Eye Candy



Eye Candy - The Simple Life

I think Eye Candy is supposed to refer to looking at yummy boyz, or girls, whatever your desire, yet for us freakers in the world of design eye candy can be so much more.  Do you find you walk around in a daze sometimes feasting your eyes on the small details of life? This is what I love about this simple life I am trying to live and enjoy here in Umbria and the world, the eye candy is everywhere.

Hot pink azaleas with moss green velvet yum!  The crystal vase is really a wall sconce that I turned into a vase.  I love it with the silver leaf table.

silver leaf and azaelas

Some days the eye candy just jumps out at me.

who doesn't love pink columns and cobblestones
This gray-green is the bee's knees.

this side mirror is beyond fabulous
1964 Ford in Foligno, Italy... strange culture
time warp

If this table and stools were mine, I would like to move them inside put felt all over the bottom to not scrape the floors and then make velvet cushions in slate blue to go on each stool.


way cool as your dinning room table

Sometimes the rain makes the colors richer in the darkened skies.


Umbria in the fog

And the fog and mist makes life mysterious and romantic.
 
I love going to work by train

Is there anything better then a red bicycle?



A surprise birthday candle for a friend?



Remember to slow down and enjoy your own eye candy -whatever it may be or wherever you might find it, that is the simple life embraced.

Cheers,
Natalie

Create a Kitchen Garden




The Simple Life

Happy Weekend!

I’m eating popcorn, writing to you and waiting for clients to arrive to my studio and pick up come gorgeous chandeliers that I painted very carefully for hours and then went crazy working on all the missing crystals attaching them in the right place.

windowsill herb garden



Today I want to show you my kitchen garden.  O.k. it is just a windowsill but it feels like a garden to me (serious city girl) and makes me ridiculously happy about life.  I love to use fresh herbs while cooking.

I labeled the herbs with popsicle sticks,
so the girls can help me cook


I like that I can come home from a trip or a long work day and if there is nothing in the house, except flour, yeast and olive oil.  I can always make rosemary pizza or onion pizza – man is that good with the onions sautéed first.  I should get onions for the balcony next year.

I also like to move the herb pots around and used them to make things look pretty.

mint and a stack of books-gorgeous


I put Basil in the bathroom to make it smell nice.



basil in tea cups


And I put candles and sprigs of Rosemary in my studio to absorb the paint smell.

make a wish
Does it make you want a kitchen garden a little bit?  Or do you already have impressive fields of flowers, herbs and fruit trees? 



Cheers,
Natalie
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Autumn Pears



I love pears.  I love to eat them, paint them, photograph them and just look at them.  They are womanly, delicious and imperfect in their beauty.   It is Autumn here in Umbria the mornings are cold and the days warm, sometimes the fog creeps in low on the river.  I'm drinking more tea.  Buying lots of apples to make apple pie and then eating them before I can get around to making the dough.

I got my quotes about pears from this site http://www.healthdiaries.com

“I warrant they would whip me with their fine wits till I were a crest-fallen as a dried pear.”  -Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor


If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself.  If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in the revolution.  All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.”  Mao Tse-Tung

“Eating pears cleans the teeth.”  -Korean proverb

“Plant pears for your heirs.” -English proverb


“A pear will never fall into a closed mouth.” - Italian proverb

Of course the Italian proverb is about eating (not sex or soccer shocker!)

“Don’t shake the tree when the pears fall off themselves.”  -Slovakian proverb

“You should go to a pear- tree for pears, not to an elm.”  -Publius Syrus (42 B.C.)

Segue  --but it seems amazing that one could eat a pear in 42 B.C.  They have been around forever!

Here is another SEGUE "they" analyzed with a computer the painting the Last Supper  by Leonardo da Vinci and they found out the (American) portion sizes of meals have become something like 72% larger (this is my memory stating here), but the size of the bread portion is only 22% larger then it was at the time of the painting of the Last Supper, which would be 1495-1498, yet imagine that Leonardo put his own perspective on meal size 1462 years after the time of the scene in the painting.  So in 42 B.C. the whole meal was probably a pear or much smaller then a pear.  Pears were probably smaller. O.k. Natalie stop.

pears and roses

And now a quote from my man…

“A man watches his pear –tree day after day, impatient to the ripening of the fruit.  Let him attempt to force the process, and  he may spoil both fruit and tree.  But let him patiently wait, and the ripe pear at length falls into his lap!”  -Abraham Lincoln

Back in time when I lived in the California Wine Country I painted lots of pears on ceramics.  Kilns make everything look painterly and pretty.  This design was very Autumnal. You can’t really paint a pear wrong because they are so irregular and misshapen, yet graceful and delicate, feminine.

it's very wine country
This is not the first time I have written about pears.  I did so before the first month this blog began you can read about it.  Here is the Link on Pears, just silliness really.  It won't be the last time either because I soon will do a post where I painted a box to look like a pear, not the form, the finish, that is kind of silliness too.

