LONG SUMMER DAYS

One of my favorite pics of the summer taken by our dear friend, Alex (TT), captures one of our many lazy days on the Atlantic shore.

DECORATING

Last May, Nate and I moved into a new apartment just across the street from our original West Village place. This new apartment afforded us a little more space to breath, and of course,the opportunity to decorate. How you decorate your home ends up being an expression of who you are, the life you live and your own personal style. As we grow older and move from place to place, I notice our home reads like a piece of our history together. Slowly we have acquired tokens from trips we have taken, photographs we love, furniture bought or acquired, and all with stories behind them or attached with special meaning to us (TT's). Though these things are just material items, they are artifacts of memories we have shared. Arranging all these artifacts into a new space is always such fun. I recently discovered a website/blog called design*sponge.com which I guiltily found myself lost in for a few hours at a time. My favorite feature on the site is called sneak peak, which gives and inside look at peoples' apartments or homes with accompanying editorial about how they came to choose certain items, and the history behind their select styles. As I look around our apartment, I see so many little histories:

The mid-century credenza was my father's bedroom furniture when he was a kid and later was my brother, Robbie's, growing up.

The tiny green ceramic pots that my brother, Jamie, made in art class in high school now houses our cactus garden in the bathroom.

The periwinkle chair, that we swore we would re-upholster, was a New York antiquing discovery. The little wooden bench side table I swooped up on Waverly Place when I was walking home one night. The painting in the background was a wedding gift to my parents from one of my grandma's painter friends back in the 70's.

The desk in our office nook was a rusty work bench I pilford from the alley behind our beach house in Newport. I sanded it down and painted it red. It has made the move to the last 5 places we have lived. The kitchen stool from the 50's was one of Nate's flea market finds in Brooklyn.

The white fiber glass deer head, the notorious White Mike, that adorns our hallway (not shown) has a history worthy of its own blog post alone. More on that later. These are the things that make our home sweet home.

FRESH

If my blog was a journal like a I used to keep, I would have had to pull it off the shelf, brush the dust away, creak open the cover and ask myself where did I last leave off? When I clicked on my blog page this morning I felt a sense of stagnancy and journal abandonment. I needed a fresh look, a fresh start. Maybe it is the change of the season into fall, or the fact that it is a dark and rainy day, but I felt the urge to begin anew to let my creativity flow to allow my self to be inspired. I needed an update - a fresh home page and new intro, to get me started. Life is busy, and I craved a relief to the guilt I feel from not updating this blog with my latest adventure, but rather use this blog as a creative outlet to share those tangible treasures in everyday life.