Further on My Home & Garden Expo Contest Entry

So back to take a peek at my competitor -- and she had a great idea, putting that step chest at an angle to solve that corner. Why didn't I think of that. I never think of things like that. Nice pots, too.

So here's Ria Bazar's Arizona kitchen -- that's all of it, except for the Apple Fall piece on the right. Simple, elegant, normal. Surely she has prims for food now, but this area is done.

 

I'm still angsted about using this area as the bedroom, but I actually don't want to swap with the study -- which in my conception, is my only choice unless I take my "food prep area" (as you will see) and swap that out for the study, put the bedroom in the study, and the kitchen in the kitchen. But you know, unless in the next few days before the deadline I get second thoughts, I will leave it because I like it myself.

So let me show you what I did with the bedroom/living room. I think it still needs editing for parallel construction. Maybe it needs rugs. I'm out of prims so it means choices.

 

So basically, I had to use this built-in fireplace. That changed my mind from my original conception of art deco/Frank Lloyd Wright if there were no fireplace, as I had one I wanted to use with this house (which is now in the rec room).

So the fireplace props are more aesthetic. No actually dead deer heads with fur and taxidermy. This is a bleached skull by THOR, a beach glass and driftwood peace by Lucas Lameth, a little jar (~RB~ Red Deer Terrarium) by Raikeira Belfire , and then this funny full perms shaman thing by Loren Zefeiri which like all such things, you can only use in your own builds with no-copy, and sell for more than $50. I actually made a complicated sculpture with that shaman, but it has "issues" so in the mean time, it's just going as decor here.

The cactus bowl is from THOR, and the rug is bigged up and greyed, also from his Mohave set; the coffee table is his too but I think from another set. Then I put Artisan Fantasy hacienda chairs which I have on my actual Hacienda in Polia. The colour isn't exactly what I wanted and it has politically-incorrect fur and hide but I don't care ultimately, this is the Buccaneer house, remember? There's a grander sofa of his but I think it's not on copy, or least I didn't have it in inventory and it's out at the Hacienda, a dignified, big green piece, maybe I'll put it here, but the cuddle couch seemed like a good solution.

Because while this is supposed to be the "main" space, I'm thinking of it as "the recesses of the house" where the writer retreats from the external "public" spaces of rec room/food prep room with its "hidden" study which is after all associated with work, even with work at home, and the path to upstairs for the barbecue "kitchen". So this is the "living room," if you will but actually more private. He doesn't have company in here. 

As you know, company always gravitates to your kitchen so he put the kitchen/food prep/rec room in the other, smaller room. This room, however, has the cuddle couch for those private moments with the girlfriend.

I definitely wanted a Kittycats' drink set, but which one? First, I put out Southern Comfort, which is a nice tray with green drinks, maybe mint juleps, and snacks. After all, "Buccaneer" is the south, right? Ok, wait, let's look this up:

Buccaneers were a kind of privateer or pirate peculiar to the Caribbean Sea during the 17th and 18th centuries. Originally the name applied to the landless hunters of wild boars and cattle in the largely uninhabited areas of Tortuga and Hispaniola.

So, hmm, I have a bit of pirate stuff as you'll see. But this guy, if a buccaneer, is a retired buccaneer now, anyway, living with his memories. Maybe he has a lame leg, a war wound or a hunting accident, there's a cane in the wardrobe.

Often I put a much bigger plant on a fireplace. I don't know why I just wanted to stay with this little succulents bowl.

I have a feeling this creator drew this shaman, then decided to cut it out and mesh it up. And that's ok. It's hard to figure how this will "fit into a build." per his TOS. I put it in a sculpture with some other items but the full perms creators sneer at you making any "art" of what you sell from their stuff -- I think some people sell the stand-alone thing as "their art" without any adornment and they hate that, as it is literalism and violates the spirit of their license. I think I have a cool sculpture/interactive idea, but it needs some technical fixes first, then I'll show you. Or what I would do with this guy is shrink him down and have him be one tiny thing in a box of geodes and whatnot that is a "treasure box". What else can you do?

