Nestled In

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.)

December can get a bit crazy with all the Christmas preparations and visits and traveling, shopping and making gifts, projects ending at school or at work, and just the general end of the year busyness, but thankfully January is quite the opposite. All the holiday celebrations behind us it feels wonderful to get back into the everyday life. The new year always feels like a fresh start, a good time to re-evaluate and re-organize your life a bit, maybe even make some resolutions (whether you keep them or not). We have thought about some goals for this year, and the biggest one is to get our home more organized. Our home is small, the rooms are quite tiny and the ceilings low so it can all look very cluttered very quickly, so everything needs to have their own place.

We also have some planning to do this year – we still have many projects (the stairs, the basement, the front and back yards, and lots of smaller projects around the apartment) left to do, we just have to sit down and figure out how we want to do them and how much it will cost and in what order we should get to them. We won’t have the budget to do all of them in 2010 but it’s good to map them out anyway.

A little New Year’s wishlist: Time and Space print set from My Folk Lover, mouse pad from Shim + Sons, metal bowl from Niki Jones, Archive boxes from Muji, masking tape from LemonTree, Ikea PS Sticka blanket from Ikea, Block lamp from Design House Stockholm and Ginkgo in Snow & Olive fabric from Ink & Spindle.

Have you seen the new collection of dishes at Marimekko yet? The Oiva collection is designed by Sami Ruotsalainen and the super talented Maija Louekari has designed the two lovely patterns for it, they are called Siirtolapuutarha and Räsymatto. I absolutely loooove them! Now I’m just wondering how many dishes can I justify buying since we don’t actually need any new dishes and our kitchen cupboards are already full…

I am in love with these bird bookmarks (via Husmusen) and cloud mobile (via Lovely Clusters), so playful and cute. Happy Friday everyone!

On my wishlist: Sparks coat hangers from Finnish designer Mikko Laakkonen.