a tea set that I suspect my mother will disapprove of

What do you think? I just bought this set on Etsy. The best part about it? It's super baby pink. The second best thing about it? The seller said it's Haviland, Danish mid-century modern, but it looked art deco to me, so I did a bit of research and yup! it's marked Johann Haviland, Bavaria, which means that it can only have been produced between 1907-1924.

Now I have to tell my mother that I bought a pink tea set. She's going to wrinkle her nose gingerly and wish me well. She's a Norwegian from Montana stock, loves Sir Edmund Hillary, Martha Ballard, and other stoic heroes, and wears jeans and a bit of vintage Marimekko. She likes whites, and woods, and blues, and the occasional red. Not into Bauhaus pastels. And that's where she and I lovingly agree to differ.

fortnum & mason green, grapefruit, and the nubbly black of an avocado skin....

just discovered the inspiration boards at snippet & ink. damn does that girl have an eye.

she picked the gorgeous image above, by photographer arjan benning, for this one.

dance and repose: carolyn anderson

Just discovered Carolyn Anderson, an extraordinary contemporary painter. (click on the photos for larger images.) It would be interesting to see what she did if she moved out of her comfort zone of 19th c. subjects, but either way, what she's currently doing is pretty incredible. The sense of motion conveyed in the Native American dancer is inspired. You can feel that shuffling, rhythmic, explosive, moccasin'd step...

fiiiigaro! figaro figaro figaro!

Spotted a beautiful vintage car in pristine condition on the street near Victoria station today, and just had to take a closer look.

Turned out to be a Nissan Figaro. Not currently available in the US, but oh! the possibilities!


.
Come to think of it, it's been a lucky 24 hours. Was out walking with my husband in Picadilly, yesterday evening, after work, and it was drizzling and cool and there were masses of crowds as usual but all was fairly calm because of the rain and the dusk. Suddenly I grabbed my husband's arm and whispered: LOOK! It's SOAMES! It was. He was out and about with his wife, looking just dashing. Went up to him, a bit starstruck. He didn't expect it, and was pleased. Mmm... So was I.

Violet is the name of a cake shop in London

Such a treat this past Friday: went with an American friend, her British husband, and their beautiful new daughter on a little jaunt to Violet, a teeny, tiny, little bakery near their home in Hackney, London's answer to Brooklyn. Violet is owned by Claire Ptak, a transplanted Californian who used to work at Chez Panisse, and now tempts the likes of Stella McCartney and Jamie Oliver with her cakes. I chose a clotted-cream cupcake with lashings of raspberry jam. Delight.

Pics from Violet, and from the rewarding blog, This is Naive.

handmade toy blocks on etsy

So love these delicate, squat blocks, washed in watercolors and polished with beeswax. Their soft corners remind me of those sweet, buttery, chalky mints that you eat mindlessly while waiting for a table in slightly sketchy but really good Thai restaurants. (Available for $24 in the Etsy store of JustHatched.)

spiny lobsters and other textilic delicacies served up by anthropologie for spring

some stunning new textiles from anthropologie for spring... adore the soft blues and terra cotta pinks and corals of this needlepoint-esque lobster, made edgy and beautiful by its surprising scale, and slightly menacing, fibrous legs....

more favorites include another rug, inspired by a vera print, in scalloped-woven silk; a "freckled fish" pillow in hot pink linen, and anthropologie's take on dwellstudio's popular avian "Chinoiserie" bedding-- I think they got their watercolor parrots exactly right. beautiful, infused saffrons, and soft floral branches. really nice.

Thornwillow letterpress is so good you'll hang up the phone on your husband too

I was talking on the phone to my husband late last night (he's in business school in Philadelphia right now), and absentmindedly clicking through sites for decorative papers at the same time. Clicking onto Thornwillow, I suddenly stopped, unable to talk. I started to stutter. "Oh my! oh my!" I gasped. "I'm looking at a letterpress online that is really good. No: I mean, Really Good! Let's talk later! Bye!"

Check out a sampling of the custom monograms they offer-- almost as nuanced and as unusual as those offered by Leontine Linens...



The great thing about Thornwillow Press (other than the fact that Cynthia Kling, the woman who gave Domino the name "Domino," has praised them to the high heavens in Vanity Fair's July 2009 ed, I discovered today) is that they balance a lot of tricky extremes.

a) They do the "Letterpress Is Posh" thing oh so effortlessly... (love that lion like nobody's business)

b) They do the wry, tongue-in-cheek, ironic, "Letterpress can be Naughty" thing well too....(love their "spanking babies" set of note cards)...


c) & then, best of all, they do lots of OTHER things too-- charming things that are actually charming, (vs the too-gooey, the too-treacly, the too-sweet). I guess the best way to describe Thornwillow is that they seem to have been designed by someone who lives in a Sempé cartoon, and whose life is half-lived in tails, giving toasts--


and the other half, lived at the circus--


or in dreamy, teetering castles of books, shared with friends, in the air.

at your service: vintage melamine serving trays

If you're looking, as I am, for divided melamine trays to organize your desk, here are two options:






we could have one (1) beautiful, new, sarah-jessica-parker-sea-green-"barely-mint" melamine dividing tray for the low price of $89.99....


or,



we could have three (3) beautiful, vintage, sarah-jessica-parker-sea-green-"barely-mint" melamine dividing trays for the lower price of $8.99....



