olioboard mood board creator

I read about the OlioBoard mood board creator this morning from decor8 and immediately went over there, signed up (for free -- I never sign up unless it's free), and started creating.

I think it's good for getting a general idea for decorating a space, but there were a few things I didn't like.

• I wish they had paint chips you could choose from (unless they do and I just couldn't find them). I love wallpaper, but I'm not going to put it everywhere.
• I wish they had more character pieces to choose instead of all the big box stuff. I suppose that could be both good and bad, but I just felt like no matter what mood board you create, it still wouldn't have as much interest as a mix of old and new items would have. The popular mood boards that were featured kinda looked like they were straight out of a catalogue.
• It would be nice to be able to crop things a little more precisely. Some items were grouped together and I liked one thing in the grouping, but I wasn't able to seperate it out cleanly.
• It also took forever to load the pages and the items. Unless forever was actually only 60 seconds. But 60 seconds in internet time is forever! -- No. Making the second room really did take forever. It took forever to load everything, so it took forever to make, and then I saved it, and it said it saved, but when I went to save a picture of it, it was all gone. All of it. Gone. I could have cried. (Again I have to remind myself: always ALWAYS take a screen shot. ALWAYS.) They must've been having technical difficulties, because the site went offline for a while. It's back now and loading much faster.

Otherwise, I think it'd be a fun resource to play around with when you want to get a feel for how you'd like a room to look. When things do load and show up, it's really easy to size and position them. It was nice to be able to arrange items exactly how I'd want them to appear in the room rather than just having a bunch of random stuff plopped on, picture-list style.

Here are a couple spaces I came up with in, oh, maybe about an hour and a half (not including loading time and hair-pulling time).

bedroom concept

It's not something I would necessarily put in my own house, but I like the overall feel of it.

 

porch concept

this feels so Greek to me. I didn't do it purposely, it just worked out that way. Specifically, I love that bench rocker. We really loved sitting in one we found at Walmart but design-wise, it was super ugly. This one's much nicer and they ship to Canada! (By the way, the art here is just a piece of framed wallpaper.)

Anyway, I've spent all day fiddling around with this website. It's a lot of fun to have this much creative design freedom. You should try it!

what to do with less than perfect macaron shells

attempt #1: macarons

I did it. I finally worked up the nerve to make these super twee cookies. I think my motivation was mostly due to the egg whites. Lately, I've been trying to get rid of some of the older things from my freezer, and I remembered I had a bunch of egg whites frozen in an ice cube tray (I don't remember why, though). On hindsight, freezing them in an ice cube tray isn't a really good idea. Unless you plan on covering them because I found they dry out quite a lot. So, anyhoo, I defrosted them, strained them, and put them in a container in the fridge; until yesterday, when I hesitantly took them out and set them on the counter. Tomorrow I'm making macarons. Tomorrow. I can't go back now, the egg whites have been on the counter for more than 4 hours. It's on.

happy kitty bunny pony

I love this book

macaroni and (fake) cheese

I think I accidentally stumbled on the best macaroni and cheese recipe and it didn't even have any cheese in it!

You weren't expecting to hear that, were you? Well, here's the deal. A while back, I bought a bag of nutritional yeast for some vegetarian burger recipe. Like all new things, I'd never heard of nutritional yeast, I'd never tasted it, and beyond that burger recipe (which turned out terribly, by the way), I had no idea what else to do with it.

Interestingly, the package had a recipe for cheese on the back of it. Cheese. I looked at it, wrinkled my nose up, and didn't really think of it again until last night.