Wedding Bouquet Display

For some time now, I’ve been keeping my eye out for a glass cloche or dome at thrift stores. I wanted them for my wedding bouquet, which I had left sitting in a glass vase (without any water) so it had dried out nicely. I wanted to further protect it from elements like water and moving people. I had checked online too and the size that I had needed cost upward of $45 which was a little too pricy for a piece of glass in my opinion. (The ones below start from $89! They are pretty though.)

photo from www.wisteria.com

So here’s my shabby chic inspired version for displaying my wedding bouquet:

 The Lanstalle lantern for candles purchased from… Ikea. Though it may not be as airtight as the cloche, I’m still pretty happy with how it turned out. And since dust mostly settles from on top, I covered the air duct at the very top of the lantern with a round piece of contact paper.

Now my wedding flowers are happily sitting in their new home, protected from the elements. (Well mostly at least.) And the price of this glass lantern? $14.99. Wanting to save does make you think out of the box! Or in this case, in it.

Updates + Spring Bazaar

I've been one busy bee huh. Yep, that's me. Moving, celebrating, waiting for the cable guy, waiting for the internet guy, selling on etsy, unpacking, buying furniture, studying, I could go on!

Our place isn't quite photo ready yet (I admit, that photo of the bedroom took ten minutes of tidying up.) But I'm hoping to make headway in the dining room soon as we just bought a new buffet table! (Well, not really new as it came from Craigslist, but new to us anyhow. Don't you just love Craigslist?) 

As for the bedroom, the husband has to build his Pax wardrobe closet from Ikea before we can put away most of his clothes. AND we still need a dryer. We bought a washer from the Sears Outlet the other week but no dryer. So I've got a huge amount of laundry waiting to be done and the pile is growing every day!

Oh the every day nuances of married life :D. So with all this going on, I realizes it's a little over a month until the SPRING BAZAAR that I'm joining! I'd better get a move on it, designing products to sell. I hope my new box of printer ink arrives soon!

In the meantime, if you're in the bay area on April 16, please do check out the Spring Bazaar which is going to be held at the Winery, on Treasure Island, San Francisco. I do sure hope to see you there!

P. S. I've also been studying blog designing. "Chocolate" (as I fondly called this blog) is due for some design tweaks. I've made the switch to Wordpress on "Studio" as I like to call my "professional" blog, Studio Alcantara. Please do stop by!

Dollar Store Stuff

I love shopping at dollar stores for various odds and ends and my husband will attest to that. I think it has a lot to do with my Filipina side that still mentally converts everything into pesos.

I'd recently put up a cork board at my desk so I needed some cute magnets to go with it so we made a quick stop at the dollar store and came out with a few odds and ends:

1. Cute Magnets

2. 8 Pack Disposable Shower Caps (which can double as shoe bags a la Real Simple)

Photo from Real Simple Website

3. Scotch Brown Postal Wrapping Paper (which I'm going to use a gift wrap. Will just jazz it up a bit like in the photo below. I love plain brown paper. There's so much you can do with it!)

Photo from http://www.holidash.com

  All for the grand total of... ta da! Three dollars plus tax! Told you I loved the dollar store.

Doesn't my cork board look great? I love how it brightens up and adders personality to my workspace. Now to find more photos for those magnets...

High Tech Book Swapping

I love receiving packages in the mail. Don't you?

This is one of the great perks of living in the US, like having Netflix, Amazon, and today I bring you...

Swaptree!

So what is Swaptree, you ask me? Basically, it's a trading service that allows members to trade books, music, DVDs, and video games. You sign up for a membership, list the stuff you have trade, and choose what you'd like to receive. Then the website does some algorithm wherein you can trade what you have to get what you like. Users get sent trade offers and it's up to them to accept the trade or not. You can also see what stuff you can get in exchange for the stuff you've already listed.

Image taken from Swaptree.com

You can either print shipping labels off your own computer (you need to input a credit card for this) or you can take your item to the post office and mail it from there. The only thing you pay for, is shipping your item! Most items cost about $2.50 to ship. I like to print out my own labels cause it saves me a trip to the post office. If you print your own label, you can just drop off your package at a blue USPS collection box.

Occasionally, I end up with a book that doesn't quite deserve permanent space on my bookshelf and that's when I list it on Swaptree. It's a good way to get a lot of slightly older, popular books, but you might have to wait a bit for newer titles. Either way, it's a fun way to trade books without having to spend much.

I just accepted a trade for my copy of I see you everywhere by Julia Glass in exchange for The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. 

Sarah Edwards, I hope you enjoy your "new" book! In the meantime, I'm looking forward to getting my new book too!

Of Book Love and Libraries

I devour books. Devour them, I tell you. Which also means I end up reading them way too fast because I'm so excited to finish reading them.

Take for instance, Rick Riordan's first book in the Kane Chronicles series, The Red Pyramid. I bought it for almost $20 (man that was expensive!) and was disciplined enough to save it for a 5 hour plane ride. I finished all 516 pages in two hours.

Michael Scott's long awaited fourth book in his Nicholas Flamel series, The Necromancer, also came out. And I bought it. For $15. And I read it in one sitting. All 401 pages of it.

 Notice they're both hardbound too.

Buying books, especially brand new books, adds up. And when I end up reading them way too fast, I end up feeling gypped. Cause I spend so much!!!

But alas, I would be poor if I bought all the new books I wanted from Barnes and Noble. Lucky for me, there are other ways of getting my hands on them.

Booklover's alternative to new books #1:

The Public Library

I know it sounds very retro, I haven't stepped foot in a library since college (where I only went there to study, and not borrow books.) But as a child, I would spend my afternoons there, always borrowing the maximum number of books every day which only amounted to the pitiful number of three.

So one day in the recent past, I decided to look up the nearest library and I headed over there.

Sure, there books aren't super recent, but there's a decent enough selection to keep me occupied. And take note, I can borrow a lot of books at a time, keep them for three weeks, and best of all, it's absolutely FREE. I found the last few books in The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series that I'd been too cheap to buy for myself, as well as few other odds and ends. Sure some of the books I picked up weren't great, but hey, what did I lose? And during my library trips, I even read a few issues of my favorite magazine, Real Simple. 

Public libraries here in the US are such an untapped resource. Aside from borrowing books, you can also read magazines, borrow DVDs and even surf the internet. I've even found that you can log in to your county's website, search for titles you want, and have them placed on hold for you at your local library! And since all the county's libraries are linked, you've got access to all of them!

I wish we had public libraries like this in the Philippines. Yesterday, I brought home seven books from the library and I didn't spend a cent. I already went through two yesterday though. At least this time I didn't feel bad about reading so fast. More alternatives to buying new books in the next post.