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By Amber, on February 5, 2012, at 9:39 pm You know what? I just don’t want to. I am not lacking obligations this year, and it’s barely February. Phew, that’s a load off.
Lots of stuff going on around here. My job is wearing me out and I’ve been missing my afternoon naps, so I sleep like a baby but I dream about work. This new job is more challenging than any I’ve ever had and I love that, but I find myself needing a lot more recuperation on the weekends than ever before. As for Mark’s job, he’s counting down until he leaves it this summer to start a full-time master’s program. This program is essentially the reason we moved to Houston, so it’s exciting for him to finally get started. For a couple years we’ll just be INKs instead of DINKs! (Dear anybody, would you like to sponsor my wardrobe during this time?)
What else…I decided I needed more to do at work (ha), so I’m trying to get a corporate Toastmasters club started. The feeler I put out through the training coordinator got a very positive response, so I’m working on setting up the demo meeting. At some point I will surely ask myself what the heck I was thinking, but for now I’m excited.
Remember the aluminum prints I ordered on Cyber Monday? Yeah, me neither. They’ve been sitting on the dining room table for a couple months and I keep forgetting they exist, but I finally hung them this weekend. The shot that is my least favorite ended up looking the best because of the way the light catches it. The image almost seems to jump out of the picture. I’m glad we ended up with the aluminum prints because the windowless bathroom they’re in was so dreary. Hard to capture that effect in a photo (had to turn off the flash for the first because they reflect so much light), but here they are anyway!
By Amber, on December 4, 2011, at 8:07 pm This year for my birthday, my parents selected a few scarabs from my very long insect wishlist and had them professionally mounted! I have long dreamed of having an extensive collection of mounted insects, but for some reason I buy shoes instead. I’ve got a very long way to go on my collection, so for now these have been given a place of honor on the living room bookshelves.
The names are helpfully printed on a sticker on the back of the frame. Say hello to my little friends:
 Chrysina woodi, USA  Chalcosoma caucasus, Malaysia  Chrysophora chrysochlora female, Peru I could look at these all day! Thanks Mom & Dad!
By Amber, on November 20, 2011, at 8:00 pm Last year in Santa Fe, I saw some beautiful paper flowers but didn’t know how I would get them home. I’ve kept an eye out for them everywhere since then, but to no avail. This year I decided they were coming home with me even if I had to hold them on the airplane! Fortunately it didn’t come to that, as we went to pay and discovered that the vendor ships for a very reasonable fee. They arrived last week and yesterday I finally arranged them. I wish we had bought twice as many, but we’ll just have to buy some more next time we visit.
Birds of paradise are one of my favorite flowers. For about the same price as real ones, these will last much longer!
 I have been envisioning these white callas in that vase ever since we bought it! Perfect. That framed picture, by the way, is a card that we bought during our first trip to Santa Fe. I think it was the very first thing we bought.
As an aside, you may have noticed that I have slipped to two posts a week. I am trying to correct that but the prognosis for the rest of the year is poor. Also, my 365 project is so hopelessly messed up that I am just waiting anxiously for the darn year to end. I keep missing days, and then I procrastinate posting what I have, which only wreaks havoc on filing them correctly. So there’s that. The 52 Project it is for 2012!
By Amber, on October 23, 2011, at 10:56 pm What a whirlwind weekend! I spent lot of time with the important Fs: friends, family and food! If you asked Sweet Pea what the best part of the weekend was, she would tell you it was the beautiful Bakhtiari rug that my parents brought her — er, brought Mark and me. They bought it about a decade ago and it doesn’t match the colors in their new home, but it does perfectly match ours! Of course, Sweet Pea doesn’t care — she’s busy loving the fact that she is finally allowed on carpet, which is not the case elsewhere in the house.
She likes that rug so much that she didn’t wake us up by serenading us the way she usually does on weekend mornings. She doesn’t need us for entertainment anymore — not when there are so many little patterns and fringe pieces to pounce on!
I hope you had a nice weekend. Today after our customary enormous Sunday brunch I made another bracelet, and this time I documented the process so I can share it Tuesday or Thursday evening. I also have a random beauty product review to share.
Let’s go get ‘em! Have a great week!
