New Year Clean-Up

Right now families across Vietnam and China are preparing their homes for the upcoming Lunar New Year celebrations. Traditionally this is the time to clean and organize your home, setting the tone for the upcoming year. With this year's Lunar New Year being so close to Western New Year we thought it was a great opportunity to clean up the piles of everything that have accumulated since our wedding 6 months ago! We dedicate a whole weekend to a thorough clean-up and re-organization. First up was our utility closet with miscellanous items left from the wedding, a banker's box full of paper and stuff just shoved in any available space on the bookshelves waiting to topple over. We wish we had thought of taking a picture before, but it was pretty embarrassing, we couldn't even see the floor. With some help from clear bins, boxes and plastic tubs everything now has its place.

The wooden and paper boxes were all from Ikea. The plastic bins are from our local supermarket Fred Meyers and the small plastic tubs were from terrific Japanese dollar store Daiso. We couldn't believe all the places where we had paper stored all over the house, now it's all in one place and easy to get to.

While packing for our short visit to Seattle it became clear how badly we let things pile up. We finally gathered, purged and put our toiletries in one place, tossing out old out-dated items.

Next we tackled the coat closet. We added another shelf above to accommodate new wedding gifts that needed storage space. Being able to see all our coats, jackets, hats, scarves, gloves, bags and sunglasses without digging through items in the wrong place is a dream.

Party favors from the wedding, birthday cards, bills, check stubs, missing buttons, hardware for the windows, gift wrapping ribbons, mementos and trinkets; these items could be found in any room in our house, but we are slowly digging our way out and setting ourselves up to keep the pile-up from happening again.

Happy New Year Everyone.

May the Year of Dragon find us ahead of the curve and not under piles of stuff.

Forest Patterns

Hiking in a rain forest isn't about the views, but the plant life.

Once we were able to take our eyes off the slippery hiking path and look up, we realized how beautiful the forest patterns were.

Nature can be so beautiful and inspiring.

More Travel Inspiration

We love maps. We had a map of the Pacific Ocean area up in our dining room for months prior to our trip. We drew on it, we put post-its all over, we jotted down notes. Maps make us dream of exotic locations, food, people and adventure.

While doing further wedding research we came across these fantastic modern maps. Again the typography, design, style and colors inspired us to dream beyond the traditional and incorporate our love of travel into our wedding theme.

We love these typographical maps by designers These Are Things.

Remember that wall of travel posters we dreamed of having? What about a wall map we could stare at all day instead of the tv? Daydreaming is way better for the soul. We'll take that Danish modern couch too.

World Map Screen Print by Callaghan Art Gallery. Comes in numerous colors to coordinate with any decor.

Other great wall maps include this great world map vinyl decals by Wall Decor. Plane and jet stream are separate decals, but come with the map!

We also really like the World Bar Code Painting by Mike Best.

We found many unique maps, such as this one utilizing state license plates by Aaron Foster Designs.

Traditional and vintage maps were easy to find, but currently we are into maps like this one by Old Paper and Pages. Maybe it's the lines signifying travel routes that drew us in.

We really like colorful city maps also, having relied on numerous similar ones on our trips, like these by Andrewmaps. There's nothing more exciting than "mapping" out your day on a detailed full scale map!

We found there are many other people out there who are in love with maps as much as we are and maybe our invitations will look something like this by Second Edition, who utilize old atlases for their handmade envelopes.

And speaking of atlases we have been in love with the King Fisher Atlas of the World book we found at the library. Everytime we hear about an exotic country we pour over the book, soaking up information. It's brief descriptions of every country in the world makes us want to slap a TO DO post-it on the book and head out to see the world

Travel Inspiration

We're in the middle of finalizing some details on our wedding. Yes, the planning is finally underway! Once some of the larger details are decided we can finally move onto the fun stuff, like the theme and invitations! We've been looking for inspiration that screams Anne & Mike, possible a theme we can run with. There's so many examples out there and in our search for ideas we came across some great typography city posters we fell in love with, like the prints above by design team The Heads of State.

Continuing on theme of great cities, we found so many great prints, which made us want to go out and book an airline ticket - pronto! Here are some of our favorites. The colors, typography, design and style of these prints made each city that more appealing and we definitely gathered more than a few ideas and lots of inspiration.

Digital Poster Prints by Taylor's Typographical Art Posters

City Prints by Blanca Gomez

We fantasize about a whole wall in our house covered with city prints that we could put little red dots on the corner of once we have visited the places in the poster. These prints by Belize artist Ignacio are a perfect example of what would have on our travel wall.

Steve Forney's tranquil travel prints would also be on our travel wall.

As well as his landmark illustrations

This print series titled "A Toast to...." by JHill Design are graphically gorgeous with fabric inspired cut outs and come in numerous states and countries.

We found romantic art deco travel posters by French illustrator Roger Broders that capture the beauty, romance and appeal of his European cities posters he created for the Paris-Lyon-Mediterranee train lines.

And what collection of travel posters would be complete without a few Kerne Erickson prints? His Americana-style, bold colors, vintage style and unique sense of type inspires us to create something that makes us feel the same way we do when we look at his posters - excitement about hitting the road for some new adventures.

Kerne Erickson's retro prints are said to be inspired by vintage photographs and brochures. Whatever his inspiration his love of beach scenery had us dreaming of a coastal vacation soon.

We have gained so much inspiration from these prints and posters, we hope to be able to capture the same sense of nostalgia and beauty. For now we're finding inspiration from this Ork Poster given to us as a gift, we just need to frame it and get our travel inspiration wall started.