THE STUDIOLO

Friday, September 10, 2010

Our DIY Office Nook on Apartment Therapy!

There has been a lot of buzz lately about offices carved out of closets and other small spaces in peoples' homes. Oliver and I jumped on the bandwagon with photos of our own workspace and today it is being featured on Apartment Therapy! Thanks again, Janel!

As many of you know, Oliver and I work from home most of the time, and while we do our best to keep work and life separated, it's a bit of a challenge in our less-than-400 square foot apartment. Our living room came with a somewhat irritating-at-first nook due to a protruding section of wall that contains the "Sprinkler Control Valve,"complete with industrial signage. The nook when we moved in:

As it turned out, that nook was the perfect width for an Ikea table top. Oliver and I painted the gray walls and yellow and white stripes, then Oliver and handy brother of bathroom fame mounted the table top to the three walls and added one central support leg. Oliver and I hung two overhead shelves and painted it all Benjamin Moore Black Satin - a charcoal-y dark gray.

As I've mentioned before, Oliver is a master of organization, and it doesn't stop at paper; he has some experience with network architecture, so he can set up a fully functioning, but very self-contained wireless office. All the computer-related mumbo-jumbo is hidden neatly under the desk, and while we have office stuff scattered throughout the apartment, I've done my best to cover it all with home-made fabric remedies. We also mounted computer speakers and holders for rolls of trace paper, which I'm constantly using.

We didn't want too much clutter above us, but we couldn't imagine not utilizing all that vertical wall space, so the shelves actually hold our collection of vintage milk glass vases and bowls, which we used for flower centerpieces at our wedding. I thought I would sell them after the wedding, but I had become attached - it look a year to amass the collection (there is more) and I think they're so beautiful. So, I'm thrilled to have a place to display them! Some of the pieces even hold office supplies, so they aren't solely decorative. We found the little cut glass lamp at Target, and it works great for evenings when we're burning the midnight oil. We found the pair of vintage Pollack chairs at Two Jakes in Brooklyn. The clock belonged to my Grandmother and is by Syroco Inc., the company that essentially invented plastic in the 1950s.

Even though the office space is fairly pleasing to look at, sometimes we just want it to go away. For those occasions, we hung West Elm curtains on an Ikea track and can close the office when we have company, or when we want a visual barrier from work. The curtains also conceal that pesky Sprinkler Control Valve sign and soften what used to be a very ugly corner in the apartment. I made those new pillow covers just in time!

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Kitchen Redux

We've chattered on a lot about kitchens, haven't we? Oliver posted about our spice rack(s) a while back, I wrote about small kitchens that make big statements, and I've mentioned them in passing in other posts. Well, I'm bringing kitchens into the discussion again, but this time, we're talking about ours. You could say our kitchen falls into the "small" category – it's literally one strip of wall in our living room. We have 28 square inches of counter space. You read that correctly: 28 INCHES. So, don't complain to me about your ginormous country kitchen with 55 overhead cabinets and 87 base cabinets! Por ejemplo:

Dual islands, a double oven, a desk...I don't want to hear it!
Here's what we were working with when we moved:

What's with the mirror in the kitchen, you ask? I have no idea. A generous leftover from the previous tenant. Thanks?
Despite the small size, we use our kitchen to make nearly every meal we eat (self-employed+home office+people who like to cook=lots of meals made and eaten at home). It works quite well now, but it took some work. With no where to hide pots and pans, it was pretty cluttered on top of the refrigerator for a while:

We knew we needed a pot/pan/lid solution, but unfussy, affordable wall-mounted pot racks are hard to come by! Eventually, we came to terms with the fact that we would have to make it ourselves, which is where the pegboard came in. Diamond Life allows you to specify the size you want and they cut it down. They also sell the hooks for super cheap – the whole thing cost about $30.

Before painting the board, we laid out the pot/pan configuration:

Oliver painted the board with leftover gray paint from our walls so it blends in and provides a fantastic backdrop for the luxurious Le Creuset pots and pans we were given by some extremely generous wedding guests.

