Amid all the eating and shopping of the past few weeks, I’ve somehow developed a penchant for jigsaw puzzles. Maybe it’s a coping mechanism for me – a way to withdraw from the frenzy without simply sitting and staring into space for extended periods of time with this expression on my face:
I know the prevailing attitude towards people who puzzle is somewhere between amusement and disdain: it must take a true dullard to sit and stare at one picture for hours on end and extract any level of amusement from the process. I understand.
For me however, it seems to slip my mind into a somewhat meditative state – propelling to the front of my thoughts all kinds of interesting ideas that have been shoved down by work and other amusements over the months. It’s not unlike the way good ideas may come to mind for you while driving or in the shower. For this express reason, doing puzzles is really not a great group activity as far as I’m concerned – it’s more of a solitary pursuit.
It’s also a clever way to get to know some of my favorite paintings – like this Roy De Forest wildness called Country Dog Gentlemen. It’s been one of my favorite paintings for ions, but I’d never noticed all the crazy detail till I had to put it together piece by piece recently.
I also came up with a nifty list of life lessons that I thought were sort of clever based on my recent puzzling adventures. Here they are:
1) Most of the time, the piece you’re looking for looks nothing like you thought it would, and it’s been sitting in front of you the whole time – you just didn’t recognize it.
2) You can swear up and down that some of the pieces are missing, but they always turn up in the end.
3) Proportion is relative – what you think is gigantic often turns out to be teeny – and vice-versa.
4) It’s the puzzle piecing journey, the seeking and discovering, not the end product that’s important – remember after all the hours of piecing you’ll be destroying the whole thing at the end and starting over. (Isn’t that so of life?)
5) Texture, pattern and color variation are far more interesting than blocks of sameness and homogeneity.
I spent hours and hours shoveling snow over the past few days – the storm that came through last weekend dumped several feet of fluffy snow on everything. And while I wasn’t so thrilled while I was working to clear the driveway, I must say it’s picture perfect now that we’ve worked our way through it. I went around my neighborhood this morning and grabbed a few pictures.
The first time I saw these gorgeous candles from Himalayan Trading Post I was hooked. The company offers a variety of beautiful candles in a range of offerings including trays and troughs, bowls and pots, and tumblers and jars – most of them refillable.
The Fleur de Lys collection shown here sells for about $12 a candle – each gently scented soy wax candle comes in one of these embossed and silver distressed jars which are gloriously decorative, especially for this time of year. Fragrances for the Fleur de Lys collection include Mistletoe, Mediterranean Fig, Honeysuckle, Spice (as shown) as well as Cinnamon Apple, Pumpkin Spice, Pink Peony, Prairie Gracelands, Orange Grove, Green Tea & Lemongrass, and Red Currant.
So I thought I was very clever this year with my long distance gift giving. I bought some really cute holiday/winter themed cookie jars and stocked them with homemade cookies. Thoughtful and thrifty is what I was thinking – then I boxed them up and took them to the post office – apparently the US postal service charges an arm and a leg for Priority Mail sent from the East Coast all the way to California.
Of course I was aware of this in the back of my mind (considering how much product we ship around for clients in a given month) but for some reason I was hoping things would turn out differently for my cookie project. Oh well – my nephews will be getting their goodies a little late this year.
On the other hand, if you have cookies to hand deliver these cute boxes spotted on DessertByCandy, are super fun and pretty. A round box gets a cut of wrapping paper and some brown ribbon. Next to it a regular fortune cookie box is left open with a spray of tissue coming out – it’s wrapped with film and tied with brown ribbon. So pretty!
This being the holidays we’ve been getting a slew of e-Greetings from magazines, designers, other PR firms – you name it. Some of them have been super cool – models posing dramatically with interesting typeface underneath, macro shots of ornaments, and one that was downright peculiar of a not terribly attractive paper tree that the recipient is urged to download, print out and tape together. My favorite so far is this idea from wallpaper and textile designer Camilla Meijer – I think it’s clever and interesting. Will post more cool ones as they come in.
So I was reading this clever website called Ariadne at Home the other night – well since it’s in Dutch, Google was loosely translating for me so I was mostly just looking at the pictures – when I came across this image of this clever “tree”. I love the way it fits in with the elegant furniture and light palette of the room so I grabbed it and saved it on my desktop.
Then I was looking through some of the chairs that West Elm has on their site and came across the two clever trees below – one looks like it’s painted on the wall, but it could be a decal, with some Styrofoam ornaments strung on yarn between the branches. The other is a real Blue Spruce branch cleverly fixed to the wall (I’m guessing you might be able to do this with a flag holder mounted upside down). This branch makes me a little sad – the other morning I woke up and a Black Pine Tree that I’d planted a few years back (that was doing so well) had snapped clean in two in an overnight storm. Really broke my heart…sob, sob. It really did.
So I also came across the BuroTree (below) on Apartment Therapy – this was popular a few years ago but went out of production for one reason or another. Now it’s back and is still just as super cool. The company is based in Australia but I believe these may be available in the US. They come in a range of sizes from gigantic, to tabletop. Makes me think of the cool decorations I remember hanging around the house that my folks had – they’d been designed in the ’50’s and ’60’s and always had such a hip, Sammy Davis Junior, Frank Sinatra air about them.
And last, but deliciously not least is this really clever tree that All the Luck in the World (from the Netherlands – do you detect a subtle theme here?) made by hanging interesting objects she’d collected over the years on a wall. So so so cool makes me want to try this too – even though I’ve already put up my tree. Just love this.
So this coming weekend I fully intend to go around and photograph some of the Christmas decorations around New England. For some reason it seems like people have really gone all out this year – tons of lights (although I probably won’t be able to capture those) and also pineapples, wreaths, garlands, bows, other fruits. I want to also video my horses playing in the snow – which may be difficult since we don’t have any on tap for the a few days. They were out playing the other day in it and they looked so amazing that I simply have to share it.
I thought it was pretty fitting that we got our first snow over the weekend while I was putting up Christmas decorations (photos to follow). Nice and light but really pretty when the sun first hit it on Sunday morning. I just love the texture of these shots.
