Mint

+ {image} Anthony Georgis of artist Trish Grantham via Habit of Art.

+ A Wedding Fair (what’s this?)

+ Hot chocolate on a stick via Twig & Thistle.

+ vintage arranged by color.

+ I love, love this song and video by The Morning Benders.

+ Hear the Broken Bells album in its entirety on NPR. Brian Burton (Danger Mouse) + James Mercer (The Shins).

+ {image} Meet Rosie!

+ LOCAL STUFF: This weekend is Third Friday in Durham. Horse & Buggy Press has an opening for Ricky Davis’ birding photography, and they’ll be raffling off tickets for the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. Buy a ticket, get a free beer; buy ten and get a free set of letterpress cards. At LabourLove, artists Luke Miller Buchanan, Michael Mills, Jenifer Padilla and Jeff Bell explore the abandoned spaces and objects left by people that have either moved on to newer and better things or have vacated due to economic hardships. Tonight and tomorrow at Common Ground Theater, ‘rie Shontel will perform “Mama Juggs,” a provocative one-woman show that challenges black female body awareness in an Oakland, CA housing project. Saturday will be in the mid 70s, so it’s time to start walking to the Durham Farmer’s Market again! I haven’t been on a Taste Carolina tour yet, but I’m dying to go. Saturday walking tours in Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, and Carrboro take you to 6-8 restaurants and shops who serve food sourced locally from farm-to-table. Yum.

Have a great weekend!

I’m coming out of blog hibernation (I can’t stay away!) to share Melissa and Jerome’s save the dates, because they’re just too awesome to wait until Monday. Melissa DePasquale is a graphic designer who is getting married at a golf course this year. She wrote me back in November to talk about using a golf tee in combination with her save the dates, and I was thrilled when she emailed yesterday to share the results. Melissa worked with Studio on Fire to have her cards letterpressed and die cut, and the mailing labels and inside covers of the box were printed on her own laser printer. The tees were screen printed, and she had a rubber stamp made for the outside mailing wrap. For filling in the boxes, she used wood grain shavings.

To see more images of Melissa and Jerome’s save the dates, click below:

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Oliver of the Sky is a young artist currently based in Dunedin, New Zealand. His practice explores network cultures, visual communication, identity and relations, with a tendency towards the colourful, playful and gently subversive.

Precarity, Oliver Van Der Lugt

URL Painting, Oliver Van Der Lugt

House, from Constellation Search, Oliver Van Der Lugt

LP: Oliver, what’s something that you’ve had for years that you JUST CAN’T throw away?

O: An art-making obsession.

LP: True or false. Lazy rivers are the best? Explain.

O: This is both true and false! lazy rivers are the best on long summer afternoon occasions, when you want to be able to slip into the water and be enveloped peacefully. Lazy rivers are the best at a bend, with a little sandy beach on this side and willows dipping in on the other side. However, feisty rivers are better when it’s winter and it has been raining for days and you’re standing at the river mouth on the beach with a jacket on watching it plunge into the sea. Or if you’re at a waterfall in the middle of the bush and the river is so fast and crazy it makes mist.

LP: What were you doing the last time you really had a good laugh?

O: This was only about two days ago. I recently moved into a new house, an old office space above a warehouse in the wharf area of my town. There is access to the roof of my house through a funny little door and up the roof of the warehouse, and when a friend came over we decided to check it out. I had been wondering why the wireless card on my laptop was showing so many networks in the area –like 20 or so.. Well, on my roof there is a huge tower pointed at an even huger tower on a hill outside of town, and scattered around my roof are about 20 wireless signal repeaters, pointed like sunflowers to different parts of the city! It’s like a forest up there, and seeing this for the first time had me in bewildered stitches. Turns out my place is part of an internet provider’s distribution, and for the trouble of the forest overhead I get free internet :)

Don’t forget to check out Oliver’s work on his website!

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Lindsay Preston is an artist and graphic designer from San Diego. In “Lindsay’s Quick Queries”, Lindsay brings you work by contemporary artists, and answers to the questions everyone has been wondering about them, like “pancakes or waffles?”

This week and last week have been so overwhelmingly busy. So I started this post to say that Mint will be moving at a slower pace today and tomorrow; I just can’t keep up with it all this week. Goal: catch up (hopefully!) by Monday, and life will be more normal next week. That’s what this post is supposed to say, and then I need some kind of image to go with it you know, so I went to my flickr contacts and searched the word “buried.”

I don’t know. It’s just the first thing that came to mind. I guess I was thinking “buried under a pile of laundry” or “buried under a big stack of books.” Instead, I got this beautiful, calm, thoughtfully arranged photograph by Heather Smith Jones of some things she found in her backyard. And I thought, yes. I have enough messy piles to be buried under in my house, and at least there will be something calm and beautiful on Mint.

Around noon, Lindsay will be here with Quick Queries and tomorrow I’ll be back with Links for Your Weekend.

image sources: first one, second one, last pair

I don’t even know what to call this week’s round-up! Got any ideas? All I know is it’s inspired by warmer weather and an itch to travel.

top image: ruched high atlas pillow, $24 / highlighter embroidered pillow, $28 / triangles rug, $34 / bleach stripe rug, $48 / african suns rug, $68

bottom image: elephant, $15 / vintage globe, $60 / metal suitcase, $60 / teak bowls, $45

What amazes me about this pretty Eugene, Oregon wedding is that it was planned in only three weeks. I’ve come to believe that people who have really short engagements know something the rest of us don’t. Imagine only having time to focus on the most important things, and forcing yourself to forget the rest! To top it off, the bride had to be out of town for one and a half of those weeks, so her best friend Cara helped pull things together.

Meredith’s dress is from Anthropologie (still available), her cardigan is Juicy couture, and her cape jacket is Tulle. Both the cardigan and jacket were found at TJMaxx. Cara made the necklace and the bouquet, and the chocolate orange cake was made by Sweet Life Patisserie. You can visit their wedding website/invitation here.

From the back:

Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.

Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.

Minny, Aibileen’s best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody’s business, but she can’t mind her tongue, so she’s lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.

Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.

In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women–mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends–view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don’t.

You can buy a copy here.

See other books I recommend here.