Such a Tease

The first of the Holiday Parties is set to commence this weekend. Hair is half the look I think. I'm feeling big, teased, tossed about Brigitte Bardot inspired hair.

Via Here

Jet Setting

I think it was embedded in me right from the start. This urgent hunger that creeps up every now and again that must be fed. When I was a little girl, my uncle would take my sister and I to the airport. There was this little area right off the runway at LAX where you could park and a descending plane would fly, engines screaming right overhead. I swear if you reached your hand out just far enough you could touch it's belly. We would sit for hours as he schooled us in the various makes and models of each one. I grew up dreaming I'd be an airline stewardess.

It's back. It's been back for quite some time but I'm finding it harder and harder to ignore. I always say a trip abroad is good for the soul. It reminds us that there is a great big world out there and that the myopic worries that weigh so heavy on us at home are really minuscule when we travel outside our comfort zone and see just how small an island we really live on each day.

Maybe it's just that darn Pan Am TV show making me daydream about the few, but stylish accessories I'd take with me on my next adventure.

Via: Pinterest / 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5

Information is Beautiful

I'm very much a visual person, which you might initially think is strange if you knew my bread and butter job lies in Research.  When it comes to research, you could say that it is the numbers that ultimately matter and at the end of the day- it is the numbers that matter. But making the numbers easily digestible and visually compelling is what eventually brings the story home for our company's clients.  It's what I spend a lot of my workday doing.

So you could see how a numbers geek like me would gush over David McCandless and his website Information is Beautiful.  If you ask me, it's the perfect marriage of art and data.

I came upon this site sometime last year via one of my daily reads. At the time, some of the current projects the Collective were riffing on included:


How to know if you swing Left or Right:

"Left vs. Right (US)"

There was even a heat map of the world's most traveled to destinations:

"World Map of Touristyness"

An older infographic that stood out at the time eventually came to be the cover visual for the book McCandless put out called "Information is Beautiful".  It presents the meaning attributed to various colors across different world cultures.

"Colours in Culture"

They have some other projects that include a breakdown of web-based earnings for music artists today- a subject particularly close to my heart (I miss spending hours getting lost in aisles of records and CDs, don't you?) and even some trending showing peak break up times on Facebook. For real.

Taking the mundane and making it interesting- and beautiful. Fascinating.

In Full Swing

With invites finally in the mail, it was a straight up party projects weekend here at Holtwood House. Saturday was all about hunting for supplies at the local Home Depot. Among the items that made it into the cart on the first of many trips to come:

How 'bout a sneak peak?

There was even time for a quick trip to see the Northern Lights. Someday I'll tell you all about my love for IKEA.

There is still much to do and we'll be in full swing here over the next 27 days. I'll keep you posted with some more snaps as we make progress.