The Tree Pod?

(The quilt is handmade by my Grandmaman!)

I'm not sure how or why this tradition started, but I've always named the apartments I live in! My last apartment was appropriately nicknamed "The Coop" because my best friend Stef and I thought that's where a couple o' hens like us should dwell!
Well I just moved into my new apartment with my younger sister and we were trying to figure out what this apartment felt like to us...Mike suggested we call it "The Pod" because he thinks we're two peas and we deserve a pod to stay in...I thought the explanation was cute, but The Pod minus the cute story behind it just sounds like some weird spaceship or something...
Then my sister's boyfriend, Chris suggested that we call it the treehouse because it's up on the second floor and just really feels like a little fort/treehouse that you'd want to live in as a kid!

We are still deliberating on the issue, what do you guys think?

Birds of a Fether

I found this over at Vim and Verve

Even if her collections weren't as wonderful as they are, I think I'd still love her just for being so darn cute! Her hair!

(Red Letter Days update to come later today!)

Brianne Swap Pt. 4 *With a special Guest!*

My sister and I have turned our parents house upside down in preparation for our move this Sunday...so we were all too glad to take a break for a little cheesy photo "sesh" when we saw how pretty it was outside!
This move is exciting for both of us for sure, but particularly for my sister since it will be her first apartment, and I thought we should make this set of photos particularly country-mouse inspired since we'll be city-mice again come Monday morning!

I wanted to feature part four of my Brianne swap series, and this seemed like a perfect setting for it. I like wearing really fancy things to do really outdoorsy stuff. My sister wore the dress I bought from Chicken Dinner Candybar a few months back and she looks so perfect in it, I'm afraid I'll feel all self conscious in it now after seeing how perfectly she wears it!
Anyhow, I don't have anything very interesting to say today since the last three days of my life have consisted of packing, packing and more packing! Once we're all settled in I'm sure I'll have lots of interesting stuff to tell you!

On Allie:
Dress from Chicken Dinner Candybar on Etsy
Belt: from the Brianne swap
Shoes: from Spring

On Me:
Dress from the Brianne swap
Belt: thrifted
Shoes: Aldo

Allison Rae

This weekend my sister and I drove by the little antique barn that the family-up-the-street-from -s run, and were surprised to see it open! They sort of just open up the doors whenever they feel like, and I rarely happen to be around when that day comes!
The barn is sort of a dust filled dream with all it's trinkets and old rusty farm tools! The sun always manages to filter in just right so that it catches the dust and makes little sparkly trails from the windows! If I were any good at picture taking I would have captured it, but it didn't quite come out in the pictures.

Anyway, this is my little sister, Allison! I'm not sure I've ever "featured" her here on my blog or not! She deserves a spot though! she's just adorable and all kinds of original in the way she combines old with new so flawlessly!
She's got a little jumper on that my Grandmother made for us last year and she paired it with the prettiest little purse!
Maybe if you leave sweet enough comments, she'll consider starting a blog (or at least a Flickr account) of her own! :)

Our Hiking Club!

My sister and I finally got around to taking Mike and Chris up the hiking trails on Mont Saint Hilaire today! It was a hot, hazy summer day and the weather turned the hike into quite a work out, but the view from the top was more than worthwhile!
We've all agreed we're going to buy passes to the trails this Autumn and go up there for lakeside picnics and weekly hikes together.

We finished the day off with barbecued hamburgers and a little bit of poolside time, and now we're heading over to N.D.G. to celebrate my cousin's cafe's 5th birthday! If anyone in the Montreal area is reading this, make sure to come over to Shaika cafe on Sherbrooke right across from Girouard Park. It's sure to be a good night!

Red Letter Days update

Left Hand Adventures -Nice, FR

After realizing how much complaining I've been doing about the hot and sticky weather we've been having, I had to stop and wonder what I'm doing differently nowadays that's making Summer less exciting and wonderful than it was when I was a kid...well this lead me to thinking about adventures, and well, one thought led to another and somehow I wound up reminiscing about our trip to Europe and then it wandered particularly to our stay in Nice.

I don't claim, by any stretch of the imagination, to have seen enough of the world to qualify as a world traveller, but it was almost a year ago now that Mike and I were galavanting about Europe together letting our feeling of worldliness go to our heads a little!

I promised an occasional travel post and I have every intention of delivering on that promise, right now, today!

Nice, FR

Nice is a dirty little town with rows and rows of sketchy hotels and even sketchier locals! The beach is made of rocks, not sand and we were warned repeatedly to watch for pick pockets at every turn! That being said, it's beautiful! It's old, and lovely and oh-so European and just a quintessential French Riviera stop to make!

The water looks like clear blue paint, the rocks (though they aren't sand) are smooth and slimy when they're wet, the leather skinned locals make for excellent people watching and the nightlife is tacky in the best possible way (think big casino themed hotels with crooners - or strange mexican restaurants with 3$ mojitos!)...

On weekends there is the strangest little outdoor antique market which is ridiculously overpriced, but probably one of the most interesting places I've ever seen! Old French men who collect old French military paraphernalia line the street along side little old ladies with hat collections that would make any girl swoon!

The seafood is amazing, if you like seafood and the whole city smells like saltwater in a good way! You can climb up on rocky ledges and read Hemmingway till the sun goes down, and nobody will bother you!

And the pretty squares and cobblestone streets date back to the days when royalty were lead in by horse and carriage for winter getaways!

Nice is unfortunately one of the cities we collected the least amount of business cards from, and so names of restaurants and shops are missing from this post. If I can find the scrapbook I made for Mike when we got back, I will edit as many of the names and addresses as I can remember into this post later on.