We've managed to get as much stuff on to the walls as possible, since our storage space is limited and, while there's no way to hide the fact that we have a kitchen in the middle of our living room, it seems to work without being a complete eyesore.

UPDATE: My colleague Thomas was kind enough to point out my fuzzy math skills regarding our countertop space. We actually have 2.3 square feet of countertop. That's more than 28 square inches, but not exactly spacious! Regardless, my apologies for the faulty calculations.

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Laboring on Labor Day

Me, laboring, on a gorgeous sunny day

Americans observed Labor Day this past weekend, a national holiday instated in 1894 by President Grover Cleveland following the deaths of several workers during the Pullman Strike, a nationwide conflict between labor unions and about 3,000 employees of the Pullman Palace Car Company over reduced wages. Technically, Labor Day is celebrated with a street parade to exhibit to the public the strength of trade and labor organizations, followed by a festival for workers and their families. Most Americans now celebrate the holiday with a Monday off from work, a bbq or two, and lots of beer, as we bid farewell to summer and welcome fall. While I found some time to relax with Oliver and some friends (I even hit the pool in Central Park for one last sunning session) I was a very busy bee this Labor Day weekend: I took my first stab at sewing and made some things for the house I'd been wanting to make for a while.

I've had a sewing machine for six years. It was a thoughtful and generous hand-me-down from a dear friend, Jeremy Waterman, back when Oliver and I lived in San Francisco. In those six years, I've touched the sewing machine four times:

1. The day Jeremy gave me the machine. I promptly broke the needle, had no replacements and rendered the whole thing useless. A year later, we moved to New York and, due to space constraints, the sewing machine was relegated to the attic of my parents' cabin in New Jersey.

2. In 2009, Oliver and I were making the rounds to various libraries and Salvation Army, donating things we hadn't used in forever and he snuck in the sewing machine, thinking I wouldn't notice. A mini-quarrel ensued: he insisted I would never use the sewing machine; I somehow convinced him I would. I was so convincing, in fact, that he let me bring it back to New York so it could sit high on a bookshelf (aka: "upstairs") and taunt us both.

3. During our last visit to see Oliver's family, his mom gave me a quick sewing lesson on her machine. I came home, fully intending to practice but never did. A few months ago I retrieved my sewing machine from it's high-up hiding place, and managed to play around with some practice stitches on a scrap of fabric. That spike in productivity was brief, and the sewing machine soon found its way back to the top shelf for safe keeping. Oliver kindly kept his trap shut about the fact that I still had yet to make anything with the sewing machine.

4. Fast forward eight months to Labor Day Weekend 2010: I was suddenly stuck with the need to use the three yards of linen I bought months ago at Mood. And use it, I did! I busted out four short curtain panels to conceal office-related junk and other sundry items in our open shelves and five pillow covers. In the words of the great Liz Sullivan, "in your face, Oliver!"

Our hall console has two drawers and open shelves. It houses our fabulous, but very unsightly printer, some paper, office supplies, and all of my project binders. I made a panel for each drawer, so we could still open them at different times:

Please excuse my sneakers and the poor photo quality, I did not style these shot at all, and I took the photos toward the end of the day, when the light was disappearing. Better photos will be taken soon!

Our kitchen is in our living room, and our Ikea shelves perform several important duties: they provide a visual divider between the kitchen and living room while storing extra dishes and dry food on the top and middle shelves, and magazines, papers and more office supplies on the bottom shelves (office supplies are scattered all over our apartment). The office stuff is very cluttered looking. So, the new panel covers all that business!

Would it kill me to iron the panels better? No, it would not. Apologies.

