Beany Malone: July 2012

Saturday, July 14, 2012

Target Lunch Break

Target Lunch Break Trip

On Friday, a couple of co-workers and I decided to make a trip to Target on our lunch break in the Bronx. As a Midwestern suburbanite living in NYC, I delight at any opportunity to go to Target or Costco.

I found a cute wastebasket for the desk in our bedroom.

Target had giant tubs of Skippy Natural (a staple in our home).

Overnight ChapStick, which I bought in bulk on Amazon.com when I thought it was going extinct in stores. Apparently Target still carries it; and wisely so, this is the most effective overnight lip treatment I have ever used and makes your lips feel great.

I guess I went on an overnight beauty treatment spree, because I also bought some Boots No. 7 Moisture Quench Night Cream. Very moisturizing and rich.

Boots is a U.K. drugstore that sells great beauty products, and I am so glad that Target carries their line.

I also bought this Burt's Bees Blemish Stick that feels very cleansing on broken-out skin.

Buying thank you cards in bulk seems like a good idea to me. These Mara-Mi Checkerboard thank you cards come in packs of 50 for around $11. Great deal and very cute.

Sixth Anniversary

My husband and I celebrated our 6th dating anniversary this past week. We have a wedding anniversary now, but still wanted to mark the dating one. I made a donation in his honor to a charity that he really likes called the Best Friends Animal Society. Their website is: www.bestfriends.org/ My husband and I are animal lovers through and through. He made the pasta that he made for me soon after we met and again the night that he proposed. The recipe is a modified version of the pasta sauce Martin Scorsese's mother makes in Italianamerican (1974). Very decadent and so wonderful. He also bought a bottle of the wine we drank together six July's ago (Pèppoli Chianti Classico that I had bought on a day trip to Chianti) and a bouquet of red roses. So sweet and romantic.

Pèppoli Chianti Classico

Our cat really relished the bouquet (roses are luckily not poisonous for cats). Our flower options have really been limited by our two little grays, but thankfully roses are my favorite flower (original, I know).

Speaking of flowers, we started a little fire escape garden today, which includes basil, a boxwood, and some sort of fuchsia-colored flower.

Squirrelly Love and Paper Source

Squirrelly Love Cake Toppers and Stationery Stores

Our Squirrelly Love cake toppers were adorable and one of my favorite things from our wedding. We stumbled upon them one day in the Village. One of my favorite places to go when I'm downtown is the Greenwich Letterpress. They offer stationery and accessories in a wide variety of cuteness, and much of their inventory involves squirrels and owls. I am mildly obsessed with owls and may or may not have a huge collection of little owl figurines.

Front Window of the Greenwich Letterpress

Cheerful Interior of the store

They also do beautiful letterpress wedding invitations. I thought about using them for our wedding invitations last year, but decided it would be too expensive and opted for Hello Lucky! ( www.hellolucky.com/ ). They do letterpress and the less expensive option of flat printing that looks like letterpress (what we ended up doing). I really liked their invitations and found their Web site very convenient. We chose the "Sparrows" pattern in espresso and persimmon:

Our invitations looked something like this.

We tried to mimic the flowering branches from the invitations, etc. on our cake.

The Cake Toppers New Home = Our Mantelpiece

New Paper Source in SoHo

All of this talk of stationery has reminded me that a Paper Source ( http://www.paper-source.com ) has just opened in Manhattan. I am really looking forward to visiting and trying to resist all of the amazing products:

Paper Source

83 Spring St
New York, NY 10012

Saturday, July 7, 2012

Armoire

Painted Armoire

My biggest purchase of the last year was a painted armoire from an online auction. Living in a New York City one-bedroom apartment, storage space is slim. The armoire has always been one of my favorite types of furniture, both functional and beautiful. My German mother-in-law has some gorgeous painted cabinets from her youth in Bavaria that I have drooled over; so when I saw this painted Peruvian armoire come up for sale, I decided it was a great investment. There are many pretty contemporary armoires, but with shipping and assembly, it just wasn't worth it. This piece was really quite affordable and unique:

Tucked in a corner of our bedroom with my wellies in front of it.

The gray brothers exploring the armoire upon arrival.

The interior stores paper goods, towels, linens, and my clothes with room to spare.

One of our cats thinks that the armoire is his and loves the vantage point looking down from up top of it.

New Work Clothes

This week I felt a little blah at work. Possibly because temperatures were in the 90's all week, and I think everyone felt a bit blah. Anyway, my solution was to order some new clothing online. Hopefully the following items will be as cute in person as they were digitally:

Anthropologie Kahakai Skirt on sale for something like $30, which is unheard of for Anthro. I've been toying with wearing basic t-shirts tucked into full skirts like this. Either it accentuates the waist or it just looks odd. Who cares?

Banana Republic cap sleeve ponte knit dress in lava. Saw this at full price of $98 earlier in the week... told myself,"be patient, Banana always has online sales," and lo and behold, 25% off sale made this dress around $75. Seems like it will be a bright pop of color in my fairly conservative wardrobe.

Already have these in black and really like them. When I saw that the BC Footwear Sway sandals in gold were on sale for $29 on Piperlime, I had to snatch them up. Pops of color and shimmer like these are necessary when one needs a little pick-me-up.

We'll see if operation cheerful wardrobe works. In the meantime, hurray for the weekend!