Desire to Inspire
As well as featuring great interior design, this blog also has a fun Monday's Pets on Furniture post featuring pics of readers' pets on their designer furniture. While a Parisian balcony doesn't technically count as furniture, this pic is beautiful nonetheless.
Stonesoup
This blog usually feature recipes that contain 5 ingredients and can be made in minutes. A recent post on how to master the art of gift giving caught my eye. Here's a brief excerpt:
1. The gift of experiences
This includes things like tickets to a concerts or a show, vouchers for meals in restaurants, or offering to cook dinner for the recipient and their friends.
2. The gift of consumables
Mostly, this tends to be wine related. Champagne is always a winner, or a good bottle of red. It helps to know the favourite tipple of your recipient.
Flowers are another go-to when booze isn’t really appropriate.
3. The gift of something home made
It could be a favourite cake or pie. But more often than not it’s something with a longer shelf life like chilli oil (recipe below), preserved lemons, my homemade BBQ sauce, custom spice blends or infused oils. This year I’m planning on including little recipe cards with each gift to give ideas how to use each item.
The thing is, home made gifts are really personal. And in the age of cheap factory produced goods, the love that comes with a hand made gift makes all the difference.
Not to mention that it’s heaps of fun!
House of Turquoise
An interior-design blog featuring all things turquoise! It's a great source of inspiration, whether you're into turquoise or not. At the moment I'm still deciding on whether to do an island bench in our kitchen or just put our dining table there, like these pics that featured on the blog recently:
Love the bench seats and wingback chairs!
The Minimalists
In complete contrast, this blog has essays about minimalism and living a meaningful life with less stuff. A recent post called the UnAmerican Dream was thought-provoking:
The American Dream…
The white picket fence. The large suburban home. The nice car. The big-screen TVs glowing in multiple rooms. The safe, reasonable nine-to-five. The corner office. The suit and tie. The white collar pride. The blue collar pride. The weekends off. The paid holidays. The occasional vacation. The fringe benefits.
In exchange for…
The daily grind. The nose to the grindstone. The rush-hour traffic. The punching the clock. The cubical farms. The spreadsheet eyestrain. The much-anticipated lunch break. The inbox overflow. The arbitrary goals. The late nights at the office. The empty platitudes. The office gossip. The “productivity.” The downsizing. The “doing more with less.” The mounds of bills. The second job. The credit-card spending. The debt. The second mortgage. The beer gut. The mid-life crisis. The retirement at 65. The volatile stock market. The retirement at 67 or 72 or 75. The death before retirement. The unyielding tiredness. The emptiness. The depression. The unshakeable discontent.
You can keep your American Dream. Give us back our time, our freedom, and our lives.
Do you have any favourite blogs you'd like to share?
2 comments:
I don't read too many blogs these days but just wanted to say I LOVE the picture of the Parisian balcony. Reminds me of the apartment we stayed in, in Paris (St Germain). I love Paris :).
SS
Thanks Shelley, it really took my fancy too. Hoping to get back to Europe in the next few years. Cheers, C
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