About this blog.

I have a second mood board to show you! This is a 'blog mood board', it will give you an idea of what this blog's all about. I have played with the idea of changing the name of the blog to Soiree House because I love evening parties and hope to be doing a lot of that in our home!

So, let me tell you about some of the things you'll see on my board and find on my blog:

1. Curious & thoughtful interior design, conceptual art & home goods. I really love to see people create spaces and 'moments' in their homes that move them. There's no need to have a boring, 'right out of a catalog'  home. You can make anything interesting & beautiful. For example, if your kid's insists on a John Deere Tractor themed room.. using THIS, instead of THIS would be a great start! You just have to put some care & thought into it and magic will happen! It's not as hard as you might imagine.

2. Fashion & Frills. I love anything that is extremely well made. It could be a pencil or a gorgeous dress, anything that's made with passion and precise attention to detail is inspiring to me. When I find items like this, I want to share them, and tell you WHY I think they're so neat!

3. Minimal, clean design, art, photography, you name it. If it's clean, well made & shows restraint, I love it and want to share it!

4. Extraordinary graphic design. From business cards to packaging, even to styling for special events in new and thoughtful ways! I love it all and want to make note of the best of it to keep myself inspired.

5. Ira Glass. I put him on my board because he has been a HUGE inspiration to me. Watch THIS and you'll see why. I'm self taught. I don't know everything about design. People I work with are consistently younger and further along than me. The amazing interior designers, Robert & Courtney Novagratz (who I just realized should also be on this board!) are known for "breaking all the rules" and I don't even know what all the rules are, that they're breaking! But, I'm 'closing the gap'.
My work really is (finally) getting to a point where it's beginning to be as good as my ambitions!

6. Lastly, the photo of the young woman next to the gorgeous pendant in the top left corner, is Sonora Webster Carver. Sonora was one of the very first 'diving girl's' in the 1920's. Sonora would climb up a forty (sometimes sixty) foot tower and mount a running horse as it reached the top, then they would jump from the tower, her on the horses back, into a pool below. She was phenomenal. In 1931, she hit the water with her eye's open and was permanently blinded. The even crazier part is, she continued to dive horses after her accident until 1942! Blind! The audience never knew. Pretty extraordinary. She wrote a book called, "A Girl and Five Brave Horses" that was later made into a movie by Disney, called, "Wild hearts can't be broken". She was reported to have thought that they veered a tad too far from the truth in the story, it's still one of my favorites. She's always been such an inspiration to me.

So, that, is a little summery of what this blog is about and what you can find here. I would love to hear from you! Do any of these things inspire YOU!? If not, what does? I'll leave you with this neat fan made video from the, 'Wild hearts can't be broken' movie. It's a good one! xo

Mood Board: Pretty. Manly.

Our living room, up to this point, has NOTHING in it. We're starting from scratch, so this was the perfect opportunity to gather my thoughts on how I want to decorate the living room. A couple of these items are not within our budget or no longer available for purchase (like the gold pedestal table that I've longed for forever) but they reflect the feel I'm going for and I decided it was ok to dream a little bit on my board... a girl can dream, right?

The item that I know for sure is happening is the Ektorp sofa from IKEA. EDIT: Once I got to the store I actually ended up going with the Karlstad Sofa. It was bigger and more modern looking. It was a difficult choice, but I love it and am very happy with it. We don't have a budget to spend $9,000 on a sofa, and honestly, I'm not sure it would be the right choice for us even if we did! The Karlstad Sofa sofa may not be as deep and cozy as a more expensive sofa, but, it's affordable, has washable covers and you can buy as many new/different style covers as you'd like. That works for me, and it seems to be a decent quality sofa for the price.

So, on with the design of my mood board here. My husband is a pretty manly man. Yes, he's an artist as well, but he builds muscle cars & loves to fish and play guitar (He'll play any instrument really) and generally speaking, he can fix just about anything. We also have a son who just turned 12... which means, I'm pretty well surrounded by all things BOY! Of course, that doesn't mean I have to live in a man cave (yuck!). So, being the only girl living with these very manly guys, I desperately crave some pretty in my life. However, I don't want to overdo it. On my mood board, there's not a lot of frill, but there is softness & bling. I've mixed those two things with the hard, clean lines, geometric shapes, warm wood, manly metal and simple colors.

I think that this strikes a pretty good balance between pretty & manly. What do you think? 

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