In the meantime, if you're planning any trips to the South of France, walk along La Promenade des Anglais, make a stop at Place Massena and go up to Rue de la France and Boulevard de la Buffa for amazing local food - don't miss out on the Salade Nicoise!

And probably the best part is, you're only a train ride away from Paris, Barcelona and the rest of the French Riviera! Oh and Monaco is a 20 minute, 1$ bus ride away! But that will have to be for another post! I hope I did this little part of the world justice!

Bonne Soiree Tout le Monde!

Brianne Swap Pt. 3

If anyone has been following my Brianne Swap mini series, you already know that the girl sent me a little box of heaven! Each piece I wear is better than the last somehow and I just don't think I can find locations pretty enough to do the items justice!
My hair was a big frizzy-pool-hair-rats-nest this morning and knowing I had about eight hours of house work ahead of me made me too lazy to wash and fix it, so braided it would be! Once my hair was done, I looked in my closet to decide what to wear and a little light from heaven shone down on this sailor playsuit telling me I had no choice!

Well a little red lipstick, a hair bow and a Glen Gray record later I was dancing around my house imagining I had received news that my hubby was coming home from war or some silly thing. I can't dance for the life of me, so I can only hope my neighbours didn't see me!
With Lola on my lap and some oldies 990 on the radio I set off to try and find a worthy location to shoot this item, and as I drove by an old marina with a bunch of old waterplanes outside I had to stop and catch my breath! Unfortunately I'm only brave with my man by my side, and I was way too chicken to go and set up my tripod in front of the men who were outside in uniforms washing their planes....

so I drove a little further and settled for the Chambly falls as a location. Not that they aren't picturesque, but it just wasn't the feel I was hoping for with these photos. None the less, this outfit speaks for itself, and so here we have edition three of my Brianne Swap series!
And really, with all the complaining I've been doing about the summer heat, a nice little summer playsuit was just what I needed to remind me how fun summer can be if you just indulge a little in it!

Left Hand Adventures -The Lachine Canal

Mike and I have been saying for a long time that we don't know enough about our own city. Montreal is packed with pretty places and history and stories and we really barely know any of it! After all the history we absorbed in the South, and after seeing such beautiful spots, we decided it's time for us to be tourists in our own city and get to know Montreal just a little bit better!

And so begins my (hopefully) weekly segment Left Hand Adventures! I'm hoping that every weekend we'll be able to drive out to a new section of the city, or its outskirts, that we've never visited before and then report back here about the pretty things we found!

I'd already been thinking about launching some sort of sister blog to this one that would focus a little more on travel than clothing, but with school starting and my budget being what it is, I think the travelling will have to be limited to nearby spots! What I do hope to do though is put together some really thorough travel guides for all the cities we've visited on our different vacations and then post them here as I complete them! So maybe once a month or something my Left Hand Adventure Montreal posts will be replaced by some other place we've been!

We don't have all that many pictures of the place today because I was originally just going to do an outfit post! It was only once Mike and I got to talking about all the stuff we don't know about Montreal that I started putting the idea for this post together in my head!

The French Colonial Government started thinking about the idea of building a canal around 1689 because of the difficulties the Lachine Rapids presented for the trade industry. It wasn't until 1825 that the canal was open to traffic and that the whole South Western part of the city was built up and industrialized. Thanks to this canal all the pretty little borroughs like St-Henri, Point-Saint-Charles and Verdun (which is where I'm moving in October!) even exist! But when the industries got bigger, there was no room for them to expand the canal and it couldn't handle the volume of shipments coming in anymore! So they shut it down and opened up the St-Lawrence Seaway instead! That's why all the creepy abandoned factories along the water are there, and why those neighborhoods still look the way they did about 70 years ago. Business had moved downstream and the South West part of the city was left behind!

Well now the Canal is lined with pretty little artists and vendors and has walking and bike paths that you can stroll along. You can rent row boats and canoes and I suppose it's sort of touristy, but pretty none-the less.

You can also visit the Old Fur Trade museum, built in 1803 to store all the furs that they gathered from the trades. We didn't go in, but the pretty little stone building was really nice!

If you're in the Montreal area, it's only about a 10 minute drive from downtown and it's absolutely worthwhile if you're looking for a peaceful little getaway within the city!

Red Letter Days

Five new items currently in the shop and more to be posted over the course of the weekend.

Henry Thomas Roberts Jr.

When we were in Savannah, Mike and I stopped in at a little yard sale that Rhiannon had e-mailed me about. The little lady who usually runs estate sales was getting rid of a whole bunch of junk she has collected over the years - and for dirt cheap too! It was the perfect kind of junk, the kind of stuff Mike and I love to fill our lives with, but are usually too cheap to pay for. Well needless to say we left this yard sale/giveaway with about a hundred pounds of extra stuff in the back of the van and very excited smiles on our faces.

This baby book made it into the box of treasures and I'm so glad that it did! After looking carefully through the whole thing I've determined it's from somewhere around 1930 or so. The date of the actual baby isn't indicated anywhere strangely enough, but there is a page in the middle devoted to little Henry's sibling's names and birthdates and both of his older siblings were born in the late 1920's. My excellent powers of deduction lead me to my theory about it's date. To make matters worse (or better?) Henry has been about my favourite boy name since I was a kid and I've always hoped to name my first son that! Mike isn't so keen on it, but I have time to change his mind!

Here are some pictures I took of the pretty little pages inside this perfectly aged leather bound book! Enjoy!