Z Gallerie left New York

Dim the lights on Broadway (or at least the lower Manhattan section). Z Gallerie is gone, replaced with a teeny bopper clothing store - just what the neighborhood needed. Apparently the company has closed a third of its stores citing the bad economy. What a disappointment to cross the Brooklyn Bridge on foot, walk five blocks up Broadway and find Unnecessary Clothing in lue of my favorite home goods spot.

Z Gallerie, I will miss your affordable accessories, wild vases, cool botanicals, weird rubberized versions of things in the natural world, resin faking as metal faking as wood, and clean bathrooms on the lower floor.

At least we still have cb2, one of only six in the galaxy.

How to make modern tree branch silhouette art

Here's a great little DIY project for anyone who is:
1. Embarrassingly cheap and
2. Can't draw

I have long admired the modern triptychs by Inhabit at Velocity Art and Design but at $116, they were out of my reach.

I already had four IKEA Ribba frames with photos I needed elsewhere. I kept searching the Internet for high-resolution images of tree branches but couldn't find anything I liked. Tom said why not use real tree branches. Duh.

To create a similar set of art panels, you will need:

a set of picture frames (for an inexpensive option, try cb2.com's record album frame for $15.)
posterboard cut to fit
tree branches
flashlight

Lay the posterboard on the floor and suspend a flashlight above the tree branches so that a shadow is cast on the posterboard and trace the shadow's outline.



Go over the pencil lines with a magic marker.


And hang.

Feels good to freecycle

We received free. We gave free.

Last year we trash picked this wood lounge chair on Willow Street. This year our balcony is too crowded with this chair, two other chairs, a table, planters and a fountain. So we let it go.

That's Bromeliad Living - being blessed by the beneficence of our well-heeled neighborhood but also enjoying watching its squeeky wheels roll away.

First peony of the spring

At least the first one I've seen.

At least I think it's a peony.

Spring Cure - the last of it

It's the last week of Apartment Therapy's Spring Cure, and we are supposed to be having dinner parties and celebrating our newfound tidiness. Instead, Tom and I did pretty much everything we were supposed to do over the eight weeks and packed it into a day. Tom's closet now looks like a display at a men's store.

I got completely obsessed and actually "styled" the pantry.

Saturday we had a breakfast party with friends in our building. We made our fancy coffee maker portable and rolled it into our friends' apartment.

They made bacon-wrapped eggs with polenta. (Recipe here.)

Office makeover before and after

Part of Apartment Therapy's Spring Cure involves cleaning up your home office. I don't have one, but I did clean up my office office. My work cube often ends up being a dumping ground for found items, unfinished DIY projects and computer hardware. It was starting to make me crazy. Here's the before.

Here's the after. Still plenty of bizarre stuff (all of it free from one source or another.)

I made the memo board. The cards are from friends or from art galleries in DUMBO.

Finally found a restrained use of shoe decorating. (Some of you may remember my unfortunate first attempt at this.)

Squirrely

It's finally gotten warm enough in New York to open the door and venture out onto our balcony. We were immediately greeted by the neighborhood squirrel. Tom has been feeding him/her/it honey roasted peanuts and sunflower seeds.

As midwesterners transplanted to NYC, we are obviously starved for encounters with nature, but this squirrel is scary tame. Assertive city squirrels are known to march into apartments and open the cupboards. I'm just waiting for him to whip out a little knife and demand my nuts.