The Interior DIYer
Uncategorized

The rug is not the issue


At long last, the rug is down. This hugely fabulous IKEA Stockholm rug hadn’t been in stock in Dublin since … probably ever. One fateful day I checked their online stock checker, and there it was. All 2.4m of it and only 5 in stock. I rushed out and managed to get my hands on the last medium rug. Followed quickly by a sweltering dose of guilt. 

As I wrote two weeks ago, I decided to use my our new rug as an incentive. My embarrassing goal being – I could only put our rug down once I got a job. For anyone outside of Ireland reading this, it may not seem like a big deal, but here in Ireland, the jobs front is horrific. I’m an office zombie by day, and unfortunately like some of the offices I’ve worked with in the past, the company I was working with went bust in April. So I was unemployed, and had splurged on this amaze-balls rug. In order to stay afloat, I quickly turned my guilt into an incentive. Long story short, I landed myself a temp role, so down went the rug last weekend. All kinds of awesome …

Our new rug perfectly anchors my here and there infatuation with black and white throughout our apartment, not to mention it adds a perfect punch of pattern to our living space. I’m a big-time fan of the layered effect, so I may try my hand at DIYing a faux zebra skin rug {I’ve seen a couple of very do-able tutorials out there} and see how it works layered with this puppy. I’m thinking either silver, gold or lavender in stead of the typical black zebra stripes. Yum, yum. But nothing’s set in stone.
Boy, am I smitten. And as it happens, so are our kittehs. 

So far rug has settled in nicely and will  be an especially warm welcome when winter hits our cave of an apartment, and most of our time is spent curled up on the couch with Netflix. 
I hope wherever you are you’re having as nice of weather as we’re experiencing here in Dublin! Lots of dining al fesco and tall, cold beverages. And ice cream. Mostly ice cream. xx A
p.s. Sorry for the cringey employment rant. I try to keep my writing real. Girl got bills to pay.

Uncategorized

That’s just like, your opinion, man

I’ll start off by stating that we are a household of regular Dude references. When it came to making something for fiance for his birthday last week, I knew I wanted to make a pop-culture/cult reference. For fiance, that would be either Star Wars, Call of Duty/Battlefield, or The Big Lebowski.

While scrawling through Honestly WTF a couple weeks back, and saw this post about the seriously talented Mark Hall-Patch and his watercolours, where he delicately paints and draws clothing. There was one particular cardigan that immediately reminded me of the Dude’s cardigan from The Big Lebowski, also known as a Pendleton Cowichan Cardigan, and I knew I had to make a Mark Hall-Patch-inspired version for fiance.
I drew up an image of the Dude’s cardigan, and for the first time in eight years, I used watercolours. A little scary, but watercolours are quite safe and very forgiving, luckily for me. I’m not madly in love with the final piece {it’s a little cartoony, I could have chosen better paper, and I should have spent more time on it; the ush}, but those with a keen movie interest shouldn’t have too much trouble deciphering it. I hope.

Image 2 image cred!

Uncategorized

Audio influence

For my final college project, I was drawn to a certain stream of music, which was not my usual taste. The Tron Legacy soundtrack by Daft Punk was on constant loop on my iPod. A friend of 20+ years {the magnificent and creative William Delray} then exposed me to the world of Birdy Nam Nam – ‘Parachute Ending’ to be precise. I’ll let the music do the talking.

As if it was meant to be, one of the follow up videos was this same song paired with the Tron Legacy teaser. It was what I needed for this project. To William, I thank you.