Just another "anti-hunting" note. Well, I feel it is, but actually, I don't know. I love this little cameo from schadenfreude called "Hunter's Kiss" -- part of a little series of animal portraits. "Hunter's kiss" -- well, that's a contradiction in terms as the hunter is going to be killing, not kissing this animal. It almost verges on kitsch but it's very poignant. So let's say even the woman in this house made this set-up. But maybe not. Maybe the only reason this writer goes hunting is that his father and grandfather were hunters and he couldn't wimp out of that family tradition. We don't know.

I'm absolutely happy with my decisions to put onion and vidalia rows in the indoor planter. I bet Ms. Varriale never envisioned this use of her beds.  But nothing says "Spanish" and "southwest" like vidalia onions, no? And I have to have the fresh vegetables for the salads. It's cold out and these onion beds actually do very well here. So that's that. The rug here is from a set of rugs of different colours with deer designs. Not that inspired, but it's ok. Rugs bother me. I used to have a wonderful set of rugs, many single-copy Storax rugs, and they were all lost in my 15,000 item inventory loss. So I have this now from LISP, and it's ok, because rugs scare me a little, trying to paw through all of them, 90% of which aren't going to work, is too depressing. I can see judges marking off points for that rug decision which is "mint" with "grey colouring". So maybe I need to go back to the drawing board.

When I stand by this big Chinese hutch by Casa de Bebe, I have qualms about where I'm going with this entry way.  If nothing else, that rug colour has to be fixed.

So I dithered over the hall set. I was rummaging through hall sets and though this was good and then it turned the story for me -- it's not on edit, I can't remove the hats, so then there has to be a guy in the Navy with that cap and a woman with that floppy hat, but his raincoat is there and her coat is missing. It's only one prim though. Sculpty, but I think the texture looks good. If it were on edit I'd remove those dumb baskets and put boxes there or something.

I looked at THOR's hallway in his store and dithered about it. It's good, but it's very white, and colouration with colours can look terrible on furniture. It's also too shabby for the worn but still noble look of this house. This guy comes from money. Maybe some of the furniture is from Mom and Dad's house. Remember this is Camp, not their main house.

The thing is, what he has there -- a box, books, a pillow -- that's just more what I want in a hall set than those dumb baskets. The hat is also perfect for the 1950s guy. I could even stick in a woman's hat or stole or something. Hmm. I do have a lot of THOR stuff already and this thing will probably be like 10 prims, I need to check it. There's its whiteness. I might be able to retexture it actually...anyway this has to be decided by the 27th. It's another $700 or whatever and I don't want to be spending more on this. I also do NOT like the blogola system in SL where you are paid for blogging in free non-transfer goods. I reject that, although on this bid, I accepted two blogolas completely by accident as I will tell you.

There's also Zinnia's WONDERFUL southwestern hall set but that is too far in the Mexican direction -- we're Upstate New York, remember?  We're at best doing faux Tex-Mex by Northerners who don't know what they're doing, actually when they throw around striped rugs and cactus bowls.

In the next post I'll explain my real hunting corner.

 

SL Home & Gardens Expo Decorating Contest

So I'm excited to have been chosen for the Home & Garden Expo design contest. Anyone could apply and then they say they picked names out of hat at random -- I think otherwise I might not have gotten in, although one person who seems to be in charge there -- Saffia Widdershins -- has generally been cordial to me over the years.

You can see my work here in House 4. Here's their blog about the contest.

You got to pick the house you wanted to design out of their list, I picked "The Buccaneer" by Skyrider Varriale. This is a very nice house with a western/southwestern/Frank Lloyd Wright sort of feel to it. So when I heard "Buccaneer," I said "This house has to have a gun rack." I had just got another antique one recently by Laika Amat (rifle in chest 4 prim complete), and I had Fairy Angel Creation's deerhead and rifle as well (FAC Deer Trophy And Rifle Display). These went into the Shaman's Hut level which is actually anti-hunting. I bet you will get some PETA types who will complain and this is the sort of thing that makes you lose a contest but that's the last thing I care about. I'm not likely to win a thing like this because I don't decorate according to SL norms. And I'm not really an interior decorator in SL or RL such as to do the right thing you need to do. 

