Allyce Lees of The Paint Store Inc kick starts our first Garden Class!

Our first garden class - Create this beautiful textured birch trees with metallic glaze with Allyce Lees of The Paint Store Inc. Learn the technique and bring home an expensive looking artwork! SAT JULY 14th - starts 9am Triptophonic Studios  $55 per person All Materials Included

Someone Inspiring ... Christine Ha @ Master Chef Season 3

Have you watched this season's MasterChef?  I am a fan of this show... my husband and I love to cook, and watching cooking shows on TV is something we really enjoy.  This season, I am throughly inspired and humbled by a very special contestant, Christine Ha.  She is a masterful chef, and happens to be blind.

Watching Christine cook, I find bravery and an enlightened heart to do good things, to remain kind, and to stay positive no matter what happens.  She may be blind, her world seems as colorful as anyone's, if not more.  She is a fine example of showing how much is possible when you put your heart into something.

Christine Ha: Photo credit from her Blog

Master Chef is on Fox every Tuesday & Wednesday.
http://www.fox.com/masterchef/

One of my favorite episodes of Christine in Master Chef: (Baking an Apple Pie)
http://www.fox.com/masterchef/full-episodes/23322263/top-16-compete

Christine Ha's Blog: http://www.theblindcook.com/

Tips to Dressing Slimmer ~~

Found a quick read article on tips to dressing more fabulous! Here's their link -http://www.sugyou.com/tag/a-line-dress  a great website on fashion and beauty tips!  Check it out :)

HOW TO LOSE A FEW POUNDS VISUALLY BY YOUR OUTFITS

POSTED IN TIPS FOR LOOKING SLIMMER BY ADMIN ON 23 MAR 2011

At the very beginning, dress was made to serve as a cover for body to go against bad climatic days. As time pass, dress is not only confined to its basic function. It becomes a way to show fashion attitudes and improve the image of their figure. Put it simply, not everyone has perfect body shape and has no good control of weight but clothes they choose can make them look slimmer or heavier. Here are 7 tips for you to dress and make a slimmer impression on others.

1. Colors Selections

We all know that colors have great optical illusion. Clothing colors provide great variety of choice for you to build your shape image. Generally-speaking, black color is regarded as a perfect option to make you slim for it will detract others’ attention from the flab part. And dark colors have the same effects. However, bright color and large prints on clothes tend to make you look a little bit fat.

2. Patterns of Dresses Selections

Jeans

Boot cut jeans

Jeans are so popular that almost everyone has at least a pair of jeans in their closet. And jeans are designed into various types and colors. Among all of those, boot cut jeans is a top option for they can help to balance your curves and flesh.

A-line Dresses

A-line dress

For ladies who want to hide their paunches, A-line cut dresses are best options to conceal their flesh and hips.

3. Prints and Detailings of Dresses

Stripes

vertical stripes dress

horizontal stripe dress

As colors can reshape you figure, prints and stripes have the same function. Usually, vertical stripes offer a slimmer appearance of wearers while the horizontal stripes make viewers’ eyes look back and forth, which builds a bulky appearance of owners.

Pleats and Ruffles

Anyone knows that pleats and ruffles usually make our dress look bulky so that the wearers leave an impression of heavy figure. As a result, if you want to look slimmer, try to avoid such patterns.

Bulky Clothes

To make slimmer look, baggy or bulky clothes are the least choice especially for those who have no perfect body shape. Usually, such designed clothes are too loose to deliver the sense of not fitting and baggy. It is possible for you to imagine the effect when wearing bulky dresses.

4. Highlight legs

High heels highlight your legs and give a slimmer look

If you have fabulous legs, you must look thinner. Considering that not everyone has such legs, short dresses above the knee will make legs look longer than they are. And also heels can elongate your legs and then make you look slimmer. In a word, any way which can highlight your legs will put you in slimmer condition.

5. Accessories

When accessories start to enhance people’s outfits, many accessories creators start to design accessories which give you a slimmer look. If you know how to pair such accessories with your dresses, you will achieve your desired effect.

We also wanna share a quick note on our new Etsy Shop called "Little Vintage Corner"  We are sharing our new found pre-loved apparels with the world now via Etsy!  We be posting more pictures from this shop soon, we hope you like it. :)

Life can be Colorful within Choices

May you find the special things you like to do - unlike directing a movie, life has no 'Take Two'.  