...........I'm not sure...hmmm. What would you pick?


[image of sjp's dior via blogdorf goodman].

Holiday Shopping under $100: What about a Papered Photo Album from Venice?

Not very often do I come across artisanship that makes me catch my breath. Paolo Olbi's work is decorative and baroque without in any way pandering to sentimental stereotypes of what classical Italian design is. To me, this is modern design. It is fresh, crisp, interesting, wild and fierce. I am stunned. What gorgeous, agile work.

Photo Albums and Journals by the Venetian designer and paper artist, Paolo Olbi, available here.

unsalted butter and radishes make a great sandwich if you have good bread

don't think i've ever seen a more beautiful salad than this one of heirloom radishes that penny los santos, a national geographic photographer, created and photographed for d*s.

ps: doesn't "radish pink" sound like the best pink you've ever heard of? pink can get awfully frou frou, but radishes are peppery and spicy and crisp and I'm going to start calling everything radish pink from now on.

vintage illustrations & where the wild things are...

Loving the splattery, scrawly look of mid-century illustrations right now...

and the flat, bright surfaces of these 1930's world's fair posters, too....




Thanks to illustrator "ward-o-matic" and his flickr set for the first image. And thanks to Vintagraph for the two world's fair images. Both of the latter are available for purchase in a variety of sizes.


Great link, btw: wardomatic's recent and wonderful analysis of some of Maurice Sendak's choices in Where the Wild Things Are. I am one of the people who know that book quite well, but I'd never thought hard about the role of "white space" in the story. Such an elegant, simple, and powerful strategy. Dazzling.

still writing...

still writing, writing, writing. (almost done though.)

Thought you guys might like to see a scene from my writing desk. Recently started working at home and it's kind of wonderful! The silver elephant figure is Ganeshji, god of new beginnings, Remover of Obstacles, and Patron of Writing Sessions. He still has a dusting of magenta powder on him (click to see close up) from when he was last annointed, a year ago, at a ceremony that happened before our wedding.

I love using teacups as little vases....

writing on book design at Best American Poetry this week

This ravishing smudgy birthday-card painting is by David Lehman, poet and founding editor of the Best American Poetry series.... click on the image to see it up close. so good. (notice how words always somehow sneak into poets' paintings......!)

I mention this today because I'm visiting as a guest blogger at the poet-painter's Best Am Po blog this week, writing about book jacket design, and interviewing poets on their favorite cover designs. so much fun!

come visit!

bacci,
p

the english for "elaichi gulab" is "cardamom rose"

if you would like to practice your hindi, this is a good place to start: "ek glass cardamom rose cocktail milega?" which means, "may i please have a glass of that stunning pink drink?"

neckware

I "Lova" this tie.

pistachio ceilings soften an industrial-chic restaurant in melbourne

What I adore about TRUNK-- the melbourne restaurant that I just discovered from an astonishingly gorgeous blog with a pitch-perfect design sensibility that I also just discovered (lark about) -- is that it marries

THIS aesthetic (fundamentally, that of the 19th c. draftsman's study, an aesthetic vocabulary that we sons and daughters of architects, many of us anyway, speak fluently...)



with THIS...


or rather, a hint of this....



While Trunk is clearly leaning in the Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch direction, with those dark dark floors and lots of dark shelves and dark tables and industrial lines everywhere, that pistachio ceiling elevates the whole room into something beyond direct historical quotation.

The thing is that my design roots always take me in the direction of wonderful, pre-pre-war architectural bones, deep dark woods and slates and the rough, "quick, grab a pen-- let's sketch it out now" kind of feel. But I am also a girl who loves design elements that are a little (or a lot) more opulent, a little unabashedly pretty, a little delicate and delicious and dazzlingly chromatic.

dear Trunk, we tip our hat.

(& we may even get out our paint chips...I've got two mammoth bookshelves to paint and I'm thinking that a dull absinthe green on the wall, and glossy black for the shelves, might complement and punch up our foamy grey living room...)

watercolor silhouettes, in reverse

refreshing and beautiful pairing of the crisp, sharply defined letter and the playful fluidity of the stained, saturated paper. would be great for cards to friends, large posters, homemade book covers, numbers for tables at weddings...(no need to do the watercolors so brightly, right? could do them in soft pinks and navy, or as you like...)

or try an animal shape-- a flamingo, an elephant, a giraffe, and paint over them in a range of tones of the same color, for a series.


spotted on AT's children site...

speaking of vats of flowers

nicolette camille is one to watch. her work is opulent yet wonderfully low-key, and her sense of color seems to be the real deal.

thanks to the-soon-to-be-san-diego-based joy for her post on nicolette...

ah-yi's Nocturne 02 print

ah-yi's prints are simple on the surface, very lovely and crisp.. . but there's a wild messiness there too that I love. she contains the disorder of little thin fragmenting lines in the safety of whale-like, brain-like organic shapes, but the tumult is there, biding its time, ready to burst through. ah, let it burst and break, ah-yi.