My goal with decoration here is the same as my rentals which is a) make a house seem real and livable, not just something to photograph for a fashion blog b) tell a story with it. Here, I'm not as constricted as a rental, I suppose, because I sometimes have to do things in rentals that will enable them to be liked and rented because the market for offbeat is very limited.

I've tried to learn something about decoration from trial and error for one, just by seeing what rents and what doesn't. Some things get appreciated even by just one person and that's enough. Often people want everything removed, or they put tacky stuff among the eloquent pieces. Oh, well.

This is a good house -- it walks well, it's spacious, it has interesting features like the indoor garden and the roof terrace. But for me, the problem was to decide "where's the bedroom" and "where's the study" because I wanted this  to be a story about a war journalist or non-fiction writer, let's say a former military man, and then explorer/traveler (always a popular SL gatcha theme so it builds itself), a collector, and then later a photographer, travel writer, hunter, and so on.

And there just didn't seem to be a good place for the bedroom. There's no second floor, unless you count the terrace which I suppose you could make the open-air bedroom like a camp or people sleeping out on their verandahs which we used to do in the old days in Upstate New York, especially if you had a second-story porch. You could take Concept's Hemingway set and put the bed, pots, etc. up there and it would work. I have those out in the "Soviet Spa" in Winnipeg.

I looked at that Hemingway leather bed up on books as blocks for this space and decided -- no. This guy may be offbeat and a writer and all that but he's not so nutty or lacking in ship-shape to put a bed up on books. It can't be.

So in "Buccaneer" there are two rooms that were obviously the kitchen and bathroom because they had wood plank walls and adobe tile floors. That makes for an awfully cold bedroom floor in the winter. But I felt that plank wall shouldn't go to waste on a needless SL bathroom and even a kitchen isn't what I want.

For one, I refuse to put in bathrooms because they're stupid -- we're not in the Sims Online. Very rarely I will put one in, i.e. when I have Dreamland Design's wonderful Turkmenistan set where I could put the lovely bathroom items in wood into a room that fit that purpose in a skybox (you can see it in the B&B in Winnepeg).

So there's no way I was going to burn prims in this contest on a bathroom, the guy can go out to an outhouse that isn't in sight -- this is in the woods in the Adirondacks, see. It's Camp. We're 90 miles out of NYC at least.  So that left the issue of his bedroom. I could put it in the smaller of the two front rooms but the door to the porch seemed too close to it in the smaller one, and I didn't like that feel of a door leading to the outdoors from a bedroom. That was my only complaint about this house. 

So I decided to make what was supposed to be the kitchen the bedroom, and the bathroom a study, as it was smaller and more cozy for thinking and writing. Of course, this leaves the problem not only of a cold floor but the expanse of space and not much privacy given the living room is right there next to the kitchen. But then, this is a guy up in the woods alone, except he does have this girlfriend...or did...

So...first let me give you an idea of how this house looks before I clutter it, and how it could be decorated NORMALLY by one of my fellow contestants named angeleina (she's at no. 11 at this contest):

This L-shaped couch by Mirage is brilliant because it solves the problem of what to do with this big space, yet still make a cosy fireplace area. The brown is perfect, it's all perfect. The little tables pull the two spaces together -- I don't even know if she's going to leave them like that but I like them. If I get this house I may get that couch, too. BTW her hanging plants integrate the spaces also. I decided to decorate my house first, then look at the others, so as not to get distracted/discouraged. Now I'm kicking myself for not having hanging plants. I'm not going to have them, though, I've decided.

She's got a great hallway and a set I didn't know -- she's from the South in RL and can get away with the "y'all" and "Buccaneer is probably more south than southwest? That floorplan console is great, I have that, another 50L Friday thing. PS those are all hive plants -- I got that same set and I dithered about using hive there, too! But you'll see I had a different inspiration...

