The happiest girl in the world

Dave really outdid himself this year in the gift-giving department. While I was buying him all the staples (pajamas, sweaters, heavy wool socks, Stumptown coffee, etc) he was hard at work tracking down some of the cool stuff I've been trying to find lately.

First of all, I finally got this beautiful book of Margaret Kilgallen's work. Not that it was so hard to find (you can buy the reprint editions at Curiosity Shoppe). I just never got around to purchasing it. And now I don't have to!

I'm also excited about my new calendar from my favorite printers, Yeehaw. (I do still want to get a refill for last year's but this one is much bigger. So I don't feel like it'll be overkill.)

And I'm not sure how Dave knew that I'd been eying these vintage elephant banks, but he did. Now the laundry quarter supply will be looking extra stylish.

I know Dave was aware that I'd been looking for one of these Finel enamel bowls for quite some time, but it's still a testament to his thoughtfulness and eBay skills. He even managed to find one without any unsightly chips!

I was pretty sure that bowl was going to be the pièce de résistance--until I opened up the Gocco printer. These things are out of production, though all the supplies (ink, screens, bulbs, etc) seem to be easy enough to find online so I'm not too worried about running out.

Now I just have to figure out what I'm going to do with it, though I do have a few ideas up my sleeve. More to come on that one.

Fun with gift wrapping

I had kind of wanted to post about this before Christmas, but I would have been revealing too much to one particular person.

I was really into this plaid gift wrap we bought--it's just Christmasy enough.* This year I tried a few new decorating methods, such as the above strand of what look to me like paper buttons. (See here for how to make them...though it should be pretty self explanatory.)

I made the bow using a variation of the above technique (that is, by cutting much larger circles and folding them in half).

I bought this giant postcard from Yeehaw Industries at the Chelsea Market holiday pop up shop and decided it would look great decorating the outside of a box.

I also made some gift tags using a silver shopping bag and rubber stamps. I really like how muted the stamp looks on the silver paper.

Dave did a little bit of stamping too. Of course the only picture I took of this one is out of focus but I think it's too amusing not to share anyway. Tune in tomorrow for what's inside the boxes!

*I know how much paper is wasted every year wrapping gifts, but I'm not about to start wrapping everything in fabric like some blogs suggest (besides, who's to say that some of the recipients won't throw out the fabric too?). I do reuse a lot of other materials anyway, from shopping bags to tissue paper.

It's Christmas all over again

The stockings are hung, the tree is out (though not lit in this photo for some reason), along with all of the other random decorations I've collected over the years. (Funny to see how bare the wall looked last year, as we'd just moved in.) Every year I can't help making (and buying) a few new ornaments to add to the rotation. (I suppose I probably should think about getting rid of some of the ones that I keep confined to the closet.)

I actually made this paper ball ornament last year, using some pages I cut out of a book, but I don't think I ever posted about it. So here it is.

This year I made this paper tree using an old magazine. A little tedious, but super easy. I love how sculptural it looks.

Last fall my step niece developed a bit of an obsession with picking up acorns and shared a handful of them with Dave (which, adorably, he saved). So I already had a dried acorn hat (as I like to call it) for making this ornament, which was only slightly more difficult than the paper tree. I wish I'd had more spare hats because I would have made a whole family of wooden acorn people. (I guess there's still time!)

I also ended up buying a few new holiday things while I was in L.A. I couldn't resist this squirrel candy dish from Yolk. (I like how we have a mix of Christmas and Halloween candy in there. The pumpkins were half price and someone could not turn down a bargain.)

After hemming and hawing over some of the pricier (but beautiful) items at Plastica, I left with just this sweet little wooden Swedish bird ornament. (Note my little acorn friend to the right.)

Here's my garland from last year. Maybe next year I'll make a new one. It's always fun to change it up. I've also promised Dave that next year we'll get a real tree, so that'll be a pretty big change. I've never had a real Christmas tree for as long as I've lived, and I've decided it's probably a good time to go au natural.

Watts Towers

On our way to the airport we made one last stop: the Watts Towers.

Named for the neighborhood where they are located, the Watts Towers are a collection of 17 interconnected structures, the tallest of which is 99 feet high. They were all built by one man, an Italian immigrant construction worker named Simon Rodia, who created them in his spare time over the course of 33 years.

Constructed from steel pipes and rods, wrapped with wire mesh, and coated with mortar, the towers are embedded with pieces of porcelain, tile, and glass, and found objects such as bed frames, bottles, scrap metal, and sea shells.

These tiles spell out "SR 1921" (his initials and the year he started the project) and "Nuestro Pueblo," which is what he called the property. The flower shapes pressed in the concrete were made using garden hose spigots.

You can see a lot of fragments of vintage soda bottles.

The whole place is shaped like a boat. Our tour guide said he guessed that Simon intended to recreate the ship he sailed to America on.

In 1955, Rodia mysteriously left Los Angeles, giving the property away to a neighbor, and never returned. A year later his house, which was located within the structures, burned down. There is a wooden platform indicating where the house once stood, which was quite an unexpected revelation for me, as it's really hard to imagine this place as someone's backyard.


After the tour we watched this short film about the towers, made in the 50s while Rodia still lived there. Interestingly enough, the musical score, which was created just for this film, was later used in a very famous TV series. (I'll let you figure out which one.)

And so concludes my long and drawn out vacation slide show. I hope it was actually enjoyable for anyone else who was reading it!

LACMA

I know it's a little unbelievable that three weeks later I'm still posting about L.A. but that's really just a testament to how many awesome things we did there. Our last night in town we went to LACMA, the L.A. County Museum of Art.

Outside there are lots of Eames wire chairs scattered about (a nice counterpart to MoMA's Bertoias).

Also in the courtyard is this sculpture, called "Urban Light," which consists of 202 cast iron street lamps that once were used in the streets of L.A. The Hipstamatic Dali lens does some crazy things to it.

After looking at the William Eggleston photo exhibit and thinking "what a great museum," we realized that there were quite a few more buildings to explore. We saw Andy Warhols, Alexander Calders, Richard Serras,

Giacometti sculptures, Paul Klees, Philip Gustons,

Henri Matisses, Ed Ruschas, Donald Judds, and on and on.

I took a lot of pictures of the "Fashioning Fashion" exhibit. It really photographed well.



And also from "Eye for the Sensual."

So I was pretty impressed with this museum. Nine buildings filled with ridiculously incredible art. And it's free during the week for California residents! (Which of course didn't help us, but just sayin...I can't think of any NY art museums on par with this one that are also free for locals.)

I love you, you big dummy

Totally depressing.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology

The Museum of Jurassic Technology is located on a fairly nondescript block in Culver City. But the interior is anything but nondescript. I'm not sure I can even explain what it is--a cabinet of curiosities, "a specialized repository of relics and artifacts from the Lower Jurassic, with an emphasis on those that demonstrate unusual or curious technological qualities." It's a dimly lit labyrinthine place, with beige rotary phone receivers in the wall that play back information about the exhibits when you hold them up to your ear.

In this room we heard the tragic story of an opera singer.

From butterflies behind glass to miniature mobile homes to dogs of the Soviet space program, the museum houses a strange variety of collections,

many of which are charmingly "out of order."

As Dave pointed out to me, many of the displays look straight out of a Nine Inch Nails video.

Especially when you photograph them using a Dali lens.

While I at times couldn't fully comprehend what I was looking at, I always felt a sense of wonder and amusement (and maybe a little bit of confusion). In that regard it's almost like a big art installation, an experiment designed to invoke various reactions in the visitor.