Leen's Lens.

Life photographer Nina Leen's photographs of teenagers in the 40s and 50s are wonderful...

...but my favorite shot of hers has to be this one, taken at the Ringling Bros. Circus in 1949. (Can you spot the acrobat in the background?)

Have a lovely weekend! I'll be hosting a friend from out of town, and helping her build her Halloween costume. She's going as a table, with her head as the main course - kind of like this. Brilliant.

Photos by Nina Leen, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

Tiny Forests & Watermelon Shoes.

Noteworthy curiosities from a recent Etsy trawl: made-to-order watermelon shoes, an air plant housed in a blue teak birdcage, and a miniature white birch forest.

Etsy never disappoints, does it? Wishing you a wonderful Thursday.

Traces.

This week on the Equals Record: thoughts on leaving pieces of ourselves behind in places we love (for me, one of those places is the purple house pictured below, where I lived the year before graduating college).

As always, a short excerpt: "I spent my last year of college living in the front room of a purple and yellow Victorian house not far from downtown Santa Cruz. Six of us lived upstairs, six or so more lived below. The house was old, rickety. It was terribly insulated (I remember laying in my bed one winter morning, almost in tears because I had to get out from under the covers). The bathtub didn’t drain properly and made strange, regurgitation sounds at random, often in the middle of the night. My bedroom had gray carpeting with bits of gum (not mine) stuck in its fibers. I loved that house."

Read the rest on the Equals Record, here. You can find past entries from my weekly column, Looking Forward (about the ups and downs of "growing up" in my twenties), here. Thank you so much for your support!

Bottom image via Pinterest. Please share if you know the original source - I'd love to give proper credit.

Cake Crush.

Someone help me. I can't stop staring at this beautiful cake, which blogger Cristina Sciarra recommends serving "warmed, with just a swipe of butter." (As evidenced below, frosting - in this case, Swiss cream cheese - doesn't hurt, either.)

Cristina's blog, The Roaming Kitchen, is one of my new favorites (take a look at this gorgeous gallery). It's the complete package: great recipes (Cristina attended Le Cordon Bleu), excellent writing (she also has an MFA in creative writing), and beautiful photography. Check it out.

Happy Tuesday!

Presidents, Pegged.

Detroit designer Meg Jannott has challenged herself to "brand" each of the forty-four American presidents, chronicling her efforts on a Tumblr feed, here. After scrolling through, I'm both very impressed and slightly ashamed - Chester Arthur? Zachary Taylor? Did we really have a president named Millard? Time to hit the books.

The last one's my favorite, for obvious reasons. See the rest, here.