fashion / wear your heart on your sleeve

who is ready for valentine's day? (i'm not either, don't worry!). february is always jam packed for us- jarman's birthday is on the 8th, the valentine's is on the 14th, and our anniversary is on the 18th. lots of romance will be going on over here! actually, we usually keep our valentine's days pretty simple. well, we try to. the valentines of 2012 actually turned out to be a bit of a fiasco. we were getting married in four days so we said we weren't going to do anything for valentine's. i was actually planning to go out with my sisters for one last girls day before the wedding. so halfway through the day my little sister comes home with a present from her 'boyfriend', and i started thinking to myself how pathetic it was that we hadn't even gotten married yet and we had already lost the romance of getting little gifts on valentines day. i obviously threw a fit and started crying because how was i going to marry someone who doesn't get his soon-to-be wife anything for valentines day (even though i had not gotten him anything, soooo selfish). jarman ended up driving back to his house to bring me the little gift he had gotten me (some chocolates and a stuffed animal) and consoled my crazy side. he really learned a lesson not to wait until halfway through any holiday to give me a gift, and especially to not get me a gift at all, heaven forbid! that should tell you a little bit about the dynamics of our marriage and who is the bratty one. (yup, it's me).

i got this shirt a little over a year ago (for $12.99 at tjmaxx) and am so excited to wear it every valentine's season, but i can't bring myself to wear it any other time than the month of february. i got the skirt at the jcrew outlet, and the boots at anthro (both on major sale). how cute is syd and her fun balloons?

from my camera / audrey's birthday brunch

audrey's birthday was on friday and i kid you not when i say that she loves her birthday more than i love mine. and that's saying a lot, because i loooovvveeee my birthday. she made a schedule two weeks beforehand of everything that we were going to do, and then posted it all over the house. she also made andie sign a contract promising that she would be nice all day on her birthday, and threatened the rest of us and her friends that she was going to make us sign one too. first on her list was to open her birthday outfit and have her birthday brunch. the night before, audrey and our mom went to the dollar store to get supplies for the brunch. they got the polka dot table cloth, balloons, and plates to accent the leftover decorations from the bridal shower last week (which i am posting about on wednesday, be excited!). after her brunch we went shopping, then came home and she tried on all of her new clothes for us. that night she went to sushi and we had lava cakes for dessert.

almost everyone says that me and audge look the most alike and act the most alike. she is kind of my twin separated by ten years. we are both a little bit spazzy, very excitable, and tend to over-think everything. we have a few good qualities too. audrey is by far the most thoughtful person in our family- she is the only sister to consistently give presents and always chooses meaningful things. i'm happy to call her my twin, not only because she is so cute but also because she is such a great little sister to have in my life.

contemporary artist / teresita fernandez

while we lived in washington dc i had the opportunity to attend lots of contemporary artist's lectures at the american art museum. i loved hearing about the artists views and what drove them to make art. for some it was all visual, for others it was much more conceptual. in the fall, i got to see teresita fernandez and i totally fell in love with her vision of art. i wrote up this post a little bit after for the national museum of women in the arts blog, and am just getting around to sharing it here. i hope you are inspired by her amazing works!

What do you get when you combine Gericault’s romantic Raft of the Medusa, Hokusai’s woodblock prints, and Rothko’s saturated colorfields? You are probably not thinking of a pedestrian walkway bridge in Seattle. However, Teresita Fernandez combined these influences and created an ethereal and majestic walkway, seemingly transporting its visitors to a heavenly realm.

Teresita Fernandez is a contemporary artist from Miami, who considers her works to be ‘landscape sculptures’, a term which she feels is underused, and a style understudied. She differentiates her style from ‘land art’, which is a more well known type of art that actually uses land as art, rather than bringing it into a museum or artistic space. Many of her sculptures incorporate mixed media materials, including glass, thread, mirrors, graphite etc.

A major theme in her works is the perception of movement that our minds create when we combine multiple images in a rapidly syncopated fashion. She aims to create sculptures that are experiential and immersive. Rather than just viewing, Fernandez wants her audience to ambulate and read the works, constructing new images and relations. Most of her works tend to evolve depending on times of day, place of viewing, and the ways in which one moves around the work.

Fernandez is the youngest artist to be commissioned by the Seattle Art Museum for Olympic Sculpture Park, and was asked to create the walkway leading into the park. In Seattle Cloud Cover she combined hundreds of images of colorful clouds, placed them between glass and covered the walkway. The images are perforated with little holes giving tiny views of Seattle’s skyline in the distance.  She wanted the view of Seattle to seem like it was moving slowly through a projector.

Much like our own Chakaia Booker New York Avenue sculptures, the piece changes as one moves around it, no one view is ever the same. Booker and Fernandez alike aim to incorporate the setting into the experience of their artwork. Each is also faced with the daunting task of finding materials that will fit their vision. While Booker works with tires and must strategically plan our each sculpture before it is put together, Fernandez had to stitch thousands of images of clouds together and create her sensorial experience. It is interesting to see these two women being commissioned for large public sculptures, which would have never been possible years ago.

bedroom makeover / before's and progress

jarman and i just finished a long day of getting crap done in our room. it is looking so good! not everything is finished, but i wanted to share what our room looked like before and how far we have come! the walls were brown which made the room seem dark and small, especially with only on window. we used to have a brown duvet and chartreuse sheets. pretty much all of the furniture will stay in the same places, and we are keeping all of it, so we are just working on making everything look prettier! (all of these pictures were taken with an iphone, and most of them were late at night, sorry for the crappy quality!)

this panorama picture shows the layout of the room (it is taken from the door). our massive king bed takes up lots of the space, but we wouldn't trade it for the world. to the left of the bed is our desk and bookshelf. at the end of the bed is our dresser and our tv hangs above.

my mom and sisters decorated our room for christmas- complete with our own adorable and real christmas tree. she also got us some gold polka dot vinyl decals for the wall, and lots of other cute christmassy items.

since then, we have painted the walls...

done lots of (clearance) shopping...

tried lots of different bedding combinations...

bought and painted a vintage headboard

curated lots of art...

and have built, organized, and hung lots of things.

that last picture is how the room looked before we went to bed. you don't even know how excited i am to have desk drawers!

now all we need to do i finish/install the headboard, hang all of the art, work on more organization, and style everything!

photo shoot / missionary farewell

both of these girls are going on missions really soon! actually, krista (my cousin) leaves today! she will be serving in the west indies french speaking mission for the next 18 months! sydney leaves on march 5th (which is coming way too fast) for the costa rica mission. they are both going to be so awesome! if you have any questions about mormon missionaries, feel free to contact me or check here!

before the girls left, their mothers requested a photo shoot of the two of them. they have been best friends/cousins since birth, so it seemed only fitting! i was dying over the blossoming tree in the backyard (you know if have a weakness for blossoms, look at my cover photo!). and forced them to sit and stand awkwardly on a table to get as many blossoms as possible.

i am seriously going to miss these girls so much over the next year and a half!