Chez Larsson

Södra Ängby

 

Not much text today because Internet Explorer keeps crashing while I write.

Anyway, last week I had a question in my Ask Anything session and was asked what kind of a house I'd like if I wasn't living in ours. I answered a 50's mid centrury modern place or a New England style house but this weekend realised I that there's a place really close to here where I'd be happy to live.

 
We live in Norra Ängby (north Ängby) and just across the main road lies Södra Ängby (south Ängby). Södra Ängy is also known as the White City. Check out these photos and you'll see why.

My kind of place as you can see. The snow doesn't do it justice though because it turns the whites a bit dingy but you should see it in summertime. Stunning.

 
 Like it or too square and white for you? 
  
  
 
 

Practicing

I did it!

I've been trying to create an Animated Gif for the past couple of days. I might want to use one for a thingy in my sidebar and Mini was kind enough to be my guinea pig.

If you want to try making one the lovely Ez of Creature Comforts has a great tutorial on her blog on how to make an animated ad.

My inspiration for this one in a post came from Swedish blog Niotillfem (Ninetofive). Check out Sandra. Talk about awesome personal style!

New Blog Look?

Martin and Wille are safely tucked away in the south of Sweden as I embark on making some changes to the look of my blog. I say safely because as with all DIY there is some cursing and pulling of hair involved. Nothing is as frustrating as when you want something to work and it doesn't. I'm at that stage now with some issues.

Anyways, I've been wanting to do some changes to the look of Chez Larsson for a while now. I even considered having a pro look at it because I'm so not a web designer but since I can't find what I want I'm back to DIY. Don't worry, I'm not changing the concept of my blog I'm just doing some spring cleaning. It is after Christmas so it must be spring, right?!

So while I'm trying to take photos in virtually no daylight (new banner may be coming up) and getting my head around some mysterious code and photoshop prickle I'd love to hear if you have any requests or ideas on how I can make the blog look and work better.

I feel there's a little bit much going on in the sidebars and I'd like to bunch things up in nice little packages to hopefully make the site easier to navigate and for you to find earlier posts and relevant info quicker than today.

Should I for instance add a nav bar at the top with tabs for some of the stuff that's in the sidebar today? Any simple but cool looking fonts I should know about? Also I'd love to get my hands on a good (looking) search button so if you have a source for one I'm all ears. Actually I'm all ears concerning anything you think might enhance the blog.

So while I'm working away over here I'll leave you with some link love.

Love this Finnish blog. Can't read a word but one can always look at the pictures!

Lovely vintage and fabric inspiration in this Portuguese blog.

Awesome photography and photoshop eye candy in this Swedish blog fave.

Looking for the mini designer chairs I have around the house? Find them here!

Love this photo! And here's the how-to for the garland.

Little Things That Make me Happy

I went to IKEA last Thursday after work. Haven't been for at least a year.

Got the usual wine glasses, candles, paper napkins and batteries. Nothing exciting. I also got a metal drawer unit. Kind of exciting because it means there will be some organizing of clutter in the boat room. That was actually the purpose of the trip.

One good spur of the moment purchase was a new pillow.I've had back pain in the morning for quite a while and considered buying a new mattress but who would have known that an $18 pillow would be the remedy?!

Another purchase that makes me really happy are the glass jars above. At $3 a piece they are cheering me up every time I do a load of laundry. I added the white dot sticker to keep the whites detergent from the coloreds.

On a completely different note, this is such a lovely home. Very different from ours but I haven't swooned so much in a very long time. I guess the awesome photography is also partly to blame.

La Lampe

Another idea I got this weekend from the BHG DIY mag was to make a lamp. They showed some cool ideas on recycling random stuff (zip ties on a grill grate above for example) and make it into a lamp. At the back of my mind I had these plastic strips that Martin brought home from work a long time ago.

The plastic strips are of this cool material which is used to line those tubes where you can get sunlight in the basement kind of things. It's cool looking, very reflective and supposedly super expensive and although I'm the tosser in this family even I have hung onto them these past five years or so after Martin brought them home after they had been discarded. In addition to the strips I used a light fixture which I found in the electrics dumpster in the basement at work (I know! It's a gold mine down there!).

I temporarily removed the top bits of the light fixture and simply punched holes (had to make three overlapping holes to accommodate the diameter of the cable because my heavy duty punch couldn't make any bigger holes) at both ends of the strips for the cable of the light fixture to run through and hung the ends over the cable creating oval shapes. 

 After adding the strips one after the other on top of each other I secured them with a metal washer where the hole in the same size as the cable .

These projects are about trial and error. I never expect it to go well straight away and in this case after I assembled the whole thing and hung it I realized I should have used all the strips instead of leaving four out so I disassembled and tried again.

 Better! The four added strips cover the light bulb better and the whole thing feels much more complete.

Day

Night

~

I hope you can see this post alright. I had a really hard time posting, my photos went missing, the site shut down on me numerous times and I had problems saving. Typepad seems to be having the flu...  

Fall Inspiration

I recently asked you guys if you had any spare BHG DIY mags and I was lucky to get a couple sent over. Thanks, Tracy! I've started an international subscription so future issues will arrive via my mail box.

Wille asked me what I like about it because he couldn't really see past the not always so stylish articles (being my very style concious son). I have to agree, some stuff in there looks like crap, some craft projects are less than awesome and some are even to awful to mention but I like the fact that there are a great deal of handy tips on techniques and tools and some great ideas too if you skip their color choices. And of course, there's Sherry and John :).

