Tuesday 21 December 2010

If the World Were a Catalog

I love public radio's Marketplace and today, while I was working from home, I heard the lovely voice of Molly Erdman. Molly started a clever blog called Catalog Living on which she posts pictures from all the catalogs that clutter our bedside tables along with tongue-in-cheek captions.

I'm not a catalog collector, but I like that Molly spoke about the anxiety we have because of fantasy home imagery. I believe it's akin to looking too much at fashion magazines and wondering why, after steady dieting and exercise, we still can't recreate the look of the D&G model. We actually live.

My pained attempts at perfection in our home (everything has a place I always say) is an ideal and ideals tend to live in books and the imagination of their creators, not in the real, hard surfaced world where 14 hour work days coupled with pinched budgets result in something more akin to a Rauschenburg work, artful but definitely messy.

Something to think about this time of year when out of town guests and catalogs will surely collide...

Now, in the spirit of tidying things up, I've freshened up the look of Blueprint. Let me know what you think. It's an homage to the Delta, where I learned how to properly set a table whilst making a "spaghetti cake", with a big city, modern day feel.