Using my new Dritz pliers, I poked holes in each newly sewn panel, clamped a tiny grommet in the hole and hung the panels from 5/8" cup hooks Oliver drilled into the drawers and shelves:

We've had the same garish pillows for way too long. I kept talking about replacing them with cheap-o ones from West Elm or some such store. But, after sewing all the curtain panels, it dawned on me that I could make my own pillow covers using extra project fabric, leftover linen from the curtains on the back. I just re-used the inserts from the old pillows. A few online tutorials made it clear that creating a simple envelope flap on the back of the pillows would be easiest. It was, indeed, easy:

This video was instrumental in my success – thank you, Crafty Gemini!

Fabric, from left: Duralee 20953 in Graphite, Kravet (Lisena in Gull), Duralee 42030 in Buttermilk, Kravet (Sommers in Driftwood)

Fabric: Osborne & Little

At the end of the day, I threw in another panel for the other side of the kitchen/living room divider:

All the new textiles have really refreshed the hall and living room. I'm so happy with the results! After this marathon weekend of sweatshop labor, the sewing machine is resting "upstairs" now, but I can't wait to get it down and make more stuff soon!

Friday, September 3, 2010

Buy Stuff: John Derian for Target

Happy Friday – and long weekend! Labor Day sales are upon us, and for those of you who will do some back-to-school and fall shopping at Target in the upcoming weeks, I recommend taking a moment to check out the second John Derian for Target collection, which premieres this Sunday, Sept. 5 online and in select stores, and will be available for six weeks.

This year's collection will consist of nearly 100 decorative accessories, including Derian's signature designs for whimsical trays, dishware, wall art, fabric-covered bins and office supplies depicting butterflies, flowers, feathers and vintage-style lettering, all priced under $25 – a far cry from the originals. I've put together some collections of some John Derian for Target items I'll be looking at.

Derian opened his eponymous New York store in 1989, reviving the art of decoupage, the process of layering images over a decorative background, with glass tableware created using color reproductions of 18th and 19th century illustrations. Let's just say Derian's work isn't cheap. The new Target collection employs the same approach to a type of plastic called melamine, bringing the price point to a more Target-appropriate level. Melamine is dishwasher safe, so cleaning up after a late summer/early fall picnic or bbq just got an injection of high-style without the worry or fuss of using nice dishware!

The limited-edition collections sell out in a flash, so get thee to a Target store, or your computer, this weekend!

Target's Designer Collaborations is an expansion of it's existing Designer Fashion Program, which has been extremely successful. The items fly off the shelves, which is good for Target's business, but great for the designers with whom they collaborate, giving them enormous exposure and allowing them to reach a new audience. H&M has been collaborating with designers, quote a bit, but not enough big stores work with established, but niche artists and designers and I'm not sure why, but I'm thrilled Target supports local artisans!

John Derian has two New York shops; 10 East Second Street and 6 East Second Street

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Horsing Around

Horse post card, available at John Derian

Horses are cute. And pretty. They can be a little scary, too, what with those enormous teeth.

They can also be scary when they hate you. I've only had one run-in with a frighteningly vicious horse and it was many years ago. Somehow, my very unfortunate experience with a nasty horse named "Shirley" did not sour my opinion of horses all around. Shirley was a doozy. Ok, FINE. I'll tell you about it, since you forced me. But I'll make it snappy. It's so much better in person, because I can act it out. I'll do my best virtually.

Tranquil horses before the equestrian storm of a story you're about to hear. Photo by Roberto Dutesco

My Grandmother lived in Amarillo, TX, and for family reunions, we often went to Palo Duro Canyon State Park, where we would roam around the canyon atop horses, chug around on a touristy little train, go on hayrides, and the like. Our last fateful visit to the Canyon started out as all the others had. We were at the ranch and horses were being assigned to each family member (there were at least 14 of us). As each person's horse was brought over, he or she would acquainted with their new equine friend. I was one of the last to be assigned, so I spent some time looking at the horses hanging out. As I scanned the pen, I saw a horse in the distance, on her back flailing around like a lunatic. All the other horses were moving away, looking at her like she was cray-cray. So I muttered something to the effect of, "I hope I don't get THAT one." Guess who got that one? That's right, ME. Her name was Shirley; isn't that just the perfect name for a crazy horse?