The thought crossed my mind that I should use this geranium milk jug from Apple Fall but it was a little too fussy for my character and even his flowery girlfriend.

Then you can see how she's made a proper kitchen. Kitchens scare me a little. I don't hardly cook in RL, and in SL I've really only spent time on one kitchen (in the B&B in Itame) that went through many accretions and iterations. Elsewhere, I tend to take a set and put it in. In Grote, I have Desmond Shang's old wood and marble kitchen fixtures from an old prefab Victorian mansion of his.

You can see how the open space flows and works -- my graphics card is acting up so I have to come back and take that properly -- the only thing I thought was a problem in her kitchen was that the backdrop wall didn't match the wall of the house, but I have that issue with ionic stoves and such and I just let it be.

So standing here you can see how this space has been conquered, with the right flower pot and I imagine she isn't done yet with the fireplace.

I was actually thinking of just taking DRD's "cake disaster" counter and making that be my "kitchen" so I wouldn't have to get into the agonies of logic that kitchens induce in me (as you will see).

But I had other problems to solve as you will see. To me the LOGIC of the house and its activities becomes a driving force, needlessly so, because it's SL and you can do anything you want, and fly and such, but still. To me, if you put a thing in a room or house, you have to explain how it got there and what you do with it. There has to be a chain of logic. How did that watering can get filled if there is no hose outside? You can leave these things out (and I will have to) but it's nice when they all "fit" logically.

I think she's going to make the smaller of the two front rooms the bedroom, judging from just these two pieces, but obviously she isn't done yet and it will be fascinating to me to see how she solves the "where to put the bedroom"  for this house. 

All of a sudden looking at this room with a fresh eye, I see you could make it the bedroom by closing all the shades, even with that door there. But really that door like that gives you very little room for a bed to be comfortable, in my view. I would never feel like the feng shui was right in this house with a bed near this door.

So, casting common sense to the wind -- and I may go back on this later -- I decided to make the kitchen the bedroom because it felt both more protected and more accessible -- at least in the recess of the house -- which I will come to.

I couldn't envision doing this woodsy FLW/southwestern sort of house without Sequoia Nightfire's room divider from the POE contest of some years ago - POE6 * Winter Dressing Screen by SEQUOIASTYLE. It's a wonderful SL antique, I love it. I have put it sometimes in Barnesworth Anubis' Marleybone skybox.  The dressing screen is no-mod and a whopping 14 prims and can't be stretched but that's ok, I put it out first and build around it. Sadly Sequoia doesn't seem to have a store, she does couture, sim builds, as it says on her profile, but not furniture, so there was nowhere to look to see if she had anything more modern in the sense of being less prims. Oh, well. My motto: every decoration has to start with an old-school high-prim SL antique!

Then what can be the bed? See you can't have plank beds like Pew or Floorplan, which I might have used, given that cold floor plus the living room. So maybe Newchurch's iron bed (I'd put that if it were a rental, where you need an adult bed) or something sturdy, iron, wood, manly, no frills here. While I was struggling to find something I pulled out out Lilith Den's wedding bed. Now that is a weird piece. It's like from some previous century or Arabia or who knows. I have put it sometimes in weird skyboxes with alcoves. It has sort of Moroccan lights. The bride and groom climb into this...box, I guess you'd have to call it. But that's ok, because it fits with Sequoia's room divider, I love it, and furthermore, it has a top to put more things on. And creates a sense of warmth and security in what might feel like a cavernous living room/open kitchen space with a tile floor which really has no business being a bedroom. I may still swap this with the study. 

We're now deeply in the weird realm and this is how you lose contests. But honestly, I want the guy's bedroom to be here, where at least there is one protected wall, the blinds, and the room divider (admissible under the contest rules). I mean, let's face it, it's not like he needs privacy and there's a gang of frat boys here and he no longer has a girlfriend, ok? And even if he does, they're up in the woods, remember? So we're leaving it.

