Best of the Week

What a week! I’ve feel like a whole year has passed. Really, it’s just a lot of life happening all at once. That’s life though, right? The ups, the downs, and everything in between. As the young Indian hotel clerk says in the trail for The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: “Everything will work out in the end. If it hasn’t worked out, it’s not the end.”

This week:



I was really inspired by this great mood board from fellow Charlotte design blogger, Andrea. She is a designer and DIYer who moved here recently, like me. Check out her cool projects and inspiration on her blog, SpaceSays.



Caitlin Wilson Textiles.





Surfing through some links on Laura Casey Interiors, I discovered this link to Caitlin Wilson Textiles. I’d never heard of this star design blogger but I was delighted to discover her new line of textiles! They are so beautiful and the blue, pink, and linen colored chinoiserie inspired floral gave me ideas for a great living room scheme. A complete set of swatches is available for $20 and comes prettily packaged in a beautiful pink box.

I finished my lamps here, read the YA bestseller The Hunger Games, and tested out a new Android app called Eggdrop with much success.

I also want to take a moment to say something about SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. This is a bill that will effect every blogger out there. See this great post about what the bill means for you and me. Sign a petition, call your reps, and get the word out to your readers and fellow bloggers! This is OUR internet.

Have a great holiday weekend everyone! See you next week!

Guilty Pleasures and Unlikely Inspirations

Today, I was sort of racking my brain for what to post about. Attacking it head on was doing little to get me inspired so I took a mental detour or two… had a cuppa, made myself a bite, watched two movies – Fright Night & Crazy, Stupid Love, cleaned the kitchen top to bottom, started sanding the second lamp… and still nothing.

Halfway through my initial bout of sanding I decided to put on some music that never fails to make me happy, that I can sing along to, and that has one of my favorite “pick me up” tracks on it: N*Sync’s Celebrity.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Before you go making cracks about boys bands and how all the talent in that group just starred in a romcom with Mila Kunis, hear me out. I’m not a 80’s baby, so this wasn’t the group I liked when I was a teen (that would’ve been Duran Duran). This was the group that I mocked and made fun of as a late twentysomething for being too cheesy and commercial for words… Until that ill fated moment when I’d heard The Game Is Over for the umpteenth time on the overhead at Borders Books (hard to escape when you work in the music department) and found myself dancing and singing along to it because it was so catchy. I mean, what is not to love about a break up song with video game noises in it? Wait! Don’t answer that.

Anyway, I loved that song so much that I bought the CD. And I loved the whole thing (except for the too cheesy and commercial for words ballad, Someone Like You, that even I think is gag inducing). But the icing is this little track at the end called Do Your Thing. In it Justin and JC and the boys tell me how “there ain’t no excuse for losing your feet, drowning in your defeat on this road of life”… and they’re right. There is no excuse. Get up, dust yourself off, and get back in the fight. Like I told a friend who was down recently: sometimes we have to get bloodied to gain our victories.

I feel better now. I sang my little heart out. I’m about to spray paint (my new FAVORITE thing to do) and put on some Justin. Timberlake. Not Bieber. Hey, a girl’s got to have her standards, right?