Friday Find – June 24

This garden inspires me…

…to go relax in mine!

Have a great weekend!

Friday Find – June 17

Image c/o CeramicaBardelli; artist Ronald Van Der Hilst

Las Vegas–Part Deux

In Las Vegas – Part One I showed you pictures of the scenery that we were treated to on our trip to Las Vegas in March.  That was actually one of the reasons I wanted to go – believe it or not – not the lights, the shows or the gambling.   That being said, there certainly were plenty of other amazing things to see in Vegas.  And here are some of them …

A few more pics of the view from our balcony…

The fountains at The Bellagio!

The ceiling in the Bellagio Reception.

A close up – these are glass poppies!  Aren’t they beautiful?

And here’s the real thing in the Bellagio Gardens.

More poppies!  I’ve been trying for a few years to grow these in my garden with no luck.

Hyacinths in the Bellagio Gardens

This is a tile floor in the Bellagio Garden.  I love the detail!

A shot from our night flight over Vegas.

And now for some examples of the lighting (which seems to be the majority of pictures I took of the interiors) in our hotel – The Cosmopolitan Las Vegas.

Bright pink chandeliers against an elegant wallpaper on the  recessed ceiling.

There were several tear drop type window treatments.  The first was in our bedroom and the second was a chandelier in the lobby bar.

 

This was one of many chandeliers through the casino, all glass.

And the piece de resistance …

A three story bar – INSIDE a chandelier!

It was impossible to get he entire chandelier in one photo. 

Amazing!

Friday Find – June 3

Hello, my name is Donna and I am a procrastinator.  Admitting it is the first step right?  Except in all honesty there won’t be steps 2 through 12.  I know it. You know it.  My family knows it.  So lets just move on okay people, nothing to see here.

Now, the reason for my little rant.  For reasons I won’t get into here, I’ve been on a clean up kick the last few weeks and let me tell you it feels good – damn good!  With apologies to the sanitation engineers that appear at the end of my driveway each week, I have been brutal to my hoards of collected “necessities” (I even threw out all of my design boards from school).  I have to be, because along with my admitted procrastination, I also suffer from a minor case of “collectorism”, or as DH says “you-need-that-for-what-exactly?”.

Wow – two minutes in and I’ve already told you way too much about myself – sorry…

So, in my clean up, I came across all of the great material I “collected” at IDS 11 in January – and yes I know this is June.  I found lots of good stuff, including, sadly, gift certificates and coupons that have long expired for things I probably wouldn’t have bought anyway.  But there were a couple of gallons of paint that may have found itself thrown on a wall in my house somewhere.  Oh well.

One of the great things I came across is this week’s Friday Find (finally… you’re saying).  At our really cool IDS11 Tweet-up, we got a goodie bag with a little package from The New Traditionalists.  I flipped through their furniture booklet and came across these pieces:

I love the lines and colour of both.  What do you think?

Happy Friday everyone!

Las Vegas–Part One

Although I’m a little behind on posting about our trip to Las Vegas in March, I wanted to share some of the scenery we enjoyed while there.  Some of you may remember that I got a new DSLR camera for Christmas.  Between my new camera and my old point and shoot camera, I took over 800 pictures in 7 days.  You have no idea how hard it is to pick a “few” of those to give you a sense of our trip, but I’ll give it a try.

Here is Part One.

We had never been to Las Vegas before and neither of us are gamblers, so we spent several days checking out the amazing desert scenery.  Check these out:

This is the hotel we stayed in – The Cosmopolitan Las Vegas.  Brand spanking new and very cool.

This is the scene from our hotel room balcony at 6:00 am.  And yes, I went right back to sleep after taking this one :)!

And this is the view down the strip later that night from the same balcony.

Our first big adventure was the flight and tour of the Grand Canyon.  There are no words to describe the Grand Canyon, so I’ll let some of my pictures do it for me.

Taken from the airplane on our flight from Vegas to the Grand Canyon.

First glimpse of the vastness of the Grand Canyon.

More.

And here is a panorama using a cool feature on my Canon camera Photo-Stitch.

Our next big adventure was a trip to the Nevada State Park – “Valley of Fire” which gets its name from the red sandstone formations throughout the stark landscape of the Mojave Desert.  We paid our $11 entrance fee and drove through some of the most amazing landscape either of us had seen.

Here are some rare plants and flowers seen in the desert.

The next stop was Hoover Dam, which was too big to get a single picture of.  I won’t bore you with the amazing details of this man made structure, suffice it to say “WOW”!

Lake Mead before the dam

The new bridge over the Colorado River next to the Hoover Damn  (from which you can see nothing I might add)

In Part Two, I will share some of the Vegas lights and interiors.

Stay tuned…