kind enough to invite me to post at the Cupboards blog a few times this week.

Greige Design via Cupboards via just get your ass over there
First up is a smattering of lustworthy cabinets in steely shades that almost make me want a new kitchen.  Almost...  It's not Vegas but it's still pretty saucy so sashay on over to see how the Madame goes Alabama style.


Hope you're having a great time in Vegas, Nick, with your gambling and drinking and glittering and good gawd I need a vacation too!!!

I come from the water.* And an old sagging couch

I get asked all the time: Madame, how do you do the voodoo that you do?  *chuckles*  Honey, pull up a tufted wingback chair and I'll tell you some not-so-secret secrets.



You too can create voodoo!  I'm of the opinion that everyone has some of that creative sauce within them - a wellspring that’s tapped into the primordial soup of awesomeness where ideas are infinite.  Some people seem to have ideas on draught (not me) but it could also take the shape of a shallow puddle, sometimes a gushing fire hydrant of tigerblood or perhaps a giant lake full of gross things and sharktopussies.  Everyone's is different.  Mine feels like an above ground pool because I'm classy.  Maybe there's some rainbow-colored spongey noodles floating around in there too...


Usually I get inspired by other manifestations of saucy creativity including but not limited to art, music, words, YOUR blog - yes you reading this, talking to children, talking to scientists and especially talking to children scientists, really good tv like reruns of The Golden Girls, all manner of designy things and wearing sparkly jewelry.  Whatever sorts of ideas that manage to get stirred up in my head then drag themselves out of my brain's primordial soup and onto the sunny shore (or splintery deck in this case...) for distribution.  Then it's filtered through a fine sieve of my personal collection of pop culture references and tragic childhood memories, dusted with glitter, spanked and then thrown out into the world.  Only then can it evolve into a majestic unicorn of gorgeous mood board awesomeness or a badass kitchen or other general amazingness.  More times than not it's a jackalope in the form of a lame dick joke that goes nowhere.  A dickalope.  It's really anybody's guess as to what these little drops of sauce will grow to be.  I just set them free from my brain and hope for the best.  They're yearning to be free!  Spread your wings and fly to your possibly successful destiny, dickalope!!  

And freedom is the key.  Giving yourself freedom is the way you break down all the walls and baby gates in your brain that surround your above ground pool of awesomeness to let your own ideas evolve.  



As a young Madame I had the good fortune of being in one of those special programs for Smarty McNerdypants where we were embarrassingly pulled away from regular class by an eccentric teacher with frizzy hair to attend a different class full of other Smarty McNerdypants kids.  It looked like a classroom on Hoarders with piles of yellowed newspapers and puzzles everywhere, old couches rather than desks and laminated reproduction Renaissance art taped on the cinderblock walls.  



We talked about big ideas not just nouns and verbs and spent our time solving problems using lateral thinking instead of addition and subtraction.  We weren't taught how to be creative, we were taught how to navigate through the roadblocks to get to the space where creativity just happened.  We made trails to our creative juice and then paved them with practice.  We were given the freedom to throw out some possible dickalopes and a safe place for them to fall when they failed.  At least for an hour or two each week.  


Everybody has ideas - some more than others - but creativity isn't gifted upon a fortunate few, it's a skill that can be developed and refined if you allow yourself the freedom to do so.**  People might ask where your ideas come from but they’re really asking how to find their own source of sauce.  Maybe they never did logic puzzles sitting on a sagging couch next to a boy who had a weird blinking problem and smelled like peanut butter so they don't know that they have the sauce too. 

all images are Barbara & Michael Leisgen via Little Lamb
So get free, y'all!  Climb a mountain or let your mind wander while you're brushing your teeth or read a blog and then nurture whatever frivolity comes from that and then set it free upon the world!  And then do that shit every day.

And if you can’t find any freedom a menacing deadline usually works wonders for pulling something creative out of your ass.  Turns out, that’s a pretty direct route to where your ideas are too.


*If you can name that song I'll give you twelve cool points and possibly a tongue kiss.

**You can't change what your pool looks like, only how you use your noodle.  And THAT, my friends, is the lamest pun in the history of the world.  A dickalope for sure.***

***Excessive footnoting is in homage to The Monster Apathy who footnotes like a muthafucka and has a blog full of freedom and inspiration.  And dick jokes. 


Today's post was part of Let's Blog Off - a twice monthly blogging extravaganza where all kinds of bloggers mouth off about a single topic.  This week we're exploring where we get our inspiration and ideas from.  Make sure to check out the other participants at the website.

Sunday, April 24, 2011

I need some industrial strength Calgon to take me away.

Now that I have 98% of a gorgeous kitchen it makes the rest of my house look even stankier than normal.  Particularly the bathrooms.  You can fake your way around some ugly furniture but nasty grout and gross cabinets are hard to style around.  Particularly if you've just found out that your sagging bathroom floor is beyond repair.  As in the subfloor has completely rotted away due to an ancient toilet leak and just fell off onto the ground [MS sidebar: when I bought my house my home inspector was about 117 and I'm guessing he didn't get up close and personal with ALL corners of my crawl space...] and the only thing that constitutes my "floor" - a term I'm using loosely here - is the mint and aqua mosaic tile and the 50 yr old cementy stuff below it holding it together.  Oh and air.  Now, every day when I brush my teeth it's like an adventure - Will I fall through the floor today?!!!  Ooooh living in the unknown is so dangerously fun!  


Right now there's a quick and dirty temporary fix (it might consist of some cinder blocks and magic caulk - I don't really know what the contractor did) until I can sell enough plasma to pay to properly rip up the entire floor to redo it.  Maybe a whole new bathroom depending on how the plasma market is doing these days...  I made sure that I wasn't flat broke after doing the kitchen but that doesn't mean I can do two remodels back-to-back.  Houses can be such assholes sometimes.  And aging home inspectors.


