Category Archives: crafty lil me

It’s hard to buy your boss a gift. Right? Right. So I made mine one. (Of course I did.) Everyone in her immediate fam got a monogrammed linen coaster with his initials on it:

Now I want a set. But a bunch of AB coasters seems strange.

Anthropologie had the amazing Barbara Keal do a felt workshop at their Rockefeller Center store. And I was one of like 15 lucky persons to turn this:

Into first this:

And then this:

(Mine’s the demonic dark grey one on the left.)

My loves Lauren and Monika joined me towards the end of the workshop/beginning of the cocktail hour. And I couldn’t have had a better Birthday Adam (here’s looking at you, Anne Pace).

Monika’s presents were not only perfect but also perfectly wrapped with monogrammed gift tags and handcut paper embellishments and the like:

I looked like a homeless person carrying all my presents and felt workshop supplies and flowers (from the office) home on the train:

But it was worth it:

See my felted creature?

And me work shopping through Monika’s eyes:

I’m supposed to evacuate my apartment today. Apparently I live too close to the water. Hm. Pass.

So instead of fleeing, I made pasta salad and cauliflower salad in case the power goes out. I smoked a bunch of hookah. I hit a mouse in the face with a flashlight. And I sketched and hand-embroidered these linen coasters for my glass-topped sofa table:

The carrot is because John tripped on one once while walking down the sidewalk, and I can’t stop laughing about it months later. And the squirrel is because I am chased (nearly attacked) by them wherever I go. I dunno why I picked those things to represent each of us … but it does make the coasters very His & Hers. And glasses will slide around on my sofa table no longer.

I went away. Then he went away. Then I came back. And he just, finally, came back too.

I forgot to send him a postcard from Virginia, so he gets this embroidered pillow version of what I’d have sent instead:

It’s like a love letter:

Only it’s a little difficult to hide/forget/ignore.

So for Holiday 2012, TOMS sent out a Memory game instead of a lookbook. Remember Memory? You flip over cards and have to remember where they all are so that you can draw a pair. It was a cute idea. But when I started playing the game with M—-, we decided that we hate the random photos of shoes and glasses and people on their cards. Lookbook shmookbook.

So we decided to make our own staff lookbook/memory game. I ran around and snapped impromptu photos of the people actually in the office this morning, printed them in black and white and to scale, and glued them over the TOMS photos using a glue stick.

Of course the first card I flipped had my face on it:

Ah, narcissism.

Two things remain true of every Home Depot trip I’ve made since moving to NY:

1. Girls – the ones who work there – are assholes. (And there is always a posse of them hiding in the bathroom.)

2. Guys – the ones who work there – hook it up. (And if no male employees are around, innocent male bystanders even offer to help if I look lost.)

“Hi! I was here yesterday and bought these steel tiles, and I need to buy more and have several cut. Would y’all be able to help me? Please?”

Home Depot Girl: “No.”

“Um? Not at all? There’s no way someone can help me figure out how to cut the tiles?”

“You um need a uh wet saw. And we don’t uh cut those um tiles for people. So uh you need to rent a wet saw.”

“Right.” Yeah right is more like it. I marched over to the tool rental section. Thank god a man was working it today. “Hi! The lady over there said I need to rent a saw to cut a few of these tiles. Would you be able to show me what I need?”

He shook his head and cut them for me. Damn right. So my backsplash is done:

Whew.