My favorite saying from my husband: " You are too young to be bored", and it makes me think twice before I complain about things.  May you make the most out of those precious time for meaningful events.  Life can be colorful within choices... do it before you lose it.  I hope you find inspiration from this wonderful article written by Marina Keegan (copied from ABC News website)  It touched my heart, and I am so glad I still have the time to do what I want to do.  

Love a little more everday, Angela 

"Opposite of Loneliness" by Marina Keegan

This undated photo released by the Keegan family shows Marina Keegan, who graduated from Yale less than a week earlier, died at the scene of an automobile crash in Dennis, Mass., May 26, 2012. (Keegan Family/AP Photo)


The piece below was written by Marina Keegan '12 for a special edition of the Yale Daily News distributed at the class of 2012's commencement exercises last week. Keegan died in a car accident on Saturday. She was 22.


We don't have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that's what I want in life. What I'm grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I'm scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and leave this place.


It's not quite love and it's not quite community; it's just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it's four a.m. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can't remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt. The hats.


Yale is full of tiny circles we pull around ourselves. A cappella groups, sports teams, houses, societies, clubs. These tiny groups that make us feel loved and safe and part of something even on our loneliest nights when we stumble home to our computers -- partner-less, tired, awake. We won't have those next year. We won't live on the same block as all our friends. We won't have a bunch of group-texts.


This scares me. More than finding the right job or city or spouse -- I'm scared of losing this web we're in. This elusive, indefinable, opposite of loneliness. This feeling I feel right now.


But let us get one thing straight: the best years of our lives are not behind us. They're part of us and they are set for repetition as we grow up and move to New York and away from New York and wish we did or didn't live in New York. I plan on having parties when I'm 30. I plan on having fun when I'm old. Any notion of THE BEST years comes from clichéd "should haves..." "if I'd..." "wish I'd..."


Of course, there are things we wished we did: our readings, that boy across the hall. We're our own hardest critics and it's easy to let ourselves down. Sleeping too late. Procrastinating. Cutting corners. More than once I've looked back on my High School self and thought: how did I do that? How did I work so hard? Our private insecurities follow us and will always follow us.


But the thing is, we're all like that. Nobody wakes up when they want to. Nobody did all of their reading (except maybe the crazy people who win the prizes…) We have these impossibly high standards and we'll probably never live up to our perfect fantasies of our future selves. But I feel like that's okay.


We're so young. We're so young. We're twenty-two years old. We have so much time. There's this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lay alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out – that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. That it's too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement.


When we came to Yale, there was this sense of possibility. This immense and indefinable potential energy – and it's easy to feel like that's slipped away. We never had to choose and suddenly we've had to. Some of us have focused ourselves. Some of us know exactly what we want and are on the path to get it; already going to med school, working at the perfect NGO, doing research. To you I say both congratulations and you suck.

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For most of us, however, we're somewhat lost in this sea of liberal arts. Not quite sure what road we're on and whether we should have taken it. If only I had majored in biology…if only I'd gotten involved in journalism as a freshman…if only I'd thought to apply for this or for that…What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. Get a post-bac or try writing for the first time. The notion that it's too late to do anything is comical. It's hilarious. We're graduating college. We're so young. We can't, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it's all we have.

In the heart of a winter Friday night my freshman year, I was dazed and confused when I got a call from my friends to meet them at EST EST EST. Dazedly and confusedly, I began trudging to SSS, probably the point on campus farthest away. Remarkably, it wasn't until I arrived at the door that I questioned how and why exactly my friends were partying in Yale's administrative building. Of course, they weren't. But it was cold and my ID somehow worked so I went inside SSS to pull out my phone. It was quiet, the old wood creaking and the snow barely visible outside the stained glass. And I sat down. And I looked up. At this giant room I was in. At this place where thousands of people had sat before me. And alone, at night, in the middle of a New Haven storm, I felt so remarkably, unbelievably safe.

We don't have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I'd say that's how I feel at Yale. How I feel right now. Here. With all of you. In love, impressed, humbled, scared. And we don't have to lose that.We're in this together, 2012. Let's make something happen to this world.