While I cry and make desperate attempts at finding a sugar daddy (AGAIN!) here are some bathrooms that make me lusty.
from Cote Maison
If I'm feeling all lusty with this bathroom I'm gonna need some curtains.  Maybe a shade... something... anything to protect against the entire DECK of people out there.  Because seriously - yum.


photography by Mai Linh via Emma's Design Blogg
Since I'm still in the fantasy part of the bathroom renovation this will do nicely.



from pinterest but real source??
I found this on Pinterest and it had the caption "It looks like a mermaid does her business here."  I can't improve on that statement in any way.


via House of Turquoise
Looks too Candice Olsen-y to me but it's so SHINY that I covet it.  I bet it has 0% stained grout and 100% of a floor.  Also, apparently you can't design a bathroom without rectangular vessel sinks now.  You just can't.


Feldman Architecture via decorpad
See?

via Mi Casa Es Su Casa
Or concrete ones.  Perhaps disastrous for putting on makeup...?  Toothpaste residue?  Questions that don't need to be answered right now because we're just fantasizing.  Also, I won't be getting either a vessel sink or a concrete one or any one that doesn't come from the Habitat ReStore so it really just depends on what they have available.


photography by Emily Gilbert via Desire to Inspire
I despise those shades but all those curves need lots of HUGS!!!



via Head Over Heels
Do you think people actually bathe here or is this just in my dreams?  


via Sacremento Street
The mix of new and old is so nice.  So very very nice.  I'm not sure how I feel about so much art in a bathroom but I know exactly how I feel about giant tubs like that.  That's right - lusty.


via Remodelista
But for the record: I.  Hate.  Dark.  Grout.


Elizabeth Dinkel via Houzz
Oh that's better.  Probably too traditional for me but after the prison bathroom above I'm easily swayed by the girly details and that tile.  My ovaries approve.


via re-nest
I'm kinda digging all this green.  Definitely digging that tile.  I'm NOT digging all that grout - Tilex Root Penetrator isn't a miracle worker y'all!


And then this:


via Full House
Sigh...  SOMEBODY GET ME AN OVAL TUB!!!  I need to just buy another home warranty and then pray I fall through the floor so they can pay for the repairs.  You can just buy a random home warranty right?!  I had one when I first bought the Ranch and those poor suckers were so sorry in the end.  Of course with my luck I'll buy one and then never fall through the floor and the quick and dirty temporary solution will last forever no matter how much tap dancing and jumping Charlemagne and I do in there.  

I'll keep dreaming.  Of bathrooms and feline/human choreography

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Jewelry for people who are cheap, lazy and easily distracted!

I'm the type of Madame that always has big dreams of all the crafty things I could make because hey, I've got a creative eye and mad skills in my hands so what couldn't I craft amiright?!  But I usually get about 75% done and totally lose interest just like the year I was going to paint watercolors for all my friends and family and only got about halfway through the first leaf before I got my ass to the closest Barnes & Noble.  Or the time I started cross-stitching a wall hanging of a wolf in front of a Southwestern sunset (DON'T JUDGE ME - IT WAS THE 90'S AND I WAS 10!) but only made it through one Kokopelli.  Let's not even mention the china cabinet that's been in storage for two years that I've been meaning to paint...  I did, however, craft the shit out some potholders and friendship bracelets in elementary school so maybe howling wolves and storage for my dining room just aren't my forte...  


So when I saw the bitchin DIY jewelry knockoffs at Honestly WTF my inner 5th grade crafty kid squeed a bit.






The original on top and the DIY hex nut bracelet version here
Well, heelllooo sexy.  I can braid things so I think I could totally make that AND wear the fuck out of it.  It's not like I'm not at the hardware store every damn day already.  I bet once you put that on you just never take it off like the hemp jewelry everyone wore when I was about 16 that you kept it on until it rotted off in the shower one day.  That's true commitment to accessories.  Also, pretty disgusting...







Original inspiration on top and the DIY version on bottom here
This one takes the best of friendship bracelets and combines it with all the tacky thrift store jewelry I may or may not already have a ton of...  The best part is the instructions seem like I could actually accomplish them before I even get bored by the Kokopelli!

But this one seems a little more time intensive...
via PS I Made This
Well damn!  It's like a cat's cradle multiplied by bling and divided by effort.  I'm not sure if I'm up to that kind of math and DIY-itude but I'd totally wear that.  Or find something that looks like that at the mall if my fingers got tangled up.

Fortunately Christmas is months away so I have plenty of time to craft some hex nut jewelry to go WITH the cross-stitched watercolor inspirational bookmarks I've decided to make for everyone! 

First I just have to tie dye the yarn... 

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

This makes me exceedingly happy.






Peabody's Penthouse from Rocky & Friends, 1959.  via Stopping Off Place
I don't know who Peabody is and I despise Rocky and Bullwinkle but if it's possible to have a crush on a cartoon dog from the 50's then I totally have one.  I think it's the glasses...  and his great taste in decor.


In related things that might make you exceedingly happy the winner of the "Lamest Giveaway in the History of the Internets" is....


ME.  Ok I forgot to eliminate the numbers that corresponded with my comments.  And also the comments of the people who just responded out of pity...


So after a couple of tries the real winner is...
I didn't rip up the paper for aesthetic reasons - the scissors were across the room...
Ginny Powell (@GinnyPowell) of the new blog A Cracked Door!  SQUEE!  Thanks for playing Ginny and I'll make sure to rub extra fabulosity on your special prize (I won't dry hump it since you're a heterosexual lady person) and get that in the mail!  

Happy Wooding!