Until later - a dopo,
Natalie


A White Kitchen




Here now is the White Kitchen that I spoke of earlier in the week.  I will try to let the photos speak for themselves.



The kitchen is in a house build in the 1600’s and that makes it splendid.  Fireplaces, a small hand painted church (praying room), wooden “trave” ceilings, views to die for, terracotta floors, all set in among olive groves.


I hope this post will make everyone “rethink” how easy it is to change your kitchen.  That said, it was a lot of work and a lot of paint, yet the effect if grand.

Ready for the before shots it's a shocker.  Do you like it better? I do, it makes the dark narrow space so refreshing to me.
before photo




I sanded it, two coats of base coat, three coats of off white with a grey tint, a faux effect with oil paint on the corners and then finally two coats of polyurethane.

I painted over the glass motif with metal paint in flat white.  It made the etched glass design look cool and the amber colored glass punched up to look much prettier than before.  The roses on the glass before were a pretty bad, bright red with green leaves.



metal paint on glass

I also painted all the metal handles with metal paint, about three coats.

It is a roll up your sleeves kind of job.  But I did it all on saw horses in my studio, even resting the doors on little supports of blocks of wood or even with screws poking out of the wood to let air pass under once I have flipped the door to paint the other side.







This house has an amazing room right off the kitchen with a wood stove and lots of windows, here you can see the gorgeous antique ceilings that are the same in the kitchen.  This client has a good eye, very feminine and cozy with attention to detail.



I wrote this amore because remember love wins!









back roads of Umbria

Couldn't you be happy here with a cup of tea in hand? That villa looks empty to me waiting for love.  Natalie

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French Country Cottage
Miss Mustard Seed
Romantic Home
The Shabby Creek Cottage
Between Naps on the Porch






Faux Painted Italian Bricks



 Good Afternoon from Umbria

I finished a job yesterday, painting a kitchen and I had done a lot of the work in my studio and then the client put it all the cabinet doors back on, when I went into the space yesterday I actually exclaimed wow, man oh man oh man- spectaculare!  I will share the work with you later in the week because it really is a good example of what a lot of paint can do.  Now I get to come back to my diario di design for a moment.  I have my 2nd cappuccino (cappuch) by my side like a loyal dog watching me with loving eyes.

faux brick and olive green shutters

Today I want to share painted bricks on this palazzo.  Honestly I think it is kind of silly-crazy to paint fake bricks over a centuries old palazzo.  But I want to show it as an idea actually to use in the garden.  If anyone has an ugly concrete wall, or a side of the garage (or the neighbors house?) something that needs enhancing.  I think it could be quite cool with vines and bougainvillea growing over it.  This process of painted brick adds depth and can actually make the space seem bigger and also more intimate.  Painting always makes a space feel more special.

If you look closely you can see this is done simply with charcoal grey or black lines and then on certain sides they do a parallel white line, and this gives the perspective.  Imagine it done with grey and white or shades of brown, or taupe and cream something less graphic, subtler.  If you paint the wall in a couple of colors first as a base coat, note the 2-3 shades of ochre, brown here. Then I would suggest sanding it, or maybe painting on some bleach to eat away some of the finish to distress it a bit.

Here are some examples of real brick wall, vines, flowers and all.

Roman wall and a fig tree






If say your neighbor's house just isn't up to par then you might consider a James Bond 007 move and swing cable yourself on to their roof and plant a bunch of jasmine, a few years and it will be all covered up, like this gorgeous brick wall.

jasmine and brick


What do you think, is fake painted brick silly or gorgeous?  I do like it here in Italy when they have a brick Palazzo and they cover up a window with concrete, then they just faux paint the brick right over the window space, to match the rest of the brick.  This I love.  I believe they cover the windows to heat the space better.  I would rather be cold with lots of light, then warm and dark!

faux painted brick, I love the ochre and white
With affection,
Natalie

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