Also in this room you will see a few reminders of this woman -- her hairpin is on the floor like that famous poem by Taniguchi Buson. Yes, it's another 10 prims -- 500 goes by faster than you might think. But what a hair pin -- by Ersch, beautifully made. Did the woman in my story die? No, as you will come to see. But she left. In a hurry.

Which reminds me of my other goal besides the first two: to put out items from the merchants I always shop at and whom I find the best, because a contest like this should really feature them, I'm just a glorified mover. So I made choices sometimes by accident when searching for things, sometimes hunting for a specific merchant, sometimes just trying stuff, but if you're going to have a hair comb, it should be by Ersch.

So there's also some perfume bottles -- two, where one might do, but I wanted to have lilies of the valley and this is what I had in inventory. The blue one is from Velvet Whip, most of whose stuff is too drawn/cartoony for the look of this house. But I wanted blue to match the hairpin, which originally was next to the perfume bottles before it fell to the floor, see. I usually put VW stuff in houses where I already have drawing/cartoon items like alchemy sets or magic sets. The other bottle is actually a not very good sculpty but somehow it fit.  I really wanted to try to do this contest without buying anything but the three things required from the Expo itself, which I will come to.

The chest that is really "her" chest is from Vagabond and is paisley and sort of Indian-like -- Zaara has a better version of this type of Indian/Boho chest with even working drawers; so does Myrrine, that look more like the RL equivalents -- this one isn't scripted, doesn't open, and isn't even as well made. But sometimes you have to paint with what fits the scene -- I wanted something softer, and even added gray colouring to it, and something that wouldn't be primmy or stand out or draw too much attention because Lilith's bed is the center of attention here.

On top goes these terrariums. BTW a word on those LISP carpets -- they are PERFECT for this "bedroom". Just perfect. Look at them! These are 50L Friday specials. She's got a set of them, different colours. These are PERFECT. And warm up that cold floor, thank God. BTW maybe I should put a wood stove in here? 

So he gets a shaving table from POST just because it's a cool shaving table from POST.  I used the "small" that has less stuff (than the large, which I put out in the Celtic Mystical Forest) but this could even be sacrificed with maybe just the mirror or maybe just the bowl if I need the prims because the wardrobe has a shaving kit inside -- see?

So about this wardrobe. I debated whether to put in one of my ABSOLUTE FAVOURITE PIECES in SL but decided I MUST. I recently discovered it while trying to find a texture change map that I saw in a store, and recalled I'd lost from inventory. It's [CB] Upstairs Armoire (touch drawers for rezzer menu) by Cedar Bay (Tibouchina Freschi)

Sadly this creator doesn't have it anywhere, doesn't have a store any more, etc. but she's still on the MP. The reason I debated is that it is a bit odd, and it has photo real, which is my least favourite thing in SL -- mainly because it's so poorly done. But this is actually an example of a very good rendition of photo real, and the entire thing is 5 prims.

This bureau is an absolute delight -- you can click and get "hers" and "his" but more than that, you can carefully edit various combinations of objects and clothes. The issue with putting out all his clothes is that the frock coats are too dated -- they seem like Victorian era -- and this is supposed to be a guy in the 1950s, let's say, perhaps he fought in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. You could say, "Oh, well those are his father's but...no." So fortunately you can put in just the tweed, and also not put in the shoes which are also very dated. The rest can pass.

On top of Lilith's bed goes Thor's blankets -- because her bed didn't look warm enough. Then this Lark books/tree root thing. It doesn't belong, given that you can't explain how a tree is growing here, whereas you could if you were doing a magic/wiccan/shaman thing. But I decided at the outset -- no fairies, no shaman, no magic, for this build; this guy is a hunter, former military, not very fantastical. He has this tree trunk here because he's a lover of nature and adventurer, not because of any wispy fairy stuff. And it's not hers btw because he's more the writer/reader.

 

 

 Alright, I will have more in awhile...

 

Iolair Design -- Celtic Furniture -- Delightful Find - Now With SLURLs!