I am not kidding, this is what I saw.

Now, I'm not particularly confrontational, but I could foresee a disaster, so I pleaded with the ranch hand to please give me a different horse. He insisted I'd be fine. I insisted I would not, explaining that I had almost no experience with horses (two horseback riding lessons does not an expert make). He refused to budge, I lost the battle and off we go, at the mercy of large beasts with tiny, skinny legs.

Horse lamps by Barbara Cosgrove

As we tromped through brush and wilderness, naturally, the horses wanted to eat leaves and whatnot. We were instructed to just tug a little on the bit and they'd stop. Not Shirley. A few tugs from me and suddenly I found my leg in her mouth. A little harsh, but I rolled with it. We keep walking, she keeps trying to snarf shrubs, my leg keeps winding up in her mouth. Not cool, girl. At some point, she gets agitated and starts turning on her axis, bumping into my mother's horse behind me and eventually kicking that horse in the face. I began to imagine my mom and I in the midst of a horse fight, helplessly gripping the reins for dear life. To my relief, my mother's horse remained calm and unaffected, which was too much for Shirley to handle; the girl wanted to fight. So she fought me instead, by trying to buck me off.

Photo by John L. Moore

Of course, that sent me into a tantrum and I started crying about how I was going to die and I wanted to ride with my mom. I was 12 or something; riding with another adult was not an option. So, I forged on like a grown up, until we got to a little babbling brook. Amarillo is pretty arid and desert-ish. There was no water in sight on any of our previous sojourns to the Canyon. In fact, the canyon was formed by water erosion in the first place. So why now, why when I'm at the mercy of a cantankerous horse named Shirley, does water materialize?! I halted the entire excursion to find out from the guide if the horses liked to bathe in the water. He said it had been known to happen. Well, I knew Shirley wouldn't be able to resist taking me for a dip in the water, so I made everyone turn around like a little brat and avoid the stream. Whatever; no one was having fun with me weeping and complaining the whole time, anyway!

As soon as the ranch came into view, Shirley made a run for it. She was galloping like a mustang to get home and get rid of me. But before we made it, she decided to idiotically drag me through a tree, which she also got caught in and from which her scrawny little legs had to be de-tangled. To add insult to injury, a branch ripped a hole in my favorite shirt, which, coincidently, depicted a tree and implored readers to "Reduce, Reuse and Recycle." I was so environmentally aware, don't you think? Needless to say, I was pretty cranky for the rest of the visit, as was captured, reprinted and catalogued in several family photo albums in which everyone is smiling and I am scowling.

Despite my single bad experience with horses, I really do like them; they are stately, graceful and very curious creatures. We see a lot of them on jaunts through Central Park, and a few horses live down the street from Oliver's parents (not alone. Duh).

Raquel Zimmerman in Central Park, Vogue, via Habitually Chic

Lately, my awareness of horses has been heightened because they seem to be showing up all over place, whether in prints, wallpaper, textiles, accessories, or lighting – with more to come, if the latest Anthropologie catalogue and the wares at the recent New York International Gift Show are any indication.

Anthropologie went horse-crazy in the most recent catalogue:

Those of you with a few thousand dollars jingling around in your pockets should pick up some scarves from Hermes:

Sweater and horse figurine from Anthropologie, horse purse from equineno.com, horse print scarf, boots from Anthropologie

Sweater from Anthropologie, Vivienne Westwood purse, wellies from Best Horse Gifts

Girls shouldn't have all the fun; deck your man out in this sweater:

Or don't – I don't think Oliver would accept money to wear that.

