grammar girl

Can you believe Christmas is less than a month away?  We cannot believe it.  Seriously cannot believe it. What happened to November?  How did all these leaves get all over the ground?  We don’t even remember Thanksgiving and we think it was only yesterday. Our days have been so jam packed lately that everything that’s happened over the last month seems to have become one big blur.  How did this happen to us?

We’ve determined it probably has something to do with trying to “multi-task” all the time, which we are slowly coming to understand is a fancy word for doing a minimum of 10 things, really badly, all at the same time.  It turns out this is something that we are experts at.  We cross 5 things off our list and then add 7 more.  We merchandise the store while we simultaneously write a grocery list for home. Christmas is here but we’re already thinking about Valentine’s Day.  Recently, we’ve even gotten good at contracting our sentences.  For example, “How was your refrigerator?” means “How was your day? The milk needs to go back in the refrigerator”.  Basically, we’ve multi-tasked ourselves into a month-long memory warp of some kind.  Awesome.

What does this have to do with the picture of the cute ceramic pendants?  In our own weird way, we feel like they are good reminders to live in the moment and to appreciate the small things in life that make all the big things in life possible.  Simple in color and simple in design, they are beautiful because they don’t try to do too much with too little. We look at them and we can see that slowing down doesn’t mean stopping, keeping it simple is really about creating fewer complications and, of course, that less is always more.

We were at a local art show when we first saw the work of local gal, Brenda Rose. It was kind of like love at first sight. We’ve had her work in the store now for several months and we’re happy to say our visitors love it as much as we do. We dabbled in collage work back in our 20′s and so we can appreciate the amount of work and care that goes into each piece. We feel like her work is what we tried really, really hard to create back in our younger youth but never could – the perfect layering of paper, glue, plexi and fine-cut vinyl.  All that detail work that makes people put their faces up really close to a piece and want to understand each intricate image.

We just received a big new collection from Brenda, filled with Portland landmarks, curious characters, and vintage imagery.  If you haven’t had a chance to stop in and see her work, you should.  If you’re anything like us, it will – at the very least – inspire you to pull out your crusty old jar of hodge podge and get artsy for a few days.

As is usual at this time of year, the shop begins to stock up on new merchandise to help keep our holiday gift-givers happy. We simply cannot keep up with the demand for our locally-sourced vintage doo-dads and so we bring in things that we hope you will find equally appealing despite their brand-newness. This year, we think we’ve done better than ever.

Proof of this is our newest line of modern ceramics by Brooklyn-based artist, Amy Adams, and her company Perch!. We’ve seen Amy’s beautiful things here and there for years now and drooled over each impeccable piece. And then, this past August, we met Amy in NYC and she was really nice. And her things were really nice. And we really like to spread the nice. So we bought a small, limited quantity batch of our favorite Perch! pieces that we could drool over in the privacy of our own shop.

Then when our order came in this week, we were like, “That’s it? This is all we ordered? There is NO WAY this will be enough for the next 6 weeks!”

So we apologize in advance for not having enough stock to satiate your desires for awesome, modern, made in the USA ceramics. Our bad.

As one might imagine, sharing a space with a cupcake shop dictates many of our business decisions. Like the time we decided to buy a new rug because of an inoperable cream cheese icing stain. Or, like the time we decided we should never again eat hot fudge cupcakes while trying to fill out our tax forms. Of course, no decision was impacted more by cupcakes than our decision to carry cake stands.

We decided early on we would need a way to lure all of those strict, cupcake-only customers over to our decidedly less sugary (yet equally sweet) side of the shop. So in one of our all-night marketing and strategic planning meetings (read: over morning coffee, while writing our grocery list) we realized that all these cupcake connoisseurs would need a proper peak for their beloved sweets. We would carry cake stands! Or, in our case, cupcake stands. Cross-marketing at its finest.

And so, over the last two years, Noun has had cake stands to fit every occassion. We’ve had blue ones and yellow ones, big ones and small ones, square ones and round ones. Ones for bridal parties, ones for baby showers and ones for birthdays. But never had we had cake stands as cute or as customizable as our newest arrivals. We love that you can switch out the ribbon to match any event. We love that you can stack them high or spread them wide. And frankly, we can’t think of a more perfect way to pay homage to our favorite treat than by putting it on one of these pretty pedestals.