So to get to the point here. In the current Fall issue I saw this article on dressing up your front porch for fall and I was totally inspired to do some decorating of our front door. Usually I just decorate for Halloween and Christmas and the rest of the year there are flowers in planters and that's basically it. I didn't go as far as the photo above but I did make the maple leaf wreath you see here. Here's how:

I picked fallen leaves off my lawn and stuck the stems in a solution of 1/3 glycerol and 2/3 water and left them there for a couple of days. The glycerol (available over here in pharmacies) helps preserve the color of the leaves.

 The leaves were then left to dry on our old patio table in the garage for another day or so. I made two times what you see above which was enough for one medium sized wreath.

I bought a styrofoam wreath ring at the craft store and hot glued the leaves onto it one by one. Pleeeeease be careful with the hot glue! I was but still burned myself a couple of times. A bowl with ice water next to your project to dip your fingers into is a good thing as Martha would say.

Back in 1992 I made a wreath like this for a (old ladies...) magazine and at the time I hadn't seen them around much. Since then they've appeared in all sorts of places but I still think it's an awesome fall décore item.

Ps. I'm still interested in the Spring, Summer and Fall issues of 2008 and the summer 2009 issue of the magazine if you're finished with yours and wants to sell them to me. E-mail me!

Inspired By

Today I have my hands full so I'm sending you over to some other sites to get your daily dose of inspiration. It's where I get some of mine!

The Home and Organizing site at Real Simple is where I go to get my clean and crisp organizing fix.

Amy Atlas and Rebecca Thuss are always so inspiring.

This home renovation makes me want to move and start over. I'm drooling over the white corian kitchen work tops and the original features of the house. I could do with the sunny LA location too. It's raining over here... 

Have a great weekend!

I'm inspired

Thank you so much for all the sweet birthday wishes, both for my mom and my blog! I've taken all your comments to heart and will use them as inspiration for future posts. Later tonight I will enlist Wille to draw a lucky winner of a Chez Larsson surprise package.

 

Speaking of inspiration, I spent the weekend at my mom's in Skåne, in the southern part of Sweden. My uncle David and my cousin Janna were also there and I was completely inspired by both of them! My uncle is 14 years younger than my mom and he is an artist who was part of the hippie movement back in the 60's. He has lived all over the world since and boy has he some fun stories to tell. I laughed so hard that I nearly fell off my chair a couple of times at dinner!

 

Besides from being really funny he is also incredibly knowledgeable on a lot of topics and he is also very much into what is referred into bio-food in Germany (where he now lives). In Sweden we say Eco-food and I guess it's the same as what Americans call Organic. I was totally inspired by their family's food choices and will try to make better choices myself when shopping for food. When he spoke about food it made me realise that although Martin cooks everything from scratch we still buy some stuff that could easily be substituted with the organic and healthier version.

 

Other inspiration from this weekend can be seen in these photos. We visited Fredriksdal, an open air museum with a farm, gardens (french, kitchen, rose, etc), buildings and a theatre. It was still early in the season (and freezing weather...)and a lot was still to come in terms of bloom but it's a beautiful place to visit if you are in Helsingborg.

 

Duni 60 Years

      

I've been getting quite a few press invitation lately which must mean Chez Larsson is making it's mark out there which is really kind of nice. I haven't accepted any until today. But then how can I turn down a lunch at a top Stockholm restaurant, get to meet the cool Swedish caterer who caters events for Queen Elisabeth, Bill Clinton and the likes AND get to know about mid century to current table dressing trends?

I'm not a foodie as you know by now, I can barely cook fish fingers but I do love a nicely dressed table. While I worked on preparing exhibitions at the Nordic Museum here in Stockholm about 15 years ago I participated in an exhibition on Swedish traditions (which can still be seen along with an actual table dressing exhibition).

Amongst the props I made for the exhibition was a miniature table setting to represent a traditional Swedish Christmas dinner. As you can imagine this topic is something I couldn't resist finding out more about. Also I can use the input in my day job as well as when entertaining friends. Killing at least a couple flies in one go!

   

   

    

The nice guys at Duni who invited me also provided these blasts from the past in terms of table dressings in relation to Duni's 60th Birthday on Sunday. 

OMG! The 70's photo in particular brings back quite a few memories of parties and dinners at my parents house. My mom always used to do a rolling of the paper napkins and tucking them into the wine glass. Shudder.

What about you? Any faves? I love the very top photo which is one of current trends along with the eco-, futuristic- and ethnic trends. Oddly enough they've named it Old Traditions.

Pantry Organizer My Way

Do you subscribe to any of Martha's daily tips? I get the Organizing Tip of the Day in my e-mail box and there's also Cookie of the Day and Craft of the Day and although they have all been in the magazines at one time or another I like the reminders.

One tip which came by e-mail a couple of weeks ago is one that I've adapted a little bit since I saw it in the magazine years ago. It's the Pantry Organizer.

I wasn't able to find the tension rods required here in Sweden at the time so I made my own version by drilling holes at the bottom of my cabinet.

 

I took the opportunity to show you because I've been updating the insides of the cabinets a little bit. The bottoms now have Martha sticky back plastic. The rest of the shelves are covered in white oil cloth as seen in the top photo.

In this photo you can see the metal sticks I used instead of the tension rods. They came from lanterns which you can stick into the ground. We'd had the lanterns for years but never used the sticks so I cut them to the right length (a bit of trial and error I have to admit but once one was the correct length the rest were easy).

 

The cut part of the stick sits in the hole and the top slightly pointy bit which used to go into the ground is now wedged into the under side of the shelf above.

It works really well and no more piles of heavy dishes.