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Duplicating Danish design: The colour palette clock

~ Hilary ~ 5 Comments

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: I adore all things colourful, crafty and creative.

This project combined all three while ALSO tossing in my love of all things European-design. Bonus!

Ever since returning from Europe, I’ve been dying to recreate some of the neat, interior designs I saw. The city that inspired me the most was Copenhagen, and the place was packed with interesting, unaffordable boutiques, design museums and specialty stores.

Even I became more colourful in Copenhagen! (for the record, this ice cream was delicious)

One of the coolest things I saw was from Illum, a trendy department store found at the heart of Strøget, the city’s pedestrian shopping street. Everything in Illum was stunning and inspiring, from the woven rugs to the chic kid’s furniture. It was like IKEA on drugs.

I wanted it all. But since Denmark is already severely overpriced and I am but a mere, nearly-broke student, I decided that putting my own homemade spin on the store’s products were as good as it was going to get.

Here was my inspiration:

As soon as I got back from EU in September, I started trolling Saturday morning yard sales and Value Village aisles in search of a cheap, decrepit clock. Success came on the morning of the Old Ottawa South porch sale.

Two dollars for this baby.

Ah yes, keeping the price low was key, and this project cost all of $3 to complete. I used a plastic container of black paint I had purchased last summer at IKEA and carefully cut out coloured rounds (using a glue stick as a stencil) from my very extensive collection of paper.

The end result was, I think, even nicer and more sleek than the original. I’m proud.

Make sure you force your roommate to hold the clock and make funny faces at the camera

A wonderful day: Jane’s wedding

~ Hilary ~ 1 Comment

I can, with 100 per cent certainty, say that this was the most adorable wedding that I will ever attend. I know that I’m young and will likely be attending my fair share of well-decorated, impeccably planned weddings over the next few decades, but none will ever top this one.

No, it wasn’t organized by a wedding planner nor was it an overly-swanky affair, yet Jane and Jake’s wedding a few weekends ago had more romance and love than a glitter-filled, overdone wedding could ever contain.

I first met Jane in the summer after my second year, when I worked as a Summer Orientation leader in Carleton’s Student Experience Office. Over the summer I was lucky enough to share dozens of lunches with her, and quickly found out about her passion for bees, Denmark and mason jars. I also heard about Jake, the man that she had been dating ever since they met working at Black’s Photography when she was in her late teens. I was over the moon when I finally found out they were engaged.

The wedding took place at Jane and Jake’s house, a beautiful cottage hidden away in the Gatineaus. Their ceremony took place beneath the end-of-September fall colours. It was adorable.

They both wore Birkenstocks. This, I love.

Jane, of course, was a very low-key bride and was in no way as demanding as the bridezillas I’ve seen on popular TLC shows. Maybe I have a skewered perception of how a bride-to-be should behave. Regardless, I was pleased to have that stereotype delicately shattered by Jane’s relaxed wedding nature.

Jane and her famous smile, pre-wedding

I think it was the simplicity of everything that made the ceremony so powerful. I thought everything was perfect, from Jane’s beautiful dress to the petite jars of wedding favour honey to the fact that Jane’s bouquet was a stunning collection of golden sunflowers.

Food was also an integral part of the day, and I’m horrified/excited to admit that I witnessed, for the very first time, a giant pig roasting over a crackling fire. There was a Lord of the Flies raw-ness to the scene. Other than the pig roast, there was cumin-flavoured cheese from Holland, a canoe filled with beer and more hamburgers and hotdogs than I’ve ever seen in my life.

There were also my cupcakes that Jane asked me to make. I was honoured when Jane asked me to bake for her, and of course agreed to make as many cupcakes as I could. That turned out to be six dozen, including a dozen mini GF cupcakes for Jane.

Cupcakes: psychedlic, banana with a milk chocolate frosting, chocolate zucchini with a strawberry yogurt icing
This is when I harassed people into letting me take their picture with the cupcakes

Thank heavens my friend (and Jane’s maid-of-honour) Kristina drove me.

What you can't see is that there is ANOTHER tray on the other side of me

I am happy to say there was only one cupcake casualty throughout the entire, 45 minute drive to Jane’s house. It was in the last 100 metres of our journey, and happened when a banana cupcake decided to pull a tumbleweed and roll down onto my lap. Thank heavens the seat belt and my iPhone braced the fall. Hilary: 0, icing on iPhone: 3.

Congratulations again to Jane and Jake. Your wedding was beautiful and I wish you two all the happiness in the world.

Here are some more sights from the afternoon wedding…

Maid-of-honour and good friend Kristina, looking gorgeous
Just when the wedding couldn't get any better, we were told there were s'mores. This one had a Reese's Cup in it.
Another old co-worker, Natalie, and her boyfriend Tyler
This is three seconds from Jane's house. On her property. Woah.

Hi, my name is Hilary, and I’m a colour addict (an end-of-summer arts and crafts project)

~ Hilary ~ 6 Comments

Subtitle: I will blog about whatever I like, please and thank you.

