Manolo for the Home

How adorable is all this stuff from Ninainvorm? She makes cute and colorful ceramics, screen prints, collages, and more, then sells them in her Etsy store way out in the Netherlands. Shipping is as expensive as you might imagine, but if your goal is to brighten up your environment, perhaps it’s worth it?

She says: “I make these name plates as a custom order for children and grown-up loved ones. I use the most beautiful vintage plates from my large vintage plate collection and then add screenprinted images & cut the letters of the name by hand out of colourful ceramic decal paper. Then the plates are fired in my kiln on a high temperature. The result is a unique, personal, sustainable and very cheerful plate.”

She says: “A beautiful medium-sized (contents: about 0.65 liter or 2/3 mugs) vintage 1960s design teapot, redecorated by me with my screenprinted lots of dots pattern in 6 colors. The vintage teapot is still in a very good condition, only some of the glazing on the handle feels a little bit rough, which isn’t something visible but you can feel it a little when you rub it with your fingers.”

She says: “Each set contains the six different postcards that you see on the pictures. In my other listings you can see detail pictures of the large prints that these postcards are the smaller version of.”

She says: “A beautiful medium-sized (about 7.5″”/18 cm diameter) vintage plate to which I added my screenprinted spirograph image. The plate is quite old, but still in a real good condition. This plate is fired on a high temperature and is therefore fit for daily use or to put it on a wall as wall art.”

As if you couldn’t guess, her life is just as colorful as her creations. See more at
her blog, which is well worth a visit!

Vintage pottery is just plain fun. It’s fun to collect. It’s fun to display. And it’s fun to use, because if it’s going to take up space in your home you might at well enjoy it. Plus, as collectibles go, it’s easy to find and inexpensive to buy (especially on eBay). What’s not to like? You can base an entire room around a cool piece of vintage pottery, especially if the piece has great color or lines.

What’s not to like? You can base an entire room around a cool piece of vintage pottery, especially if the piece has great color or lines.

I’m not advocating smoking, but if you’re looking for ashtrays that don’t scream truck stop, vintage is the way to go.

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Love her or hate her, Julia Child exerted a great deal of influence over the evolution of American cooking — a book I love, Something From the Oven, touches briefly on just how much. But that sort of history is best left to authors of food tomes and cookery bloggers. What I’m interested in is her kitchen. Want to see it? There’s an amazing reproduction of Julia Child’s kitchen in an exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of American History. I’d post a picture here, but I’m unsure about the legality of doing so, which means you’ll have to be satisfied with the link above.

Isn’t that a beautiful kitchen? Julia Child’s kitchen was not particularly pretty in the sense that a staged kitchen in House Beautiful is pretty. Rather, it’s a lived in kitchen… a worked in kitchen… a kitchen that is beautiful in its perfect usefulness. The knives, the colanders, the parts for the KitchenAid are all accessible. I somehow imagine that I could walk right into Julia Child’s kitchen and start whipping something up without much trouble. I doubt anyone could say the same for my kitchen, since not much beyond my cast iron pan and my teapot is accessible without digging around in cabinets and drawers. Could someone say the same for your kitchen?

One thing I’m very thankful for on this Thanksgiving Day is all of the readers who stop by to check out what’s new at Manolo for the home and to share their thoughts with me. It’s a privilege to write for all of you, so thanks! And happy Thanksgiving to everyone in the states!

(Photo by Lane & Anne)

Thanksgiving, at least in the States, is less than two weeks away, and for the second year in a row The Beard and I will be serving up dinner here at our very own home. Our extended families will be elsewhere, and we will miss them as we chow down on a Celebration Roast instead of the turkey they’ll be eating. Last year we had a guest, but this year the roster of diners will be limited to ourselves and the baby who can eat just enough real food to enjoy her own Thanksgiving feast.

Our table? Will be simple. We resist the urge to serve up the mashed and stuffing on plates and in bowls embellished with gaudy cartoons of pilgrims and Indigenous Americans. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, though if you were to ask me I’d tactfully suggest steering clear of that whole bushel of iconography. The holidays should not be an excuse to lose one’s sense of good taste.

So what have we got here…

Personalized napkins are awesome, eliminating as they do the need for place cards. Plus, guests can take them home at the end of the meal! Country Living has simple directions for the DIY crowd.

Printing coordinating menus, place cards, wine glass labels, and other paper goods for the table is easy. Just choose a color palette to coordinate with your tablescape and clip art to jazz things up a little. Conversely, sites like Paper & Cake sell print-at-home kits that make printing everything you need for your Thanksgiving table easy-peasy.

Martha Stewart’s Thanksgiving tables range from the fresh and cool to the modern to the downright dowdy, complete with pine cone turkeys. Note that pine cone turkeys are fun for the very young and the very young at heart, but do look silly. Can’t help that.

This table was DwellStudio founder Christiane Lemieux’s American Thanksgiving design, featuring plenty of DwellStudio products, natch. It’s sort of busy and understated at the same time, which isn’t entirely off putting.

