Birthday Love

Yesterday I celebrated my 25th birthday. I got so many wonderful gifts and love from my very treasured friends and family. This is just a small thank you and slightly an excuse to brag about all of my amazing presents.

Melissa and Peter went all out as usual. I received a special delivery all the way from Hogsmede Village. A PACKAGE OF CAULDRON CAKES! Delivered by owl of course.

My mom had a lovely bouquet of flowers delivered to my door. She also sent me this adorable mushroom container from Anthropologie. To top it off I go to go on a mini shopping spree at IKEA. I now have this awesome rug for the living room and my closet looks much more organized.

thanks to my pops, I now have the Wii Fit! I'm on my third day of my yoga routine. Very calming, I'm already feeling better and more limber!

My love, Megan Love gave me the most adorable necklace (a little pair of golden scissors), from one of my favorite stores PopKiller. She also gave me concert tickets to see BEACH FOSSILS. She is pretty amazing. Thanks joycie!

The lovely Sarah gave me records for my collection. The Tom Tom Club and Joy Division. If only my record player wasn't broken :( Gah. Thank you sarah, you are so sweet!

I got a long distance hello from my favorite people in Colorado. Meghan and Alex. I miss them everyday, so I was ecstatic to get a wooden birthday greeting :)

Finally my #1 love, billy got me many many gifts, dinner, magazine subscriptions, a trip to Pittsburgh! and this adorable little pocket knife necklace at the Melrose Flea Market. So cute, and functional! 

all in all, a magnificent birthday. Thank you so much for all of the love. 

Spice Rack

Last night I designed a shelf using Google SketchUp. It was my first time using the program and its awesome! I am going to be using this all the time.

Polyvore Album Art

I've been obsessed with polyvore.com for quite some time. It is a wonderful way to waste hours making mini collages and a very unique way to shop online. After making hundreds of collages based around fashion, I branched out into designing album cover art for some of my favorite bands. I strongly recommend polyvore to those who have not yet discovered it's awesomeness. enjoy!

Three New Succulents

recently acquired plants for our growing collection.

Privacy Windows (for free)!

My boyfriend and I recently moved into a new apartment in Hollywood. One of my favorite features of the new place is the enormous picture window that takes up one wall of the living room. I love my great view of the sunset over the Sunset strip, but I DON'T love that all of my neighbors can see everything I am up to inside. We had been keeping the curtains closed, but it was getting a bit dark and depressing in the place.

Since we are short on cash as usual, we came up with this idea to cover the bottom half of our windows.

We needed to give ourselves some privacy, but without sacrificing the light, our view, or any money. We wanted to stay away from window film, an obvious solution, since a) no money and b) we are renters, I don't really want to be scraping and scrubbing goo residue from the windows when we move. We were inspired by this post on Manhattan Nest, where a cornstarch mixture was used to affix fabric over windows. Fabric was more opaque than we wanted, and I've heard bugs can be attracted to the cornstarch. And again this needed to be a free project.Finally after some testing we came up with the solution for us.

We cut stripes from a roll of white tissue paper we had around the house and attached them to the window using very very diluted Elmer's Glue.  Elmer's School Glue is non toxic and washable, exactly what we needed for our project. We did a few test strips on the glass and after it dried, I was able to peal it off in one piece.  We dipped the paper into the glue/water mixture (about 1 part glue to 6 parts water) and smoothed it on to the glass using a sponge. It took a bit of care to remove all the air bubbles, but I enjoy doing things like that.

It turned out quite nicely in the end, it only took about 2 hours and it was all from things we already had in the house. It's so nice to keep the windows open :)