Lately as I said I have gotten so sick of events, and so sick of the latest mesh creations which consist of gazebos, candles in cages, photo frames, couches with blankets artfully draped on them that have no or only 3 texture options, console tables, things made in fact originally by Katy been then retextured, loungers -- well, you get the idea. There's very little new under the sun.

I now have 100,000 plus items in inventory. Since hitting 100,000, I've been battling every day to whittle it down -- deleting name repetitions and empty notecards which are obvious low-hanging fruit, as well as endless packaging garbage from merchants like folders, group joiners and landmarks, but also just plain ugly crap that will never be used.

Since the Postcards are broken and I now have to manually take photos and save them offline AND remember to keep the SLURL -- well, I'm done for now. I need a break, and likely I will take one for a month or more from events. I'm just done buying them, because I realized that even if I put out 100 items a day from inventory that were not used, I would only have used 36,500 items after one year. Not all of the 100,000 items are furniture, of course, but probably half of it is, and it's daunting to think that it might take two whole years to use every piece of furniture I have bought in my inventory, deleting some along the way. I love decorating, but really, it's heart-breaking to accidentally come across some things I bought in inventory and FORGET! A crime! Like the AIR stuff (will show later).

Lately, I've been scouring the MP for 49L items that are just weird or even Soviet for a build, or actually quite well made even if prim or sculpty, with the occasional mesh find.

When I started the Celtic forest, I decided that every single 30L Saturday Sweet Revolutions tree, log, grass etc which has sat in inventory for years without use HAD to be used. It's insane not to. And much more. (SR, run by Gwen van Aurora, is the store where I got the big swamp trees and such for the Shaman site in Tofalar).

For example this past Saturday -- why would you not buy a 30L Tourmaline Tree and glowing jewel-like teardrop plants? But then...will you use them? Well, I'm determined to do just that now.

The Celtic Mystical Forest kit comes from this store called CELTIC MYST dEcO ++mAgIcK Deco Designs++ that has all this amazing Celtic, fairy, druid, medieval, etc. stuff which I love. I guess it is my Irish roots. To be sure, it's sculpty. I don't like sculpty as a rule for houses and furniture, it doesn't look good and why buy it when you can buy mesh? But for forests it can be pretty good, and sometimes better. Although in this case, Celtic Mystical doesn't do grasses at all well, but fortunately their kits are on "mod" and they don't put in shadows to prevent you from removing things. More on this later. I will show more of that when it is finished.

So it is SO REFRESHING to find a store like Iolair Design which is off the beaten path. I'd never heard of it. It is run by a German woman (or at least, an avatar with a quotation in German on her profile), so you wonder -- why Celtic? It has a bit of a heavy German feel to some of the Celtic furniture. But that's ok. One likes sturdy furniture in SL that won't break after years of use! These Oxford chairs are wonderful. I got a moss green one.

Then there's this jewelry box, which unlike so many mesh things, opens! Hooray!

These Faberge type eggs aren't exactly Celtic - but I guess their theme is broader to include "Medieval". They don't "do anything" although one of them keeps time.

I loved these cut-glass flasks. They don't dispense anything. But they're mod so you could put something in them. They really look good!

More later on the couch...

The furniture has colour change which is why it's worth the somewhat pricey $700 - this is moss

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Tropical%20Orchid/192/146/1194

I came for this gorgeous Tres Beau living room set - $700

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Tropical%20Orchid/192/146/1194

OK so I went back -- I will never buy a thing like this -- will others?

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/TMD/131/168/22

BOILDEGG SENEUAL APPLE CHAIR BLACK PG

 

He means "Sensual"

 

These are nice from ASW but don't feel like buying now

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Home%20Town/124/126/23

Traveler's Rest Suite $399

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/NESWNGI/6/153/23

$30 and $35 items from ChiMia

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Unbroken%20Isle/122/200/3102

Full set is $488 by Kalopsia -- that pineapply lamp is $188, might go with past stuff of hers

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Collabor/251/205/1089