Nestled In

The lucky winner of the Kauniste teatowel is Kay! Thank you everyone for taking part and sharing your birthday stories, we really enjoyed reading all 123 of them!

A few more pictures from the weekend, looks like I spent a lot of time in the kitchen. I think that the kitchen is the heart of the home, it’s my favorite room. And even though our kitchen is lovely it’s also unfortunately a bit small, I’d love to have a bigger one or a dining room so we could have people over for dinner more. In my Dream House we’d have a great big kitchen in the middle of the house and a dining room too, it would be perfect for dinners, board games and sewing and crafting projects that take up space. I guess it’s always good to have something to dream about!

In a completely unrelated matter, if anyone is using a feed reader service (RSS or Atom) and having problems with our photos not showing up, please let us know so we can try to fix it. And speaking of feed readers, if you use them would you mind sharing what you use and how you like it? I’ve been meaning to (finally!) start following all the (many) blogs I read that way instead of just visiting each blog to check if it’s been updated (so old fashioned, I know!).

Every once in a while we get emails from people/companies interested in advertising on our blog or asking if we could mention their products in our blog posts. As a rule we say a polite thank you, but no thank you, as we like to keep our home blog exactly how it is, a blog about our home and about things that inspire us when decorating our home. Our blog is a fun hobby for us (we both work/study full time so blogging is done in our spare time), a good way to collect and share inspiration and connect with people who are interested in the same kind of things. While we have absolutely nothing against ads on blogs (in fact we really admire people who can make a living out of blogging – it must be a lot of work!) we feel that for us personally accepting advertising would add a lot of pressure that we don’t want right now.

Even though we don’t have advertising on our blog we do feature things we’ve bought or things that are on our wishlist, or artists whose work we like on our blog all the time. We’d never post about something just because we were asked to and in fact don’t post about 99,9% of the products we’ve been asked to mention on our blog. But then sometimes we get an email about something that we love right away and we think that our readers would love too, something that feels like a right fit for our blog, and then we’re more than happy to post about it. So when Finnish textile company Kauniste contacted us about featuring their collection of lovely dishtowels and offered to send us a couple of dishtowels so we could give one away to a lucky reader we said a big yes, please! right away. We love the fact that the Kauniste dishtowels are handprinted right here in Finland and that the company works with young Scandinavian designers. We also adore the 60’s and 70’s inspired designs!

So, if you’ve made it all the way through this long post, we’d like to announce a giveaway. Thanks to Kauniste we’ll give away one orange “Sienet” dishtowel (pictured below). We’ll draw the winner on my birthday, Saturday February 27th. If you’d like to take part in the giveaway just leave a comment in this post and tell us a favorite birthday memory or a gift you’ve given/received.

(All images from Kauniste except bottom image by us.)

We have something new to share with you both in and out of blog. First the outside news: we have both gotten very excited about analog photography, especially black and white photography. There’s something special about shooting on film. You will probably see more film photos in Nestled In in the future too as we get more practice with both shooting and developing.

Then the blog related news: from now on our replies to your comments will be shown on a light green background within the comments feed so that they stand out a bit more. I’ve posted an example comment to this post.

I’m taking a Swedish language class at school at the moment, it’s been over 8 years since I finished high school and last studied Swedish and I wasn’t that good at it even back then so I know that this class will be a lot of work for me. But one fun way to study the language is to read Swedish magazines and blogs – and one of these blogs is HELLO TIGER!, a cool interior design blog that’s written in both Swedish and English. Tiger has made a list of inspiring blogs of 2009 and it was a fun surprise to see our blog at #4. Thanks Tiger! And thank you also to Lorna Sixsmith for featuring us and our blog in her Blog Watch article for Munster Interiors! How crazy (in a good way of course) it’s to think that our blog is mentioned in a magazine in another country. Check out the article here on Lorna’s blog. The other blogs included in the article are Meet Mabel & Violet, Living Room, Maggy Moon Interiors and The Brick House (which has moved and has a simple and stylish new look). Also, a big thank you to everyone for your nice comments on my previous post!