Fiber Art

Fiber art: some hate it, some can't get enough

If you fall in with the latter crowd, but can't find any fiber goodness in your area, you might want to check out your local Target.

Yep, Target, the prolific purveyor of cheap "dsigner-inspired" home goods, has taken another formerly-niche decor item and brought it to the masses.  I saw this display while out shopping for moving pads and thought that it was just too good not to share.

Vacation Time

It's the beginning of January, and you know what that means, right?

I'm back from my annual UK visit.  This is always a somewhat bittersweet time, as I'm glad to be home where I can see my friends, get back into my routine, and sleep in my own bed, but leaving my girlfriend behind gets me kind of down.  It's especially hard now that all of the buildup and excitement of the holidays is over and I'm back to dealing with the craziness at work and my dad's poor health, but that's enough about that.

I always make sure to hit up a few thrifts and antique spots while I'm over, just to give myself a good tease.  I can't really get much back in my suitcase, but it's always enjoyable to just have a look around and see something different.

Here's a few of the treasures that I found at the Herts and Essex Antique Center.

Going Mobile

Ugh, these shots are awful, but I'm posting from work without the DSLR, tripod, or decent lighting.

I figured that I'd begin sharing a few of the pieces that had made their way to the office.  That's right.  The furniture hoarding has now reached the point where the entire basement is filled and it has  spilled over into the plant.

Retail Therapy

As usual, my days have been pretty packed lately, but I found myself with a few minutes to kill during my dad's physical therapy session and decided to head on down to the Humane Society and the Green Shag Market.

You might recognize the booths pictured below as those of fellow bloggers Mr. Modtomic and Hannah (of Secondhand).

Mr. Mod's is well-stocked and arranged as usual.  I'm especially enamored with the Selig chair and the Brazilian fiber art wall hanging.

 

You could walk in here and come out with a whole living room set up ready to go.

Hannah's got tons of cool stuff available, including this giant Witco Polynesian dancer. 

I don't usually leave the antique malls with anything in-hand, but Hannah had a sale going on and I couldn't resist bringing a little something home.  Stay tuned to see what I snagged.

At Least I Don't Have a Garage

At this point, things are looking a little more Grey Gardens than Farnsworth House.  So it is time to do so some clearing out.

Yeah...

The Nook

With the upstairs almost complete and a whole house repaint indefinitely postponed, my attention has turned to one particular trouble spot in the living room.

 

Trip Loot: Part 1

I've dragged this out far enough.  It's time to get to the rest of the MCM souvenirs brought home from my biannual UK excursion.

This trip turned out to be all about the ceramics, with a healthy addition to my collection of West German pottery and a few other pieces that I'll share later on.

Loft Living

Master bedroom update:  it's movin' along

The master bedroom, or as we like to call it, the studio loft, is now looking much more habitable.  Just a few short months ago, this was nothing but a storage space crammed floor-to-ceiling with jumbles of MCM junk. 

It still requires some finishing touches like drywall repair, paint, some electrical wiring, and general decorating, but I like the way is coming together.  That's quite a result for a room that's just full of all the leftover furniture that didn't make the cut for downstairs.  A dining table in the bedroom?  It's the next hot trend!

Hungry, Hungry

 Remember when I said that I wasn't going to go down the Googie / kitch rabbit hole after those Naugas?

I lied.

I was browsing Ebay last week and suddenly this ceramic hippopotamus was all up in my purchase history.

Breakfast: the final frontier

Welcome back, everyone.  As always, another week brings more decorating projects at the Nickarmadillo household.  This time we're changing up the breakfast area.  Yes... again.

First it was the butcher block craftsman set.  Then came the Eames shells, the knockoff Bertoias and the genuine Bertoias.  There might have been a few more in there, but at this point I'm starting to lose track.

Now we've moved in three of the five Burke "propeller"(115) chairs that I picked up a couple weeks back (and hung the new Nelson Polygon clock). 

What time is it?

By now you should all know what this means.

Finally joining the typosphere

While this blog primarily focuses on the furniture and smalls that find their way into my home, I do have several other sub-collections within the overarching Mid-Century Modern theme which I've never really discussed in great detail.  One of those would be my growing roster of 1940's to 1970's typewriters.  If I include both my "workhorse" and "play" machines, the count now stands at 9, so it's a pretty substantial, if not particularly exclusive, collection.  So, I've decided that a few of them needed to make their debut. 

This little guy was adopted the weekend before last.  Care to guess what's inside?

House Tour 8/27/13

Don't mind me.  I'm just updating the house tour with new pictures.

Mid-Century Midwest House Tour (8/27/2013)

Living Room

Movin' on up

In order to make up for my extended absence, I've got a special treat for you all.

I don't believe that you and my second story have ever met.  After the disastrous pre-blog roof leak of 2011, the subsequent lack of access for cleaning, and the furniture hoarding (Oh, all the furniture hoarding...), it was looking quite the mess up there.

The room pretty much became a dusty, musty dumping ground for everything that I'd pulled out of alleys/dumpsters or found at estate sales and didn't have a place for.  1940's homes don't have the storage required for modern living, much less the life of a furniture hoarding freak, so there simply wasn't anywhere else to put it except the basement and that was already packed with my non-furniture junk.

This is the way our situation remained until my girlfriend visited last week and finally convinced me to get moving on a project that I'd thought would take years: making the master bedroom a master bedroom.

This required completely reorganizing the basement with new shelving and tidy, labeled containers.  Then came the task of dragging all the pieces that I wished to sell down two narrow, twisted stairways and into the basement, where it would be categorized and out of sight of the living areas.

Phew.

A bit of tidying/arranging and one seriously aggravating set of Home Depot blinds later, everything is looking pretty snazzy.  We've got a real, honest-to-goodness master bedroom now!

Rain, rain, go away!

The summer has taken a decided turn for the dreary, so Mr. Modtomic and I (and our respective ladyfriends) decided to take advantage of a break in the clouds and check out the Wentzville flea market.  We had a great time browsing, but neither left with bags overflowing.  There just wasn't a whole lot of Mid-Century Modern going on.

Still feeling the urge to splash some cash, I hit up a few thrifts and antique malls along the route back home and snagged a couple smalls, one of which was this pot/jar/thing.  My cooking is limited to a frying pan and a sauce pot, so I really have no idea when it comes to identifying types of cookware.

"Boy, you really order a lot of old retro stuff"

I really jumped into this Ebay thing with both feet.

So far you've only seen the teak Zooline monkey, but my recent foray into online auctions has resulted in numerous visits from the UPS guy.  "Boy, you really order a lot of old retro stuff," he says.  He hasn't yet seen my attic/hoarder's den...

One such package contained a little something that I've waited forever to get my grubby mitts on, a Panasonic RC-1091 "Spencer" clock radio.  While an alarm clock may not excite some, this is one of the first pieces that really sparked my interest in modernism and holds a special place in my heart.

What a crock

Good things almost always seem to come in multiples, just like this vintage West Bend ceramic bean crock.

Flying high

Cross one more project off of the list (sort of).  The Curtis Jeré "Birds in Flight" is now hung and the star of the show in the dining room.

Alert

The Foundry hasn't had any particularly good sales as of late, but they definitely made up for that today.  It's a Mid-Mod lighting bonanza!

Who's a good boy

 Having a feral cat who lives at the office qualifies me as a pet-owner, right?

And wouldn't you say that every good kitty cat needs a treat now and again?