the lovely grass

These beautiful wild gardens are what I envision for Moss Hill. No proper rows, all laid out in neat, straight lines. No vast lawns, flat and unadorned.  For me, let there be undulating curves,  wild tangles of blackberries and roses, and casually mown paths leading from one lovely place to another.

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Breathless, 

we flung us on a windy hill, 

Laughed in the sun, 

and kissed the lovely grass.

~Rupert Brooke

http://confessionsofasineater.blogspot.com/

interesting in an ordinary place

I love love love Rebekah's (of Little Byrd Vintage) eye and styling. I see these very same things at fleas and thrifts all the time, but I don't look at them and think "Ah, that would be really special in another context." Her real gift is her ability to separate the wheat from the chaff, and come up with the real treasures.


Take these hurricanes, for example: don't they make great cloches? Brilliant!

This photo just makes me smile:

How cool would this be for an outdoor shower? 

And this, oh my, YUM:

All images/items @ Little Byrd Vintage

...It's about finding something interesting in an ordinary place... 

I've found it has little to do with the things you see 

and everything to do with the way you see them.

 ~ Elliott Erwitt 

http://confessionsofasineater.blogspot.com/

with imagination enough

I've got basically this very buffet in my dining room. I think this is a good place to start the makeover (isn't a well-turned out bar always a good place to start?)

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It is a very nice thing, however, to send flowers for decoration

to a girl who is giving a party. I once knew a charming gentleman

 with imagination enough to do that. He filled my apartment 

with flowers the afternoon I was giving a large cocktail party

 and sent along his Filipino butler, too, to help out.

~ Amy Vanderbilt's Complete Book of Etiquette, 1957

http://confessionsofasineater.blogspot.com/

a sweet deliciousness

I'm on the hunt for new lampshades for my yellow ginger jar lamps.  Here is one in a sad "before" picture. Any suggestions? 

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We eat light, drink it in through our skins. With a little more exposure to light, 

you feel part of things physically. I like feeling the power of light and space physically

 because then you can order it materially. 

Seeing is a very sensuous act --

there's a sweet deliciousness to feeling yourself see something. 

 ~ James Turrell 

http://confessionsofasineater.blogspot.com/

undefinable yet paradoxical

When it was time to retire my 1960s hard-rock maple "Early American" coffee table I looked high and low for a glass-top table I could love. Maybe I was looking in the wrong decade...

All these images (via here) are from the 1970s, and while some of them are clearly from another era, there are several that could hold their own - as is - against any contemporary room out there. (I especially love 1, 6, and 9.)  Even the ones with particularly hideous elements have something that could pass as 2010. 

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; 

the past is gone, the future is not come, 

and the present becomes the past 

even while we attempt to define it, 

and, like the flash of lightning, 

at once exists and expires. 

~Charles Caleb Colton

http://confessionsofasineater.blogspot.com/