By Amber, on September 4, 2011, at 10:17 pm Our walls are pretty bare. In the three years in this house, we have hung more decorations in our guest room than in the rest of the house combined. The total outside of that room amounts to one painting (a seashore scene by my grandmother’s friend) and one framed poster (a panoramic view of Washington, D.C., my sorta-hometown).
Mark suggested a while back that we decorate with some of the photos that I’ve taken, and I started to compile some of my favorite shots to choose from. I knew I wanted the simplicity and gallery feeling of stretched canvas prints, and we finally ordered some. We hung them in our bedroom this weekend, and we couldn’t be happier with the result:
They came out exactly as I had envisioned, and I can’t believe how much warmer they make the room. Plus they remind me of things we did together — the first and third were taken in Fredericksburg, TX, and the second and fourth were taken in Glacier National Park, MT.
Originally I wanted to use a Houston business to do the prints, but the one I had in mind answered my questions in a way that made me think attention to detail might be an issue, so I ended up using CanvasPress, which is just a few hours away in Round Rock. Their online tool is extremely user-friendly, and they run some great specials on their mailing list (like 20% off this weekend — I am trying to quickly decide what else I can submit for print under the deadline!). They have a first-time customer code (FF25) that gives you 25% off your entire order. I used it and essentially got one print for free. Shipping is pretty reasonable and they arrived very quickly, carefully packed and individually wrapped in plastic.
I’m just so psyched about how these turned out! I’ll have to be careful or pretty soon we may have no empty wall space left at all.
By Amber, on July 31, 2011, at 10:00 pm This is a project that was many years in the making (thousands, if you want to be literal). When I lived in New Jersey I bought a multi-compartment shadowbox that I intended to fill with various treasures. For some reason, I never did it. While I had my rock collection out the other day, I finally pulled together enough elements from my childhood fossil and nature collections to finish this project.
(As an aside, I got my shadowbox from Michael’s, but I don’t see it on their website, so you’ll have to check your store. I did find one that looks identical on Target’s website.)
I set out all of my items onto the background, set the dividers over top, and began gluing. I intended to use putty in case I wanted to do something else with the specimens in the future, but quickly realized that hot glue was going to be far more practical, particularly for the most fragile items like the sand dollar:
 If you make a critical mistake or just want a different background color, you can buy a piece of posterboard to replace the background and cut it to size. In my shadowbox there is a different backing piece that goes behind the background and attaches the board to the frame. If yours doesn’t have this, I suggest buying the posterboard.
Once you’re done, set the glass and frame on top, gently tilt the whole assembly, secure the fasteners, et voila:
For as many years as I put this off (probably about 5), it took maybe 20 minutes at most to put together and turned out even better than I expected. I’m trying to figure out what else I can give the shadowbox treatment. :)
What would you put in your shadowbox?
By Amber, on July 28, 2011, at 9:39 pm As a child, I had a lot of collections. As an adult…I still have a bunch of them. Most of them have been sitting in boxes since we got to Texas three years ago. They bring me absolutely no enjoyment that way, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready to part with them!
I was recently inspired by a friend’s home to pull some of those treasures back into the light of day and keep them there. Read on to see how you can pass off your childhood collections as decor!
I started with my rock and mineral collection:
Also needed: an apothecary jar (I got mine from Michael’s, but these are so popular right now that you should be able to find them at any large craft store) and tongs. I thought I would need the styrofoam, but I didn’t. You might. It depends on how big of a nerd you are.
Start filling! My strategy was to fill by color. I had an enormous chunk of pyrite, so I used the tongs to carefully place that in the middle of the very bottom and put smaller pieces of pyrite, hematite and anything sparkly around it. I also placed the larger, less-interesting stones (pumice, unpolished marble) into the middle of the column as I went, which prevented me from needing to cut a piece of the styrofoam as filler. If you do need it, you might want to spray it first with that craft paint that looks like stone finish.
When you’re done, you’ll have something like this:
Follow the jump to see the second project!
Continue reading Childhood collections, all grown up
By Amber, on May 22, 2011, at 10:00 pm Though I am not a Buddhist, I like the Buddhist concept of non-attachment. It’s difficult for me, as for many Americans, not to become entrapped by things. My nature is that of a magpie, or put less nicely, a packrat. I like things, darnit! I mean, obviously. It wouldn’t be so bad if I were better at getting rid of the old things, but I’m not.
