I love IKEA

I mean, I love EVERYTHING about their company, their stores, their entire "cool stuff in a box with directions with no words and funky names" culture. And damn, they serve this apple cake in their restaurant that you'd sell your mother for. (Or maybe you'd keep your mother and make her make you the apple cake. That's what I'd do.)

Their appeal (IMHO) is enough choices to satisfy but not so much to confuse and terrify the design impaired. You're choosing from a small collection of patterns and colors and wood finishes and everything is fit together in a little showroom you can copy! Or even if you mix and match - no one with taste will be offended!

It's brilliant. 

I'd say my entire home is either IKEA or inherited furniture. We've bought pieces and moved them around to various apartments and our house and rooms in our house; the new "island" in our kitchen? My son's old dressing table. Mini-dresser in the bathroom for towels? Also formerly of the nursery.

See? IKEA makes people creative! Or at least enables us to pretend we are!

I'm not getting the curtainless window thing.

I guess if you live in the middle of nowhere and aren't worried about Mr. Jones next door catching you in the Full Monty as you stroll through your bedroom - cool. But if you live in an area with humans near-by? Why no curtains? Privacy versus pleasing views? I vote privacy.

Then there's the sun. I don't know where YOU live but I live where we have sun for several hours a day. Do really creative artistic souls not need blockage from the sun? Do they not mind being woken up by streams of sunlight burning into their sleeping retinas? Maybe they stay awake all night and sleep when the sun comes up and it doesn't matter.

I apologize - I read "Metropolitan Home" again and people are living in big giant houses that look like they're made out of windows and there are no CURTAINS. I would be applying 50 sunscreen in the dead of winter.

Geeze.

So I LOVE design/home/lifestyle magazines. Okay, I love ANY magazine but those are my very favorite crack of choice. I get great ideas from them, for decorating and for my business (which is how I justify them into my budget). Super stuff, pretty pictures but every damn time there's one of those "how to decorate on the cheap!" and it turns out to involve you strolling to your local fabulous designer level flea market and happening upon some Queen Anne chairs with a few tears on the seat which you buy for $100 and VOILA! Some fabu fabric and you have brilliant new chairs!

Uhhh...okay then. Except the flea markets and garage sales I go to are chock full of crap. No matter how much spray paint and fabu fabric is applied - it will still be crap.

Or even better - go into your attic/basement and see what hidden treasures are there! We'll show you how to spray paint them and turn those army cots into a fabulous coffee table!! Great idea, except no one in my family is or was an antiques dealer or collector. They're not world travelers nor have they ever been on safari or lived in Africa or had a distant relative who happened to be the dude who invented legs on tables.

If someone would like to show me how to turn an old black plastic CD holder and three wobbly kitchen chairs into something worthy of a magazine layout, THEN I will be impressed.

Could I HAVE enough to do?!

A rhetorical question to be read in the style of Chandler Bing; I'm only happy when I have too much to do. It makes me feel wanted, needed, necessary (my moment of self-psychoanalyzing for the day) and yes, creative. Like we claim a messy desk means a fertile mind? My messy life means I'm full of...

Hang on.

This blog is for all things creative in this bee's life; writing fiction, freelancing my non-fiction, designing and making jewelry, handbags and whatever else I might come up with, decorating on the thrift, all things do-it-yourself and stuff. I'm going to write stuff down, show pictures - you write stuff back, show pictures. I fully believe that creativity shared is creativity squared.

Did I mention my interest in creative catch phrases?