As far as decorating my bedroom goes, I’m pretty big on colour. Want to know how big? Here’s a picture of my room at my parent’s house, painted circa grade 10.

This was also the time when I took embarrassing, myspace shots like this in said bedroom. You know you did it too. See that green blazer? That’s my high school band jacket. See the purple scarf? I wore that yesterday. Coolest kid in school, clearly.

DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME EVER.

The one perk to moving halfway through high school? I got to paint my room two different colours. My brother picked black and red. Logically, I did what any colour-crazed teenage girl who had been living in a baby blue bedroom for the last seven years would do, and selected pink and yellow to go along with my already-lime green laden future room. Bless the girl who lived there first for picking such an atrociously bright colour.

So back to my first statement: I like my room full of colour and creativity. With such, you can only imagine my excitement when I discovered this frame at a design boutique in Vienna. I knew that the second I got home I would recreate it.

My inspiration

And it was so easy. This was all I needed.

This craft project was also simplified by the fact that I had in my possession a decently sized saw. It was in the toolbox my dad bought for me in second-year. This being said, shouldn’t every 20-something girl own at least one saw? Craft projects must be taken into consideration.

Now, since pencil crayons and their resulting shavings come out looking quite artistic, ensure that you take several pictures of both during and after the crafting process.

Then base the front of your future business cards around one of the photos you take. This is very important.

Before you know it, voila! You will have a ridiculously childish, Viennese inspired frame to help brighten up the already ceizure-inducing colour of your room. Admire for hours.

In total, this frame took about 2 hours to make, almost all of which was spent lounging out on the porch in the end-of-summer sun. I’ll post the extremely-simple instructions down below, in case you every have a desire to make a frame which will most definitely make you look like a Kindergarten teacher or teen mom. Ugh. Who am I.

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Happy Birthday Lindsay! (ft. Martha Stewart’s tiramisu cupcakes)

~ Hilary ~ 4 Comments

Fact: every dessert is better in cupcake form.

Heck, lets just broaden that statement to say that anything is better in cupcake form.

Including tiramisu.

This past Friday was my roommate Lindsay’s birthday.

Since we haven’t been living together for very long, and because we are both lovers of good dessert, I wanted to make her something special for her birthday.  She requested either ice cream cake or tiramisu.  I settled on the latter, having already conquered the frozen fates when I made my homemade ice cream cake back in February.

Obviously I couldn’t just make any old tiramisu.  Silly you for thinking so.

Martha Stewart’s website has a bounty of creative cupcake ideas, albeit ones that are fairly complicated (to the point that the recipes come accompanied by a tutorial video – yikes!).  It was here that I discovered the recipe for these.

I have never used so many kitchen do-dads to make one batch of cupcakes.  I was boiling, brewing, sifting, melting and brushing… It all worked out though.  What can I say? #justcallmemartha

Having just moved into a new house with many left behind/forgotten baking utensils, I had to get creative with my methods.  For example, I used a cheese grater from IKEA as a sieve and a salad-bowl-in-a-pot as a double boiler.  I try to be resourceful, I really do.

The outcome of much kitchen labour was a batch of 15 pretty awesome cupcakes.  The cake was spongey and light (although a tad burnt on the bottom, woops).  The chocolate-marsala sauce that was brushed over the top tasted delicious (although, as Matt pointed out, it tasted a little like some sort of sushi sauce, but he is just crazy).  Finally, the pièce de résistance was the mascarpone cheese icing that was so light but so rich.

ONE more thing: I splurged and bought vanilla beans for these cupcakes!  A real life vanilla bean (actually, two).  It cost me an arm and a leg (AKA $7), but it was totally worth it.

PS (I lied with the one more thing): can you tell that I’ve been making a conscious effort to create the “setting” for my food photos?  I’ve noticed that most food blogs feature a bunch of random background items (emphasized by their sweet cameras and actual ability to achieve some sort of bokeh), so I thought I’d try doing the same thing.  These shots featured Lindsay’s container of cocoa and a silk scarf I bought at a garage sale.

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EXPLORED: Toronto’s Distillery District (half photo gallery, half a tale of my sugar-infused afternoon)

~ Hilary ~ 3 Comments

What a wonderful afternoon.

I don’t know about you, but exploring new places makes me so terrifically happy that I want to skip, cheer and dance (simultaneously).

I spent this past holiday weekend in Toronto.  My second day in Ontario’s capital started off fairly low key.  After a blissful morning of sleep, I called my aunt and uncle to see if they, for lack of a better term, wanted to “hang out.”  One quick BIXI ride later, we met for a lunchtime reunion over Front Street pub grub.

My aunt and uncle outside of the Mill Street Brewery (best beer EVER)

Now, be it pollution or just general weather phenomena, the sky was filled with a thin, cloud-like fog.  Any evidence of skyscrapers or even the CN Tower were masked by this layer, and it looked as though someone had taken an eraser to the skyline of Canada’s largest city.

After lunch, we strolled the short 15 minutes to the Distillery District.  The rain that had poured on the city earlier in the afternoon had evaporated, leaving a crisp, clear spring day.  The weather was perfect.

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