Mark is very good at aesthetic asceticism. He owns maybe three pairs of shorts, two pairs of long casual pants, and two pairs of dress pants (granted, he does get to wear pajamas to work, but I still don’t think the count would be much different otherwise). The man once moved cross-country with all of his worldly possessions in the bed of an F-150! But when he suggested that I transfer all of my cds to a leather binder like the one in which he keeps his, I thought, “And throw away half of the album art? What about the ones that came in cardboard cases?” Eventually, however, I realized they would all be far more useful there than jumbled in a big tub as they’d been since we moved, and decided this would be a good time to practice non-attachment.
He said, “The binder holds 100 cds. Do you think you have more than 100?” ”No, definitely not!” I said several times, despite the fact that I hadn’t actually seen them in three years. One hundred is so many! So I stacked them up and got to work:
Oops, that kind of looks like more than 100. Fortunately there were a lot of mix cds that I’d burned myself, which I no longer need now that I can connect my ipod to my car stereo. If I had wanted to keep those, I’d have really been in trouble. This was the pile of empty cases and discarded cds when I was done:
Et, voila! All my cds, many of which I forgot I owned, finally accessible where I can enjoy them again (and the ones that didn’t fit in the case, stowed away under the bookshelves):
 As difficult as this little exercise in non-attachment may have been, it was fun to relive my college years, which was when I bought the vast majority of my collection (it was mostly cassettes before that — and that collection is a whole other story).
Oh, and I don’t suppose this case would have done me much good anymore, anyway:
 Done any housecleaning lately? Find anything good?
By Amber, on May 10, 2011, at 9:17 pm I never shared what we brought home from Playa del Carmen!
We have kind of a Dia de los Muertos thing happening in our bookshelves. We both love Mexican folk art, and my birthday falls on the first of the two days of celebration. Shopping for folk art in Mexico as a Texas resident feels a little strange, since we can easily find much of this stuff practically in our own backyard, but Mark and I did come across a couple things that called out to us. And with these latest additions, I think we are reaching official theme status!
And the rear view:
The wooden one came from a random store along the stretch of shops where they kept trying to sell Mark marijuana. We spied a cart full of the ceramic ones on one of the first nights and I enquired, in Spanish, as to the price. I understood about 10% of the response, just enough to determine that we would buy one another night when we weren’t headed to a bar. Mark and I quietly discussed getting it home safely on the plane, and I don’t know whether the woman had understood us, but she picked one up by the eye sockets and began banging it on another to show us how strong they are. Okay then! We told her we’d be back otra noche, which she seemed to take as a haggling tactic, so Mark told her we had to beber. She smiled and we parted ways.
We went back on our last night and picked one out. Choosing a color was the hard part! I have a feeling we might bring home another if we go back…
By Amber, on February 20, 2011, at 10:19 pm I have a problem, and Sephora is enabling it:
That may not look like much, but there are three or four layers of perfume samples there. I know I have mentioned that I am terrible at using things up, though I was in fact successful in that particular venture with all the lotions and I might go so far as to say I’ve partially reformed my ways. But perfumes are a special challenge. I almost always choose perfumes as my three free Sephora samples because I think most cosmeceuticals are gimmicky and overpriced, and I’m certainly not going to find my dream foundation with a dime-sized dot in a color that has been specially selected to not match me. On the other hand, I never tire of smelling new fragrances! It’s because of a Sephora sample that I found one of my two most-worn fragrances, but every one I commit to takes me that much farther from using up the other samples I have.
I hesitate to throw out the ones I don’t especially like, because usually you can layer them into something wonderful and unique, which is a process I quite enjoy. That’s assuming, of course, that you can find them in your stash. This weekend I started reorganizing my nightmare of a cosmetic drawer and gathered up all those little samples into one accessible place so I can hopefully start thinning the herd.
It’s going to take me a while to get through all of those samples. What types of products should I choose for my three free samples in the meantime? I’d go with moisturizers, but I haven’t even shown you all the moisturizer samples I’ve amassed when they’ve substituted for my requests!
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