Love the pitcher. Like the use of leaves. Love the chairs. Love love love the sunshine! My ideal Thanksgiving would be hosted by someone else (preferably a vegetarian, but I’m not picky) in a sunny and very warm locale. Screw autumn.

Finally, here’s more of what you can do with printable templates from Paper & Cake. Yum!

New purple kitchen cabinets means Never teh Bride is on the prowl for coordinating dinnerware! Yay! Right now I’m digging on dishes, glasses, mugs, and tableware from Rosanna Bowles, creatrix of collections of charming ceramics like so…

Her current offerings include wonderful things like chic black serving trays and cake stands, holiday plates that aren’t covered over with dorky smiling snowmen, eye-catching jet teapots, colorful dessert plates, mugs that feature your initials, pate knives, and more.

Wait, what? I need specific knives just for pate? I think I’ll pass on those, but as for everything else, bring it on.

Those among us who love coffee or tea or hot chocolate and find ourselves buying it in the outside world tend to accumulate a lot of paper cups on our desks and in our cars. I’m not sure whether those things are recyclable, but I dutifully throw the cups and sleeves in with the paper and the lids in with the plastic each week. Still, it would be nice to not have all that paper and plastic being produced in the name of delicious hot beverages. Coffee from home? We can do that, but the free insulated travel mug we got at a grand opening is so dull. It was in looking for an alternative that I found these travel mugs, which I love.

The DCI I Am Not a Paper Cup cup is the standard by which I judge other travel mugs, if only because I saw it first. It doesn’t leak, has an air chamber to keep hot things hot, and it doesn’t get overhot to the touch. No logos, and no Styrofoam.

The I Am Not a Paper Cup comes with amatching silicone lid, but you might lose it, so they sell replacements.

Want something a little more colorful in which to carry your coffee? The NY style coffee cup is one suggestion, though I’m not 100% sure you can find lids to match. Full disclosure: I grew up drinking hot chocolate from these (the paper sort) on cold winter days, so I have a certain fondness for them whether they have lids or not.

Here’s another ceramic cup option, specifically one that comes with a silicone sleeve that looks remarkably like one of the nubby cardboard ones. Benefits? It’s slightly less expensive.

Or you can buy the I Am Not a Paper Cup and get a silicone coffee sleeve separately for four bucks (i.e., the price of a latte). The upside to this is that you can choose a color other than “cardboard.”

Of course, if you’re a butterfingers who routinely drops your coffee, tea, or hot chocolate, perhaps the melamine coffee cup would be the best option for you. It’s the least expensive option, it omes with a silicone lid, and it is ready to accept standard-size paper sleeves or a reusable silicone sleeve.

It’s been more than a year since I posted a photo of my friends’ sweet wall-mounted mini bar created from random bits of shelving, so I thought it was time to revisit the topic of mini bars. Particularly good for those wine enthusiasts or liquor lovers living in small spaces, mini bars make it so you don’t have to stash your boozahol in the same cabinet where you keep your Cuisinart. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind. But there’s something really classy about offering someone a drink and, when they say yes, walking over to the mini bar instead of futzing around in different kitchen areas.

The Acacia mini bar masquerades as a chic and modern freestanding cabinet, ensuring that your parents and other relatives with a tendency to drop in unannounced don’t suspect you of being a daytime drunkard.

This mini bar from Alpina is made to withstand varying weather conditions, making it rather manly. In that vein, it holds a mini keg and a jug of wine that are ejected via its two dispensers.

US army ammunition boxes from the Vietnam war era become a surprisingly attractive wall mounted mini bar… which holds the sort of emergency rations we all need now and then.

Perhaps you’re seriously short on space? Try a folding mini bar (otherwise known as a portable bar). When closed, it takes up a surprisingly small amount of space, but it opens to reveal six shelves for storing glasses and bottles of your favorite elixirs.

Folding mini bars aren’t always tiny, however. This one is about the size of a freestanding cabinet or tallish end table, but it expands to become a rather nice full bar. You stand on one side doling out the drinkles, while your party attendees stand on the other, hopefully putting a tip or two into that empty glass there.

I’ll take one of these:

And four of these:

And while you’re at it, I may as well have you send me one of these:

Love,
Never teh Bride (who is redoing her kitchen)

How cool are these? De’Longhi recently commissioned 10 professional artists, interior and graphic designers from the US and abroad to create original designs that were laser-etched on the front panels of De’Longhi’s Perfecta Fully Automatic Espresso Machines.

The engraved Perfecta machines, produced in limited edition, are set to be auctioned to the public through eBay Giving Works from October 4-17 with a portion of the proceeds benefiting Oxfam America. Expensive? You betcha, but that’s the whole point. If you think that the Artista Series will be just a wee bit out of your budget, there’s always the EC5 steam driven 4-cup espresso maker, which costs less than fifty bucks. You can’t beat that!