maxi dresses

I have been living in maxi dresses this summer.  I love them to death. I bought two styles from Target in every color, as I like to wear a uniform and am incapable of dressing myself in a wide and varied wardrobe.   Since Target is holding a buy one get on 50% off this week on women's dresses, I thought I would share.

This summer's uniform is this dress:

And this dress paired with lots of colorful statement necklaces:

I am 5'2-ish and 145 lbs, usually a size 10 or 12.  The colorblock dress is a petite medium and I love the length and fit, no adjustments needed.

The solid color dress does not look terribly attractive in the above picture, but I love it on.  The verrrry low cut top offsets the muu-muu effect.  However, order a size down. I have two in the medium, and they fit fine, but the top is a bit loose.  When I ordered a few more I went with the small petite, which fits my top perfectly and also fits on the bottom.

I ran the petite smalls through the dryer and they are about an inch off the floor.  If you are shorter than 5'2 you might have to get them hemmed.  I tried on the regular size medium and it was a foot too long.

The petite is on clearance for $13 (buy two, get the second one for $6.50!).  The regular not-petite size is $24.99 for some reason.

Lastly, I am contemplating this:

Cardigans are also on sale! 

The guest bedroom: some chiang mai and Jenny Lind

A few weeks ago a friend mentioned that she had a vintage queen-size Jenny Lind bed that she had bought in a church rummage sale, and if I wanted it, I could have it.  OF COURSE I want it! I've been looking for a Jenny Lind queen-size bed for years!

One small problem--the side rails were missing, and the mounting hardware was mounted at 15 inches high, meaning that simply screwing the spindle headboard onto a standard metal frame would be difficult.  Despite my previous bad experiences with vintage beds (yes, plural bad experiences, here and here), I figured we could work around that.  (Foreshadowing. I clearly have not learned my lesson.) 

In order to make things interesting, we sold the previous Malm bedframe and waited to do this project until we had out of town guests coming the next day.  No pressure! I hear guests love to sleep on mattresses on the floor.  

First we ordered a metal hookplate bedframe.  When we got it home, the hooks were too large to insert into the hardware. Weirdly enough, this weekend our next door neighbor put a queen size frame and boxspring out on the curb, so we returned the hookplate frame and used the free frame.  

Next we thought we would put the frame on risers so we could screw the frame in above the spindle.  One of the risers was a bit wobbly, and it seemed like an unsturdy solution for a bed that our boys like to jump on.  On to attempt number three.  

Using a piece of scrap wood, we screwed the metal frame to the wood at the bottom, and screwed the scrap wood into the frame higher above the spindle.  This worked well, although I think we should probably redo this with a longer piece of wood to give the headboard more support.  Also, I need to paint the wood white.  Someday.  

That finally did the trick. 

I miss the chiang mai dragon bedroom, so I pulled out that stuff out.

Voila! Fresh guest bedroom!

Earring and necklace corner

I have been looking for a place to put my necklaces and earrings where I could see them. A few months ago I bought this hanging organizer, which has pockets for earrings on one side and velcro tabs on the other side for hanging necklaces.  It hung in my closet for a while, but that was annoying and generally useless. I decided that the empty corner behind our bedroom door would be a good place to spread out.

My necklaces are now hanging on a row of pegs that I took from the entryway of our garage.  The earrings remain in the hanging organizer, but I will be perusing pinterest to see what other solution I can DIY. (Like this, perhaps?)

I bought the girl painting at a church rummage sale in Delaware for $7 when I visited my family in April.  Of course, that meant I then had to get her back to California.  She came with a reasonably nice frame that I hoped to refinish, but the frame fell apart when I packed her for shipping.  For now she is just hanging out unframed, staples and all.

Mah hair; and how do you store your photos?

You all were too kind on my last post--I am well aware that the boys room looks like amateur hour, but I appreciate the kind comments and suggestions.

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Weeks ago I posted that I was getting my hair cut, and dithering between chopping all my hair off again or leaving it to grow longer.  (Time flies when you don't blog very often!)

I walked into the salon having decided to chop it off again.  Then my hairdresser talked me into letting it grow. So it sort of looks pretty much the same as before the haircut.

I know, I know, resting bitch face, I has it. 

I think my hairdresser talked me into letting it grow longer because she herself had cut her hair drastically short a few days prior and hated it so much she promptly got extensions.  Her hair issues may have been projected onto my head, as it were.  However, one drawback to having fabulously stylish short hair is that it needs to be trimmed on a four week basis, and that is just a giant pain.  One of the reasons I want to grow it out is to be free of the constant need for trims.  (I can stretch the gray hairs out for a while, usually 8-10 weeks at a time.)  So I am not unhappy that I am growing it out.  For now, anyway.  That could change at any moment.

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I have thousands, nay, possibly hundreds of thousands of digital pictures of my children (and my house.  If I died tomorrow I would be terribly embarrassed that my husband would have to explain to the children why there possibly more pictures of our living room than there are of the children.)  Probably half of the pictures are duplicate shots of the same thing, which is the curse of the digital age and not having to pay to develop film.  Regardless, I have a million gazillion unsorted digital photos sitting on multiple hard drives and cloud devices that need to be sorted and put into some sort of order.  I feel like a hoarder--the project has become so overwhelming and huge that I do not know where to start.

I am not a scrapbooker. I do not want to spend my precious free time organizing photos.  I am probably going to start a fifteen-minute-a-day project to start getting this under control.  But I need some kind of process or end goal to work towards.

How do you keep up with photos?  What simple and easy app or website will fix my problem?

wall of faux taxidermy

I had the brilliant idea of collecting all the extra faux taxidermy I had lying around and putting it in the boys' room.

It looked more awesome in my head.

I found the lion head at the Rose Bowl flea market, and the cardboard moose is from Cardboard Safari.

The t-rex (the arms, they just kill me) is from this Etsy store.

The antelope was a gift, and the colorful moose was from Target.

This room just has not come together.  I don't hate it, but nor do I particularly like it.