Fun ways to display equestrian achievements and paraphernalia:

Left: Country Living; Right: Madonna in Ashcombe House, via Habitually Chic

This bedroom, in the home of Mark Badgley and James Mishka, doesn't have literal horse imagery, but it certainly evokes an equestrian feel:

Also from the Badgley-Mishka manse:

I love this letterpress horse "thank you" card from Greenwich Letterpress:

Robert Dutesco's photos (from above) in context:

A few more horse accessories to round out your growing collection:

Clockwise from left: cast porcelain figures from brooklynREHAB, turquoise lamp from 1st Dibs, horse head sculpture from Waylande Gregory, large horse from Jonathan Adler, XL horse head from Blue Ocean Traders, lamps from Barbara Cosgrove, box from Waylande Gregory

Monday, August 30, 2010

Tennis Anyone?

The first round of the US Open officially kicks off today, with a bunch of big names playing. In honor of the tournament, I'd been planning this tennis-inspired post for a while, then Apartment Therapy beat me to the punch last week! They even used the clever title I planned to use. Damn! :) No matter. I am not deterred; today we're looking at tennis imagery through the years.

First, a little tennis and fashion history. The New York Times blog had a nice montage showing the evolution of women's and men's tennis fashion through the years:

But, I'd like to go into some detail. Tennis became popular among English aristocrats in the 1860s. Outfits were all white, with women in long dresses and corsets. Wimbledon was the first tournament. Tennis caught on in America in the 1880s, with the first tournament at the Newport Casino in Newport, RI in 1881.

From left: 1881 Tennis Dress in Harper's Bazaar, via Fuzzy Lizzie Vintage Clothing; Right: 1895 images from Tennis Forum

In the early and mid-1900s, tennis fashion became a little less restrictive for women – knee-length skirts, cardigans and silk stockings! – when Suzanne Lenglen started playing without petticoats or corsets. She wore outfits by French couturier Jean Patou, which were likened to ballet costumes. Lenglen loved her bandeaus and fur coats:

Early 1900s

1920s

How great is this stylized poster from 1921?

In the 1930s, women began to play with bare legs and ankle socks (scandalous!) and skirts became a little shorter, although miniskirts were still thirty years away.

Left: Jean Harlow; Right: Jack Crawford

Keds' reproduction of the 1934 "Court Ace" are currently en vogue and available for purchase here:

The women in these photos look a little less carefree than those in the 1940s Simplicity patterns, but the basic shape of the styles are there:

Tennis wear in the 1950s was much like styles seen off the court, especially with men and their preppy sweaters!

Apparently, professional player Joy Gannon broke the all-white clothing rule in the 1950s, but I wasn't able to find an image of the number she wore, designed by Ted Tinling, which only had a purple HEMLINE. Hardly a breach, in my opinion.

Much like street fashion, 1960s tennis fashion saw much shorter hemlines on the ladies. The men weren't exactly wearing oversized outfits, either!

Left: Outfits designed by Tinling; Right: Roy Emerson

In the 1970s players wore what their sponsors provided for them, thus becoming walking advertisements for various sportswear and footwear companies. Outfits for both men and women became shorter and tighter. I LOVED the socks with the little balls on the backs, see the top right photo:

Clockwise from left: Converse ad, 1978; Image Unknown, Chris Evert, Arthur Ashe

In the 1980s and 1990s, during a fitness craze, breathable fabrics and second-skin clothing was all the rage (remember Jane Fonda?) for women. For men, shorts started getting longer and shirts looser:

Pete Sampras

During this time, fashion magazines began treating players to celebrity-style covershoots and encouraging more raciness. With her tiny outfits and hot bod, Anna Kournikova attracted a huge following, despite the fact that she never actually won a grand slam tournament.

Left: Bjorn Borg on the July 14, 1980 cover of Sports Illustrated; Right: Anna Kournikova

So here we are, about 150 years since the beginning of tennis. More than ever, players are bringing in their personal style into their tennis outfits, from warm-up gear...

Outerwear via Daily Mail

...to tournament wear:

Serena Williams' Harajuku-style via Tennis Runway. Serena has really pioneered a new sense of fashion for women's tennis wear. She's always sporting a unique outfit!