The Dining Table Chronicles Vol. 3

Right now the dining table is looking like dark walnuty goodness. I had to put four coats of stain on it because the top looked stripey, it still does (especially in the photo) but it looks much much better. Actually it looks good. I am giving the stain a couple days to fully dry and I am going to spend some time dusting the apartment before I apply poly. Next time I post about the table it will be done and I will give a full how-to on the whole process.

In other news, because I am restless and have a million different projects I want to tackle I am already started on the next one. Here's a hint

Sit On It

s the table re-finishing project moves along I can't help but think about how badly I want some new chairs to go with it, and of course how I would like to (re)decorate the whole dining/office area. I am dreaming after these beauties but unfortunately being fun-employed means I don't have enough pennies to buy these =[

They are of course the Eiffel Tower Wire Chairs if you happen to have four sitting around your house that you want to donate to charity me then I will think you are the most awesome person in the world and I want to raid your house for whatever other awesome treasures you have but until then I will just be oogling over them through my computer screen and thinking how good they would look with my table every time I walk to the kitchen.

Up next on my wish list is a card catalog, I have been looking for an awesomely priced one for years with no luck but I am hopeful. I especially like how they used this card catalog to store the booze–perfect for my dining/office area. I mean drinking is appropriate while dining and it is sometimes necessary while doing homework.

Image via apartment therapy

So there you go, what my greedy consumerist mind is coveting right now. I am insatiable I tell ya....JK (sorry for typing JK but it seemed appropriate)

Changing...Already?

ey, I gave fair warning yesterday that I would probably change around the blog design and of course I did, I finally am pleased with the way things are looking...hip-hip-horray, however, I am getting slightly concerned that I am putting way more thought into this than necessary, so I am going to go ahead and deal with the current look for a little while; at least I am going to try and leave the design alone, that could possibly be a challenge for me.

I posted yesterday with the blog looking like this...

It was nice– clean and simple, but nice, only nice and so I added a background

The background made me feel very pleased with myself, I had managed to incorporate the scale pattern which I love (because it reminds me of a mermaid) and my favorite color scheme, and for bonus points it sorta matched my portfolio site, but after sleeping on it I decided that I was not satisfied. So I messed around with the embroidered header

Photoshop is magical, and I was able to change the green gradient to colors that made me happier

And then I added the border, which I also color corrected in Photoshop. I flipped the layout, changed some colors and fonts (I am still not 100% happy with the post title font) and re-added the drop caps, here is the current look, I don't have any more plans for changing the look (as of now!)

Coming Out Party

eez starting a new blog is intimidating. There are so many decisions to be made; what to call it, Blogger or Wordpress, what to write about, what will it look like, and on and on with the decisions. In the interest of complete honesty I have spent the last week and a half trying to settle on a look for my new blog, I have come up with so many ideas and made more tweaks to those ideas than I can count, I kept thinking about what elements of other blogs do I like and that opened up a whole other can of worms– you see, I am a more is more kinda girl, I like patterns and textures, and flourishes on my type but when it comes to blogs that I find aesthetically pleasing I am drawn to clean and minimal, so what am I to do. Well, enough is enough, I am just going to start posting and will make changes later if I feel it is necessary.

How about we take a look at a few of the arrangements/ideas I have had before settling on this look.

 

I had a vision of a very simple blog with a white background, wide columns, and a header written in copperplate calligraphy, unfortunately my calligraphy skills are still lacking and despite writing vaya over a hundred times, my lettering never looked quite right. 

Next I tried working some watercolor into the header, I love the look of watercolors but my ideas didn't look quite right. 

 I really liked the look of this header and I liked how the arrows were going somewhere but it didn't match my personal aesthetic. 

I wound up working my way to this header, and although obsessed with the color scheme, I still didn't think that it looked very "me"

 I experimented with embroidering the header. I was originally convinced that this was the the winner. It represented what I want my blog to be about and was a better representation of my personal aesthetic. But then I started thinking that maybe it was too much of the look and worried that people might think that this is a sewing blog, but I stuck with it for a few days and let my thoughts marinate

I actually had even created a crochet border that was an added little detail, but opps, I forgot to take a screen shot before removing it. A big problem is that the welcome image is disjointed from the look of the header, and truth be told, I am not all that photogenic so that is the photo I wanted to use, and so, after hours and hours of embroidering that header I went back to the old look, sort of...

I will probably change the look a hundred more times, I swear it is harder to design stuff for myself than for anyone else, but for now here I am, and I am ok with changing my mind later (probably later today, ha!) I just didn't want to turn into one of those people with beige walls because they couldn't settle on a proper color, and that is what was happening to me–I was being stopped from actually writing because I wasn't happy with the look of the blog, and that was just silly.