kirkland, to bellevue, to newcastle, to kent, to...tacoma!

i typed out this post with one eye closed since my contact lens prescription is way off and i can't do anything up close, and it didn't save!!









suffice to say, thanks to pui for all the driving and to both pui and bao for a fun day out! i love the words that come out of bao's mouth. i directed her attention to a saleman with crazy shoes. she walked over, took a peek, came back and said: "oh my! green and pointy!"

shoes!

Dyeable, satin pumps? Not for me, and not for my bridesmaids. So here's my latest installment of shoe love...and Jenn can't hold this against me because zappos has free shipping, free shipping on returns, with a 365 day timeline! So tell me what you like and what you hate. I'm tempted to say Jenn will be partial to at least "c"? I love, love, love #2 and #14 for bridesmaids. #18 for myself: hello damask!! It even sports a removable cameo, which is a pretty cute touch even though I'm not partial to it! I've never had a thing for snakeskin in the least, but i'm so tempted to get #20 or #21 as my bridal shoes.



a, b, c, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33

miss you, love

in light of all our song talk, silverchair best reflects what i feel tonight.

in the garden

andrew went home for the weekend so i hope he reads this. i went around to the back of our property, behind the fence where there's a little island area with rhododendrons....and i found.....rosemary! lots and lots of rosemary! and around the side of the house, silver dollar plants! yay for perennials!


i finally posted to some gardening communities about our mystery plants and they unanimously dubbed the lettuce plants foxglove - and sure enough look what's abloom today:

that being said, it is technically a weed...the identity of plant number two is still up in the air...

momomom

i took my mom out for a day of trying on dresses at nordstrom and other random places in the mall. she's the only peron i know who perhaps has more energy than me to do this - although i could pull off going to three or four bridal shops in one day and try on every single non-ballgown dress in each store, i came home with a migraine and head straight to bed at 8 o'clock - she, on the other hand, jumped in and out of dozens of dresses then came back to my house to cook a roast and whip up dinner, and then weeded my huge garden in under half an hour at dusk - this weeding task would have taken me the entire weekend.

i love this neckline on her. she has it in her head that you need cleavage pull off anything plunging or v-neck but i don't think so! (better not since my dress has that neckline!)



the photo at left my mom is comlaining the belt takes up half her body, middle is demonstrative that she needs petite sizes, and right, that strapless aint half bad!


this dress below was the most flattering on her, and made me warm up to the idea of using it as a bridesmaid dress....so i ordered it in four sizes yesterday.








my mom is really taken by this trapeze dress - because it's so billowy she can fit into a size 2 or a size 0. i am all over twiggy-inspired dresses, but my only concern is she'll look at photos from my wedding ten years from now and say, "what was i thinking?!"

cake stands

i dragged andrew to snohomish last weekend in the wicked heat to check out their antique stores for random bits of furniture. i walked away at the end of the day with a sweet vintage hat and a rekindled desire to use a milk glass cake stand at my wedding. most varieties are white, but it might be neat to nurture my passion for complimentary colors by featuring an orange mango cake on a 9" blue stand. a white one can certainly double as very classic, functional, collectible....and while the white is very understatedly simple, i am in love their undersides. here's a smattering from a few i'm following on ebay.

dead things

today on my lunch hour i visited a cobbler in bellevue to get the inside soles of my ballet slippers reglued and popped into michaels and was delighted come across these "mums" handmade from dried yucca pods!

i've been scouring the internet for dead things and came up with very limited retailers. i did, however, realize that all my beloved pods are actually from india as 90% of the websites that came up from my pod-related search strings were based out of "Kolkata" (Calcutta?). i shot off emails to half a dozen of these indian wholesale websites, not anticipating any replies, and i got none. andrew's heading back to vancouver this weekend (happy graduation, emily!), and i'm making him hit up little india to see if, in amongst the lavish fabric shops and yummy curry houses, there are any shops that sell my dead things.

but after going through everything i'd bookmarked, i realized there was on in the UK, one in oregon, one in texas, one based out of california that has both a wholesale and a retail front, and even one in canada!














i love this ball shaped one directly above - it's called a crepe sola (or crape shola depending on the engrish translations), or a sola x-mas ball. i've been unable to google US-based retailers for this.

so i hear nordstrom has the very best return policy....

so i hear nordstrom has the very best return policy. so much so, that you can buy a pair of shoes, wear them for six months, then return them for a full refund. somehow in the ten minutes between my phone conversation with andrew, and me heading off to work, late because i was tying up my nordstrom order, my total went from $1200 to over $3500. i ordered 4-5 sizes in each style so there shall be some dress-trying-on-partay to be had by my girls.

miss emerald

i took my mom out yesterday for a day at nordstrom and whatever else the mall had to offer. i'll have none of that matronly dress business for my mom! more photos to follow...

friend or foe?

help me identify these plants in my garden....friend or foe??!! after uprooting one such "specimen a" a couple months ago, i've decided the only thing i can really do is let them grow and see what happens. but i'm getting impatient. so someone has to tell me if i should weed them out or not. because while i've found a lot of our perennial ground cover at local stores (see post below), no nursery or plant center i've been to has anything that resembles these two entities....

untitled, photograph

crate&barrel

we had our first adventure into wedding registry gunning yesterday, and i must say that i wish i hadn't learned how to do the warehouse order at work last week because that scanning gun was cooler! it's kinda like when i was a kid and i wanted a checkout scanner playset not all that different than this one to the right....which mysteriously disappeared not long after christmas. i had thought i'd broken it and my parents returned it, but i later found out they thought they returned it because i wasn't playing with it (well at least i can rest assured i wasn't rough with my toys)! i do a minimal amount of cash register work at my retail job, and my dad thought i might love scanning the items since i loved my playset so much as a child, but not so.

somehow we were pretty frugal about the list and didn't pick too many insanely expensive things, or, for that matter, too many things in general! we walked away with only 39 items, 10 of which were expensive furniture items that we have no intention of guests buying but that we can get for 10% off after the wedding. we're currently so deprived of furniture that he just wants to slam the money down for a bunch of pieces, meanwhile i'm almost tempted to make up a separate registry under an alias name with a wedding date that's a few weeks away so we can get the furniture sooner. am i alone in my sneakiness? i noticed there were options for other types of registries - celebrations, birthdays, etc - but i'm thinking they don't get the 10% off deal after the fact.

at the end of it all i got a free heart shaped candy bowl and i rewarded the mister with part of my chocolate frosty and his very own a frosty milkshake.

last round, promise

My original plan for the BM dresses were damask b&w prints, and I haven't really found anything I've liked so far. So here are my final choices for dresses. Here are two that are pretty decent. I have one word: pockets!




I saw this dress, below, in person yesterday at Anthropologie, and Jenn, while I know you had a bad experience with their clothes being more than ill-fitting, I think this dress is very promising, and we can swap out the sash for any fabulous fabric option.




This turquoise dress is super cute but I don't know if it would be a bit much to have three matching girls.....
So enter the striped option - either 3 striped dresses, or a combination of the striped and the turquoise one. Both dresses have fabulous skirts on them. My only concern is the colors are too bold to go with anything but a black car....



My dad owns both the copper car, and the turquoise convertible, which is the car of cars. The damask would go fabulous with it, but the turquoise dresses might clash with the car, but I hadn't planned on doing major photo ops with the car(s). I guess ultimately with the victorian mansion the damask is the best option.....