MTV 30

I just had to share this somewhere, and what better place than Homemade Hot Sauce?

Today, August 1st 2011, MTV turns 30 years old. I found this video of the VERY beginning of Music Video Television – I’m talking 12:01am on August 1st, 1981 – and it’s really amazing.

30 years ago, MTV launched its revolutionary channel with a poignantly significant song choice: The Buggles’ Video Killed the Radio Star. The title of that song must have hit hard for older generations at the time, who were probably dealing with the reality that the era of radio was dead.

It just goes to show that there will always be something that’s on its way out… and even twitter will be old-school one day.

In fact, just last night Erin, Kira and I were talking about how one day, Rihanna will be on the oldies channel, and “hammered” will be old-people slang for whatever the kids are calling it those days. So the ultimate question is – will grandmas be raging to dubstep?

map art

Hello little sunshines!

As I said before in my SOWA post- we made a lovely craft out of Liz’s favorite things- maps! It is adorable and I am obsessed with it. Here is a little step by step for you to create your own! and we did it all for under $25!

You’ll need:

a map- we used a vintage map of the middle east we got at SOWA
Canvases- If i were to do it again, I’d say you should use six- we did four and it still looks good
PVA- Id advise PVA because it doesn’t crinkle the paper as much as glue- but glue would work.
Scissors

STEP ONE:
Lay out your map and decide where you want to put the canvases
(this is another map we got of europe!)

STEP TWO:
Get out your canvases

STEP THREE:
glue down and cut the canvases

STEP FOUR:
Put a little extra PVA on the side and smooth down your edges

TADA! THEN HANG EM UP! 😀

I’ll get a picture of them once they are up n the wall so you can see it all nice and hanging.
Now you have some beautiful handmade map art- and its so easy- even liz could do it!

Saturday

Hope you all have a lovely weekend!
What are you up to?

Have a good one!
e

sowa market

This past Sunday something magical happened. I had the first Sunday off since I began working at paper source. What did I do with that day you may ask? I FINALLY went to Sowa Market.  Sowa is a open farmers-antique-craft market in the South End. Needless to say- I was basically in heaven. If you have a free Sunday you should definitely check it out. There is an open aired farmers market, a craftier section, and then inside there is a vintage market. i died.

Where is it? You can either walk, bike, or take mbta- i suggest biking- to 460 Harrison Street- until you see this sign! If you are taking the T- go to Broadway Station on the Redline or take the 1 bus to Mass Ave and Treemont.

Here are just a few of the trinkets we found at sowa this weekend!

Jewelry made from old T coins and other foreign currency. The real gem at this booth was the old books, trays, and crates they used to display their jewelry on!

I have an obsession with gold and turquoise. I also love this tray.

A box of all sorts of buttons- from Land before Time to old campaign buttons- all under a dollar!

So many maps! Liz must have looked at them forever! We ended up five of them- ranging from a map of the whole world- to national geographic maps of particular regions. We got a really old map of the middle east for our living room craft-map project that I am sure you will all be hearing about! The best part? They were only THREE DOLLARS each!

This was our real golden nugget find- The American Specimen Book of Type Styles. It is a font book from 1912. It has over 500 pages of fonts! Instead of The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog. as the preview for the fonts- it quotes the constitution. Its a really awesome book- and as font geeks- its almost our holy grail. Okay, so it basically is. Were obsessed.

We ended up being very good and not blowing ALL of our cash- we got the book, a handful of maps, and I got an awesome old leather purse with MY INITIALS ON IT! ill have to get a picture up here for you to see soon- it was too perfect. Moral of this story is- you have to go.

To top off our lovely day Emma, Liz, and I walked to The South End Buttery-a great little cafe i the south end with GREAT cupcakes- I highly recommend the red velvet cupcake!

All in all it was a day chalked full of a few of my favorite things- antiques, friends, coffee, an and a dreary day. It was a perfect precursor to a great fourth of july weekend.

Things I look for in a coffee shop

Today I went to Olea Cafe in Brookline Village for my lunch break – I usually go to KooKoo Cafe but I figured I should branch out and try it, since it’s across the street.

The coffee was really good, and the chocolate croissant was awesome. But the place was just WRONG! I hate walking into a coffee shop that has a great recommendation, that multiple friends have directed me too, and immediately feeling like I’m in a cafeteria or a poorly-managed Bon Pain.

Mood and decor go hand-in-hand with a good coffee shop, so here’s a break down of what I feel is necessary for a coffee shop to be a destination worth visiting.

1. Homey surfaces that don’t make me feel like I’m in a crappy pizza parlor – no fake marble table tops or cheap tile floors.

2. Good coffee, with an option to drink it in house in a mug or glass coffee cup.

3. Decor! A theme, decorations, art on the walls, or some sort of evidence that there was a conscious decision made concerning interior design.

4. All the fittings of a heaven for mac-toting hipsters. At least one couch, cushy chair or something that isn’t a cheap stool.

5. If you’re not going to have wifi (what is wrong with you?!) then you have to have awesome food. KooKoo’s, for example, is one of my favorites. No wifi, but their tabouleh and tuna pita sandwiches are stupidly good. I go for lunch and for the atmosphere, not to camp out and do work.

Pretty Please?

Dear Erin – can you make me these?

Nutella Cheesecake Bars

Love, Lemon

ROCKIN RADIO SHOW??!

Just opened my Emerson email web host for the first time in a long time, and clicked on my sent messages. First message ever sent was an email that Erin and I wrote to WERS – not even WECB, but WERS – about our prospective jointly-hosted radio show.

