Spent the early half of my day getting work done and then ran errands after.  It was a good, simple day.

Earlier from brunch at Shanghai Cafe in Chinatown.  Really love their pig ear (cold dish) and pork soup dumplings!

Still trying to get lighting down with my new camera (it seems everything I take is too dark!) and working on composition.  By the end of this year hopefully my photos will look a lot better!

Via Instagram from my cellphone.  It was a chucks kind of day.  I’m hoping the sun will peak out sometime this week, it’s been cloudy and foggy for the past week.

These were taken with my cellphone camera + Instagram.  Didn’t have my Nikon D5100 on hand because I was out of state this weekend.

Lots of fog this weekend.

Road trip, pit stop.

This was taken yesterday while running errands.  Blurrier than I like, but it was taken in the car.  The weather has been pretty great lately in NYC.

I spent this week organizing, de-cluttering, and moving things around in my room.  I’ve been wanting to make an inspiration board, open up the space around and on my table, and just organizing and cleaning things up on my shelves.  It’s kind of crazy how the littlest things around you can affect you.  I also think adding trinkets – a photo, a cute figurine, a candle, a toy, something personal – can help make your desk more fun when you’re doing work.

Here are some helpful sites I found that really helped jumpstart my inspiration:

Sarah Wandering
Great images for home decor, interiors, and DIY tips.  She even posts things she changes/adds to her own home, which is so personal and inviting.

Design*Sponge – Before + After
You can always count on Design*Sponge for anything home and design related, but the Before + After series they have on there is really great to look at to get lots of new ideas or revamping things you already own.

IHeart Organizing
Everyone needs some organization in their lives, especially if you have your own office it’s hard to just function when everything is out of order!

Pinterest
I never took to using Pinterest…until it came to finding inspiration for home decor, organization ideas, pretty much anything you need to get yourself excited about revamping your space, even if it’s just your desk or shelf!  I even pinned a few of my favorites onto a board as well to keep track and to reference back to in the future.

A new addition to my table.  Here are the super simple and quick steps I took to make this polka dot pattern!

1. Cover the bottom of any box with black stock paper or any color you prefer (this is optional depending on what you’re stamping your pattern on, usually a nice contrasting color will look nice).

2. Create a polka stamp (check out my stamp tutorial to find out how to make your own custom stamps).  I actually just carved this dot stamp out of an old rubber eraser I had.

3. Get an ink pad of your choice (I used this white ColorBox stamp pad) and stamp away!  The way I created my polka dot pattern was just by shifting the dots over for each next line, so I stamped the first three dots at the top and on the next line created three more dots diagonal from the previous line above them, and I just continued to follow this pattern all the way down.

It’s something super simple to do to make things more interesting (and cute) on your desk!

Slow work day today called for cleaning.