Wooden lace...

Okay, I have to figure out how to work one of these into my home decor:



Apartment Therapy featured a post on Indian screens last week. I immediately thought of blackwork patterns in cross stitch and love the combination of openness and pivacy the screens afford.

Maybe I can incorporate this into my backyard folly somehow...

Treasured tines...

For some reason, probably having to do with my lifelong love of my mother's Spode dessert set, which we only dusted, but never used, I am attracted to tableware of all sorts, and especially tea accoutrements and interesting flatware. Several years ago now the Cooper Hewitt in New York ran a fabulous exhibit called, "Feeding Desire," which traced the history of eating utensils from 1500 to the present.



The exhibit was illuminating and reinforced my love of naturalistic silverware - Susie's twig utensils, and others like the piece pictured on the cover of the exhibit catalog, and the huge, Victorian sets where one place setting could possibly contain 50-100 pieces.

Then just last week Design*Sponge contained a post about forks! It reiterated much of what was in the Cooper Hewitt exhibit, but was a fun read.



The image above is from the post, a drawing by Julia Rothman that shows all of the forks you should have in your silver service.

I now have the urge to go to flea markets and antique stores and rummage for treasures in silver. And yes, in fact, I do want strawberry forks and bonbon spoons.

Pencils as art...

Now this would be overkill, even for me:



Image from Social Designer, Goods for the Greater Good

Did you know...

That Ikea was around in 1965!?!

Images from Enter My Fantasy:

A dose of a different culture...

Last week a friend and I made an expedition to H Mart, a big Asian grocery chain with a Korean bent and a store not far from here. It's the kind of place that is simply overwhelming to the uninitiated, like me, who are not looking for anything in particular, but going more for the experience of it.



We began with produce, where things were mostly recognizable. At last, a source for baby bok choy! From there we wandered through the fish section, over to meat, and then up and down the grocery aisles. There were rows of noodles of all kinds, teas, standard western fare, which looked out of place, household items, and on and on. There was not one kind of sesame oil to choose from as there is in the local Pathmark, which makes shopping for it fast and eay, but a choice between brands and dark sesame oil, and black sesame oil and wild sesame oil. And then the section of dried seaweed, dried plants that I hoped were not for eating, but I think were, freeze-dried squid strips, etc. I had no idea how to choose between the varieties of noodles, so I chose none.

We came at last to the frozen food section where I was determined to take home some dumplings. But there again was the issue. I could read no list of ingredients and had a hard time choosing between one kind of meat dumpling and another. In the end I chose a few packages where I understood the preparation instructions and enjoyed them when I tasted them.

In the end I left H-Mart almost as overwhelmed as I walked in. I'm glad I went with a friend as we gave each other courage to try some things we otherwise never would have.

Would I go again? In a heartbeat. Now that I know what they have and what to expect, I can pretend to be a slightly more educated consumer.

And then there is that sesame candy that's been haunting my thoughts for a week now...