Details

I have a gypsy house. A bazaar house. Some would probably say "bizarre." Nothing really matches, I don't think, but I've never been accused of being "put together."

We've made a lot of changes to our house recently, like painting, rearranging, and a boredom-fueled kitchen cabinet demolition. At this point I'm realizing that my favorite little things about this house are the details - the random shit I pick up here and there and set next to other random shit. The end result is comfort and familiarity. My house may be messy at times (I blame my shedding dog and my messy husband, let's not talk about my part of the blame), but I can still relax here amidst my stuff.

The stein was a birthday gift to my husband from his brother. Andy is a homebrewer, so by extension we are drinkers. I knit, and that's a picture of my parents on their first trip to DC.

Andy won the German mug in some random raffle in a Russian restaurant. He picked up the matryoshka for me in Moscow. I'm not sure why he thought glitter was my thing - I was expecting something a little more, er, polished, but I love it anyway. I found the bird on sale for two bucks at Michael's, and I made the cherry blossoms out of origami paper and birch branches. You can find the tutorial here.

Andy picked up the red elephant for me in Afghanistan. The grey soapstone elephant was a gift from friends of my in-laws for our wedding. They're from India, and it's customary to give the bride a small gift of jewelry after her wedding, but she wasn't sure of my tastes so gifted me the elephants instead (it has a larger twin on my bar). The bookends were a Home Goods find, and those are antique books paired with some more modern selections.

I saved the picture from the trash bin at school, sort of. The Paymaster was my DH's grandfather's, the table was made by a great-grandfather (?) of my husband.

I found the ribbon piled up on the "refuse table" (as I like to call it) at work. People pile things they want to get rid of on a table in the teachers' lounge. I liberated it, and it found a home threaded through the curtains in my living room.