Happy New Year!

From El Jefe, Lily Mae, and myself, we wish you all the very happiest of New Years, and hope that 2010 brings health, love, and peace to you and your family and friends. We have so much to look forward to in the new year, a house, a Savannah cat, the final season of Lost, and many hours spent with our dear friends and loving family.  We count our lucky stars every day to have what we have and I treasure this little outlet I've made to share a little bit of it with you.

Bye bye 2009, and helllllllloooooo 2010!!
*liv

p.s. Just kidding about that Savannah cat. We saw it on Animal Planet and now Jeff really wants one but they're like $10,000 and illegal in three states (although not California!) so I'm going to say that dream shall go unfulfilled. Sorry Jeff.

Here we go again!

Sooo... we kinda put another offer on a house that came on the market on Christmas Eve and the seller accepted it!! As you may remember, we're getting super close to opening escrow on the Golden house, but we thought we'd put an offer in on this one in case anything with Golden fell through. And THEN we saw the house in person and fell in love. This house is perfect. It's 600 square feet bigger than Golden (1644 total), a two bedroom, one bath home but with a big den and a big formal dining room. It's adorably vintage with original tile and cabinets and the backyard is nicely landscaped and fairly big. It's in the same neighborhood as the Golden house (so still close to Mandy and Seth!)  and on a nice wide street. Drawback- it's another short sale. The listing agent wants us to open escrow though while we wait for the bank approval so we're hoping it won't drag on for too long. But even still, this house is worth the wait. Check it out!

Check out the doorknob!

The floors throughout are refinished and gorgeous, and the stone fireplace matches the stone on the front of the house. We love that big picture window in the front, and there's a secret cabinet under the window to stash firewood and black widows!

The formal dining room is huge! We love the chair rail and the big windows.

These inset ceilings are in the living room and bedrooms too. Neat feature!

I love vintage kitchen tile. This one has pale yellow and blue tiles. The appliances are new (although stainless steel would have been cooler) and the flooring is spic and span. It's big enough to have our round table in here too or maybe an island.

This is my favorite feature! It's the original milk cubby that the milkman would leave milk in from the outside of the house!

This is the room in between the den and the hallway, we think it'd work well for Jeff's studio.

A laundry room! With tons of storage! And it's in the house!

 Check out that pink bathroom set... it's in surprisingly great condition. So retro!

At some point it'd be nice to put in a double sink, but it'll be painful to get rid of that cute pink sink and tiles!

The bedrooms are really big and have great storage. In both closets they have built in shoe ramps that you lean your shoes on, which I guess was popular back then. I need multiple shoe ramps. The hallway though has two huge closets with lots of shelving which is something the Golden house was definitely lacking.

The backyard is smaller than Golden, but it's really nice. This plot behind the garage and in front of the back fence would be perfect for my vegetable garden!!

The yard has nice trees too, like this camellia next to the garage door.

I have no clue what these hard green pods have inside of them, but they look cool! And the orange tree is chock full of them!

The garage door is new and automatic and there's a fence in front of it too that separates it from the driveway and street. Great for when we get a puppy!

There's a nice stone patio big enough for our outdoor table and chairs and a bbq. The den has sliding glass doors that lead to the backyard.

Can you tell I'm smitten? We got the signed and fully executed offer back from the seller today and are going in to sign off on the disclosures tomorrow morning so it's looking good! It will likely take a few more months before we get the bank approval and close escrow, but this gem was too good to pass up. Let's hope this is The One!

JibJab!

Thanks Karen!!

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Buttonholes

This goes so nicely with my new fascination for sewing buttonholes...

From Anthropologie...

Gift tags

I love making gift tags. I get to use my pretty scrap papers I refuse to throw away, my punches, and eyelets and it keeps me entertained for a half hour.

I made these ones from some of our leftover blank wedding cards, a circle punch and some scrap fabrics that got sandwiched in between the layers. I kind of wish I made them smaller, now that I'm looking at them. Oh well, next time.

Christmas crap

If I can't decorate my new house for Christmas, I sure as cuss am going to decorate other people's houses! I saw these on a blog somewhere and thought they were so cute, and easy to whip up. I got a little obsessed with cutting the trees from all of my green fabrics and made enough trees for four pillows! 

I left my camera charger at work (d'oh!) and Jeff "misplaced" his so these photos were taken on my iPhone, hence the poor quality.

I finally busted out my Lotta Jansdotter sewing for babies book and made the hat and scarf out of a cuddly microfleece. Every kid hat should have little ears, so cute!!

Mischief...

Santa's little workshop

A few new crafty items I made while I was home sick. I hope I'm not giving bronchitis with them...

Wool felt eyeglass cases. These were my first sewn buttonholes that I did on my machine! I'm addicted now. Everything I make will now have buttons.

Jeff made me put my "handmade by Liv" labels on them which I was kind of embarrassed about. I mean, obviously they were made by me. Not exactly from Bergdorf Goodman's or anything...

I need to stop with this bag pattern. Once you have the measurements memorized and all the construction steps are automatic, it's so tempting to crank out like 50 of them. This is one of those IKEA fabrics. Love.

For Marmie. I love pictures of cats in the sun with their eyes gently closed. I think it's their happiest time.

Anima

Anima, a show by Jill Bliss that I've already blogged about, opened this past Friday at a gallery in Portland. The pieces are SO incredible. Check it:

Aren't they gorgeous? I would LOVE that Elk piece. I would probably exchange Lily Mae for it if someone wanted to do a deal. You can imagine my excitement when I saw on her blog that she was making prints of a few of the pieces (the originals go for between $1500 and $6000, a wee bit out of my budget) and I had a spaz attack when I found out she was selling them for only $20 each. They went on sale at Buyolympia.com on Saturday, but much to my disappointment, they put a horrible bright background on them! The artwork stands out SO MUCH MORE on a white background (which is why every freaking gallery has white walls) and the green is so distracting to me. Not to mention wouldn't really go with anything we already have. I am so bummed. I hope someone requests them with a white background and she acquiesces.

By the way, I should have been using this new blog editor months ago. It makes it so much easier to size and move pictures! I'm dumb for not realizing it was there earlier. I also changed the width of the blog and postings by editing the html. I'm getting fancy! The blogging future is bright.

Lost!

Jeff finally finished his Lost pieces!! They look spectacular. The show these pieces are for is being held at the 1988 Gallery in LA on Tuesday, and will feature a ton of paintings by different artists. Jeff did a huge tryptic that includes a lot of the show's main characters and pivotal moments over the five seasons it's been on the air. We're going to go see the show on Tuesday, and we heard word that several of the show's main characters in addition to the writers and producers will be in attendance. I'll take more pictures then hopefully!
The show of course started with the plane crash that stranded the characters on the island, so Jeff made the broken fuselage a big piece. Also characteristic in the show was a big black fog that terrorized the island's inhabitants. Jeff made the burning smoke from the fuselage look instead like the black fog. So smart!
Here he is doing last minute touch ups. Seriously last minute. He pulled an all-nighter last night to get this done in time for today's deadline. It's a classic Jeff move but I'm very impressed he pulled it off. You should have seen what it looked like yesterday!
There are way too many show scenes in this painting to describe them all... if you don't watch the show, you're missing out!


Ben's face is my favorite. It is SO good.
Okay, maybe John's face is my favorite. And Vincent the dog!
The polar bears were pretty significant in the story line too.
Juliet and Said's faces are crazy real also. Good job Jeffy!