My great white green whale

Geoff and I don’t have a lot of money.  This means that when we need something I tend to spend a lot of time looking to find the right item at the right price and the right quality.  That way we don’t have to replace it in 10 minutes and we end up with what we need.  Sometimes this is harder to do than other times.

As I’ve said before, I have a black belt in shopping.  What that does NOT mean is that I go out and spend a lot of money for fun.  What that does mean is that I rarely, if ever, pay full price for anything, I know how to hunt for a bargain without wasting time, and I manage to get good stuff for cheap.

Right now I’m on the hunt for two very specific things, and they both happen to be green.

The first item is green sheets for our fold out guest bed in the living room.  This may sound odd, but our fold out queen bed in the living room is currently using a well worn set of RED jersey sheets which do not wear well and which have little holes in them.  As we have a cat (SCRATCH, I’M LOOKING AT YOU) who only contributes to the problem, these sheets are really not OK for using for guests now and are only going to get worse.

As we were gifted with an absolutely gorgeous cotton duvet cover and matching shams that happens to coordinate beautifully with the sage colored walls in the living room, it would be really nice to have either coordinating sheets, or white/cream sheets with a sage or celadon edge.  Also?  I’m not willing to fork out some outrageous amount of money for them.  These will get used a few times a year, they should be comfortable and more or less coordinate.  That’s all I ask.

This is, apparently, an impossible task.  Marshall’s, Target, and every online store I can think of seem to agree that green = mint, all queen size sheets should be $60+, or that what I really want is Egyptian cotton and I just don’t know it.  Geoff and I don’t sleep on Egyptian cotton sheets for Pete’s sake, we’re not buying it for the guest bed.

I have decided that on our next trip to IKEA that we’re going to check out the green sheets they have there as they have solid color 100% cotton green sheets in a 4 piece set for less than $30.  That, my friends, is a good deal.  Also?  If they so much as coordinate a little without making my eyes bleed I am happy.

The second item on my list is proving trickier.  It’s been a longer term project partially because it is less important and partially because I’m not sure the fashion industry actually makes what I want.

Green shoes.

You see, this has come about kind of slowly.  At first I picked up a pair of deeply discounted French Sole green-brown ballet/loafer flats to wear with my non-black pants.  I adore French Sole and I have a lot of their shoes, but I only buy them when they’re seriously on sale.  I noticed that this particular pair of shoes was very versatile but that it tended more toward the brown than the green.  That was fine, but I had some outfits that really needed the green aspect, especially a pair of pants I scored for $1 that have tiny green pinstripes in them.

So I started actively looking for green shoes back in, oh, January.  At first the only thing I found was stuff like this.

Nothing against it, but that’s not my style.  Not that I’ve ever claimed to have a particular style, but that’s not me.

Alternatively, I was finding this.

No, just NO.  There was no way.  I like ballet flats as much as the next girl but those were never gonna happen.  Neither were these.

Aside from all of this fail, there was the fact that most of the green I was finding was mint, lime, too yellow, too brown, or was accessorized the wrong way.  Like, oh, this.

I am left with the memories of the pretty green loafers that I missed on RueLaLa because I wasn’t fast enough to get to the sale.  I am disturbed by the odd convergence of shoes that look vaguely like slippers Hugh Hefner would wear crossed with loafers that would probably be comfortable and just might be in a color close to what I’m looking for.  This new trend is being referred to on some Hollywood starlet following website I found via Google as “the new ballet flat” (gag).  But, they had a photo.

Naturally the maker of these no longer carries them.  And then, of course, something else in the Google search caught my eye.  Apparently I am too mainstream for my own good.  The Gap has beaten me to it.

I think it might be time to retire.

~Kelly