Vacation Inspiration

Woo! I'm back with some new patterns! Kevin and I recently travelled to Costa Rica for a nice vacation. It was so beautiful! The plants and animals were my favorite thing about it. 

I set a goal a whiiile back to make more patterns and attempt to create a collection of patterns that sort of fit together. So I finally get to check that off the list with the first one.  I think they would make some fun, summery fabrics. 

Maybe I'll get really motivated and post them to Spoonflower! We bought ourselves a new camera for the trip (so many sloth photos, awww). But here is a totally random selection of photos we took that I used for inspiration:

A Trip to the Barn Sale

Today we final headed up to Frederick to check out the barn sale at Chartreuse & Co. that we heard about back in February. There was a pretty good mix of re-finished and needing-to-be-refinished furniture. Best of all, most of the prices were pretty reasonable. Only a few pieces were over $500. The old library card catalog to the left may have been one of them. Kevin loved the Scrabble pillow on top.

There were more than a few pieces that we really loved. Sadly, due to our complete and utter lack of space, we just couldn't commit to bringing them home. The whole experience made me desperately wish we had a house but it was really fun just to poke around.

I loved this industrial workshop cart. The color was like a deep teal. The little herb bottles were really fun. We actually brought home this window frame for about $30. I'm trying to decided whether to turn it into frames, a chalk board, a magnet board... so many options. Any ideas?

I really love this desk. The top was so nice. We were both pretty obsessed with this cabinet which was a blue-y gray color (there was definitely a weird "antique blue" theme throughout the sale... as if all re-painted antiques should be blue).

So what do you think? Should we have made room for any of these treasures? Ever been to a barn sale? It's literally in a big barn in the middle-ish of nowhere.

UK Vacation Finds

So now that we've been back from vacation for two weeks, we're finally finally finally settling down and things are getting back to normal. May and June have been insane with work-cations and (hallelujah!) real vacations... tacked on to work-cations. I feel like calling them "work-cations" makes me feel slightly less depressed about how many consecutive nights I spent in a hotel, thoughts?

One of my favorite things about traveling is picking out cool, unique, memorable souvenirs. Related /unrelated, Kevin says my personal style is that of an old lady.  So here's what I got and you can be the judge. (I'll also mention I've been formulating a follow-up personal style post and I think most of these fall somewhere in my spectrum. Stay tuned!)

On our day in York, home to York Minster the largest cathedral in Northern Europe, we ran across a local artist fair. I saw this print of a cow and immediately thought NEEEED. The artist also had similar... we'll call them "up-the-nose-shots" of various farm animals. Kevin said I'd be sorry I didn't buy a sheep as well and I have to admit now... he was kind of right. Does anyone have a farm I can borrow? Love those sheeepies.

We spent several days in Harrogate, Yorkshire which is an old "spa" town and what I mean by "spa" is that there was sulfur water and old ladies came and sat in it. Hm. Anyways, there's pretty good shopping and I ran across a designer shop from London, called Cath Kidston. I loved the fun florals (cough, old lady-ish I knooow). After much deliberation, I chose this fun green zip wallet.

Lastly, we went to Edinburgh, Scotland where I learned that Scotland's main exports are wool, more wool and whisky. So Kevin bought whisky and I bought... wool. Since I'm not Scottish and therefor not beholden to any particular plaid, I chose this blue, yellow and white scarf. It's super soft so... thank you sheep!

Overall it was a great trip and I love my purchases. We did also expand our candy collection and when we finally dig out from under the ENTIRE SUITCASE OF CANDY BARS I'll write some more blog posts.