Over at Young House Love, they recently hosted a giveaway for a $500 gift card for Z Gallerie (but the giveaway ended, so don’t go over there to try and enter!). I hadn’t ever looked at Z Gallerie before, so I had a shop around their website, and these are some of the things I would buy if I had $500 to blow.

How about these amber wine glasses to start things off? Because I saw this post on Bower Power yesterday and now I’m totally obsessed. Wouldn’t these make a great Fall tablescape?

Amber Colored Optic Stemware – SALE $23.96 set of 4

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I stumbled upon this yesterday and I am all kinds of obsessed with this shop. Lu’s Boutique makes 14k gold necklaces out of real leaves and petals (and even an acorn!). Here’s how she does it:

“Each leaf is handpicked and soaked in a solution that dissolves the meaty parts of the leaf, leaving only the veins and edges. Afterwards, the leaf is coated with a copper-based paint (in order to conduct electricity) and dipped in 24k gold, silver, or copper. With the right voltage, the metal binds to the leaf – creating a beautiful piece of handmade jewelry!”

I am just…gah! Obsessed! I can’t even describe! Look at all the detail in those leaves! I want one of everything! These are SO perfect for fall. There’s some other really beautiful jewelry in her shop too…

(Click images to go to shop pages)

My favorites include the calla lillies, the acorn, the graduated pearls, and the wishbone. What’s your favorite?

(All images via Lu’s Boutique.)

The couches my housemate had in this apartment were vile. They were as old as him (23 years, that is…yes, 23-year-old, used couches), and they both used to be white or have white areas on them…and needless to say, after following them from his parents’ house to his first apartment (a house shared with 7 or so other people, one of whom used the couch as his bed for a few months) to this apartment, they were a nice shade of dirty oatmeal. Disgusting. Not to mention they were filled with all kinds of gunk that would not disappear no matter how well I vacuumed them out…and they were, y’know, broken. They were the kind of dirty bachelor couches that make you feel gross just brushing past them. They needed to go, and Jason and I had agreed to split the cost of a new set that we would then take to our someday-home when I move out of this place, but we had been having some seriously bad luck finding things that were a) not disgusting, b) stylish, and c) reasonably priced. Weeks of scouring Craigslist had yielded few results, and none of the sellers we contacted came through. We were pretty discouraged.

Enter the Ikea Ektorp.

(Click image for source.)

“The Ektorp?” you say? That $500 couch?

Yes.

I found an almost-brand-new one free for the taking last week on the way home from work.

As fate would have it, I had to walk home from work that day because I didn’t buy a bus pass that week. As fate would have it, I walked up South Highland and saw a desk sitting on the edge of a cross street. As fate would have it I decided to mosey on over and take a peek.

As fate would have it, there were three identical Ektorp couches sitting in the yard behind the desk, all wrapped in plastic, all with signs on them that read “FREE, please take.” I was suspicious. Did they have bed bugs? Lice? Mold? Were they stolen? This was weird. But it was also perfect. A dark blue Ektorp sofa with matching recliner, for free, in this person’s yard. I looked them over as thoroughly as humanly possible and found nothing perceivably wrong with them. I parked myself firmly on the arm of the couch and called Emily for assistance in the way of her Zipcar membership.

An hour later she came with the Zipcar Prius to take the armchair, and left me again to drop that off and go get the pickup truck. An hour and a half after that, she and two friends came to my rescue and we loaded the couch into the pickup truck and drove carefully to my apartment (luckily it was just a few blocks). Tom and Jim unloaded the couch and I was left with three couches and an armchair stuffed into my tiny living room.

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Two more days until the official start of fall and I’m so so so excited. I painted my nails in Ginger Bells today. I bought a new pair of boots over the weekend. I’ll probably pull up my petunias and plant mums in their place sometime in the next week or two. I’ve got a little bowl of buckeyes sitting on the end table. This Friday is my alma mater’s homecoming football game and Jason, Emily and I will go to watch the band’s halftime show. Nothing says fall like chilly football stadiums, band popcorn, and high school kids, right? :P

Unfortunately the weather this week has a different thing in mind…highs in the 80s all week? No thank you! Go away, summer, I’m tired of you.

I’m back!

So, finals are over, and to blow of some steam after finishing my huge stressful project Thursday afternoon with more than five hours to spare until the time came to turn it in, I decided to bake. A new recipe.

Apple upside-down cake.

See, I kinda hate raw apples. I hate the sandy texture of the flesh and I hate how chewy the skin is — I feel like I’m chewing forever when I eat an apple. But I love apple flavored baked goods, and I also love the fact that it is mid-September and it is officially apple season, and almost, almost officially fall (next week!).

So to celebrate the end of hell month, and to use up the apples that I bought but didn’t quite know what to do with, I made apple upside-down cake.

Let me tell you, the smell that this cake makes while it’s baking is absolutely divine. It smells as perfect as a Yankee candle, except it’s way cheaper and you get to eat it at the end. So…it’s much better than a candle. (‘Cause seriously, who the heck pays $24 for a candle??)

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