I still remember the conversation: “hey Erin, would making the text lime green be annoying, or fun and exciting?” “definitely fun and exciting!”

hey! this is Liz Cormack, of the Liz & Erin duo. we’re roommates, we’re fun, and we REALLY want a radio show. we propose to call it the Tall Blond Talk Show which will consist of music and entertainment. see you at the open house tomorrow!

you stay classy Emerson,

Love, Erin and Liz

p.s. we’re bringing a demo CD mix.    

not annoying.

penguin pizza

just get ready- its wings night.

Just change your bra, already.

You know that moment. When you wake up and throw on a bra- its your favorite bra- and it just happens to be bright purple. You quickly flip through your clothes trying to find a shirt that won’t show the color of your bra through it. With no avail, you run down the hall into your roomates closet- still no luck. That is when I fling the door open to Liz’s room trying to find SOMETHING appropriate for work to wear that won’t show my bra.
There is a simple solution to this- change your bra. I mean yeah, you have a few other white or off white bras in your dresser- but you already have this one on! For any guy that is reading this- it may sound stupid- but for any girl that is reading this- you can totally relate. (as if we actually have people reading our blog)

This happened to me the other day- I work at Paper Source, and you have to look pretty pulled together, so a colorful bra is not really the look I was going for. Liz just looked at me while I was desperately throwing clothes on and was like, “erin, just change your bra.” ABSOLUTLY NOT was the first thought through my head. Its just such a pain. (Where as trying 50 different shirts on and cleaning them up after isn’t) After many outfit attempts I finally listened to Liz (this doesn’t happen often) and changed my bra. I was much happier and more comfortable all day.  This my dear readers, is not the point of the story. But the moral can be applied to many things- especially in our lives.

If you read Liz’s post below you already know about the struggs of our living room. Its been a constant push and pull. It too big, its too white, now its too bright, theres no wall space, now it looks like a retirement community in florida, yadda yadda… Then around midnight last night Liz and I were sprawled out on the living room floor and we just couldnt take it anymore. We are both very busy people- I mean VERY busy. She works Five days a week 9-5 and works at a restaurant nights and weekends. I work about 25 hours a week, take classes, and intern 9-5 two days a week. This puts us in a place where we don’t get much sleep and are still trying to enjoy the tiny bit of our “youth” we have left before we have to go be real people. We are both also design-color-happy-particular people. When something isn’t working in a room- we are not happy. Our living room has been a source of unhappiness for a month now.

Last night, we reached our breaking point. Around midnight, paint samples were flung around the room while we debated various shades of gray, green, pink, white, teal and finally settled on a nice color called, “twilight gray” This was weird. The only color we could agree on was gray? what? (Gray isn’t even a color its a shade of light!!) So in true Liz fashion, she brought in a POP of color. And by pop of color I mean she brought in her left-over teal paint from her bedroom and we immediately attacked the ugly Florida retirement community watered-down seafoam walls we had been living with.

and- VOILA! everthing is already starting to feel better. Even when delusion struck around 2:30 am we were still laying on our newly slip covered couch amongst the cat hair, staring at our new teal wall.

Sometimes you really just change something, from as simple as your bra, to as in depth as your wall color to make everything “right” again. That was a lesson I learned last night- especially because I 1- hate to be wrong and 2- hate change. Sometimes you just have to do it. and really, if you know in the back of your head that a “color” is not right or is not working for you- then that “color” is probably not right, and you should change it.

–see what i did there.

Put It On the Wall

This summer has been all about pushing it.

I need more sleep – but I push through it. I need more money – but I push through it. I need to spend more time on myself – but I push through it. I’m not having fun at my internship – but I push through it. I want to take a break – but I push through it.

So every morning, I wake up, force my heavy eyelids open, and think the exact same, overwhelming thought: god damn it, something has got to give.

When you’ve committed yourself to things you can’t back out of, the solution isn’t in giving up or throwing in the towel prematurely – the only thing I can do for myself is to really perfect life where it counts. Things that CAN get better NEED to be the best they can.

Which brings me to our apartment. Moving into our apartment (after squatting in the empty apartment next door quasi-illegally for 3 weeks in a hot and sweaty pig sty) was a hap-hazard, frantic process. We felt a desperate need to be settled in, so we settled as quickly as possible. And in true Erin and Liz fashion, that meant painting the walls, color-styling our rooms and even making the trek to IKEA before the previous inhabitants were even out of their rooms (poor girls didn’t know what hit ’em). We get a little excited. But, again, in true Lerin fashion, we may have thrown paint on the walls a little too quickly.

Some people can live with a half-assed decorating job, or a failed paint job, or a room that is only near completion. Design-minded folk like Erin and Liz cannot.

So I’ve realized that of all the overpowering pulls on my life right now, the one thing that really has to give is that our apartment needs to feel like home – it needs to be an escape from the summer of pushing it, the only place where I don’t need to push through anything.

For the past month, Erin and I have been pushing through it – and finally last night we admitted to ourselves and to each other that the living room has been sucking the happiness out of us. The thing about us is that we try really hard to be happy, and most of the time, we really really are. We try not to recognize inconvenient truths, whether it’s a schism in our social group or a cloud over our moods, in an effort to maintain our happy lifestyles. I think we learned our lesson last night though. We’d been trying to ignore how much we hated the living room for weeks. But once it was out in the open, that stupid wall color had NO CHANCE again the combined spontaneous energy of Erin and Liz. Once a problem is recognized, we are very productive individuals. We go through our four step process, and suddenly, at 2:30 am as usual, we are well on our way to perfecting our haven.

1. Recognize problem.

2. Fight about it.

3. Have epiphany, love each other again.

4. Take action, and don’t stop til it’s finished.

The point of the story is that our apartment is now well on it’s way to being something we’re both proud of, and we were silly to ever think that that didn’t matter – more than anything.