There She Blogs

Friday, June 5, 2009

When the Recession Ends

Have you heard about these drawer/shelf liners from The Container Store? I'd like the Herbal Cucumber scent but who can spend $10-15 on pleasant smelling drawers right now?

I live in a little 1925 house that has more window than walls. We took our sweet time to buy and install window treatments, which was a mistake b/c someone saw something they liked inside and broke in and robbed us one Saturday night. Before this violation, I did manage to make homemade roman shades for our bedroom after a quick check on how much they cost gave me shivers. Each window in this abode is a quirky size so custom shades would have cost around $300 each. So I googled "roman shade tutorial" and viola, I was good to go.

Jen Duncan's blog had the best photos with her tutorial so I went with hers. I used sale fabric from Ikea's Stockholm Blad collection and sun-blocking fabric from Joann's as the back. The cleats that anchor the ties were hard to find but I finally scored them at Ace Hardware.

These were easy and cheap to make and I'm quite pleased with how they turned out. Here are some other shots:

Closed...

(notice the plywood in the window...thanks robbers!)

Please excuse the wonky exposure of the photos, it's tricky to properly photograph a backlit window!

In Utero: The New ReadyMade Grows Arms, Legs and Takes Stand Against Lamps

So my former employer, the ReadyMade blog, is back is business after a 6 months hiatus where the old staff was abandoned in Berkeley and the new staff relocated from NYC to Des Moines.

Their most recent post reports on their brainstorming meeting about the new direction for the mag. This may strike moderate fears in those of us concerned that the departure from Berkeley and the severance with the magazine founders would mean a compromised ReadyMade. There are no signs that that fear is a valid one but this post does include lots of cryptic photos about ReadyMade’s future look and tone. See the post here.

Are they planning muted tones (a la a 1950s Boy Scout manual) for their color palette? And what’s with the English garden illustrations? Phooey. Thank god Blueprint is on the table.

As a student of Cultural Studies, I always, always loved ReadyMade because so much of magazines centers on advertising and convincing its readers to buy things and here was a lovely magazine that prospered even though it’s message was: “No need to buy. You can make that yourself.” I await the first issue with the new team…

But what in the heck do they have against lamps??