Please Comment!

Hello everyone!  I'd like to ask you all a favor!  If you read the blog and you like it or have a thought about something I say,  please take a minute to leave a comment?  It's pretty easy, if you are on the Blog home page, simply click on "# Comments" (even if it says 0 - why not be the first) and that will open a comment page.  If you are reading one of the specific blogs, simple click on "Post a Comment" at the bottom.

You'll have to pick an identity before the comment can be posted, here are the four options:


1 - If you are a fellow blogger member or have any kind of google account, simple select that box and fill in your blogger id or gmail account; or


2 - Select Name/URL if you want to leave your name and tag back to the website (URL) you are affiliated with; or


3 - If you are a Typepad, Wordpress or other OpenId user, by all means enter your id to select this option; or


4 - (and this to me is the simplest!) If it all looks greek to you, simply Select Anonymous!

Thanks so much, hope to hear from you soon!

A Room with a View

There was a little house. That little house was covered in flowers. Flowers of purple and orange mingled with the deeper hues of burgundy. The burgundy coincided with the palest of yellows and all of the colors magically wove themselves together to create a feast for the eye.  

Oh...how I love flowers and working in the garden!

 I equate gardening with art. The play of the colors,  hues and textures are akin to painting. It can also be another form of expressing oneself. I always look at the flower above all else when picking out the plants to put in the garden. 

I am partial to pale pinks, purples, blues, yellows and whites with a jolt of color here and there. 

Flowers that show hues of true red are not found for red is probably my least favorite color. I have a friend who says that he is going to come and plant some red flowers in my garden one day while I am sleeping!

Hot pinks and burgundies are the closest that one will find to that color palette when walking through our little farm.

Whatever you color preference...you can create a room with a view at your house. It will change seasonally and it can be as large or as small of an area as you choose. Just keep in mind that the size of your "room" should be dependent on how much sweat equity you want to put into it that room. My kids have never quite understood my fascination with weeding or gardening in general...nor does my husband for that matter. I find it very peaceful and cathartic to work in the garden. In fact, my son Aidan came out to the vegetable garden while I was out there today and said, "Mom, I don't know why you like gardening so much." I replied something that rang with the pleasure and peaceful thing and he said, "Even with the sound of that machine that dad is using?" My husband was not too far away power washing the floor of the spring house which had acquired a lovely shade of green slippery algae and mold from the high humidity and moisture that we have had. So much for me proving the peaceful point! I also did not let on to him, that on a day like today I was probably going to jump into the pool with my clothes on when I was finished for it was so stinking hot...that would have really motivated him to join me. It was bad enough when my youngest son said, earlier in the day, that I should build a little lean to in the garden for when it was so hot and sunny. That way I could go under it and I wouldn't sweat so much. Imagine his surprise when I jumped in, fully clothed, a few hours later.

Enough about the sweat and peaceful aspects of gardening. The best thing about it for me is to be able to go right outside and pick what I need a few minutes before entertaining! I love free form arrangements and they are so easy to do. Remember the Murphy's Law blog a few posts back? It never fails and I mean it when I say that it is a few minutes before!!!!

I took my love of gardening and entertaining (I did not tell you about that passion yet) and created these sweet little menu or place card holders for the Summer Barn Sale coming up this weekend.

We will have all items available you see here to put together your own creative table for an upcoming summer gathering.

What "room" with a view are you going to create or have you created? Would love to hear about it!

Happy Gardening!

Meg

Welcome to Holland

My brothers' post on Facebook yesterday brought to the forefront the many unexpected people that I have run into over the last several months who are visiting "Holland" for one reason or another. Be it through a disability that a child was born with (visible to the naked eye or not), an illness they have suffered from or an injury that they have sustained that is life altering. We have been visiting Holland ever since our oldest son was born almost 21 years ago. We entered it again upon the illness of our 3rd son. Holland was never a place that we thought we would journey to. While it is different from the destinations that we envisioned immersing ourselves in, it is no less beautiful! To all of the people who are traveling in Holland when they thought they were going to Italy...this is for you. 

WELCOME TO HOLLAND

by
Emily Perl Kingsley.

c1987 by Emily Perl Kingsley. All rights reserved

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this......

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."

"Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."

But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.

But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.

Plein Air Festival visits Life's Patina at Willowbrook Farm

We were so pleased to see the photographers and artists involved in the Plein Air Festival through the Wayne Arts Center use the scenery at Willowbrook Farm to create their art!  I was lucky enough to meet several of the artists and talk with them.

Their talent was astounding!

Brenda Carpenter, who was the photographer for the whole week long event was kind enough to send me this proof of a picture she took of my favorite fountain in the front of the house. Look how she treated it and made it look like a painting itself. Another incredible artist with a remarkable eye for color and composition! Brenda is THE photographer of the Devon Horse Show which begins this coming Thursday the 24th.  

courtesy of Brenda Carpenter, follow her at blog.brendacarpenter.com

The Plein Air Festival at the Wayne Art Center is where thirty five artists from around the country are chosen to paint landscapes over the course of five days out in the "plain air"surrounding the Art Center as well as Philadelphia. The Plein Air Exhibit and Sale is open to the public through June 30th. For more information on the festival and to see more of the artwork created, please visit waynepleinair.com

Next Barn Sale - June 1st through 3rd - Join us!

Hello everyone!

Hoping you can make it to the next Barn Sale at Willowbrook Farm!

We'd love to see you!

Blue is so much more than a mood!

~Shades of Blue~

I love all of them....and if you walk into my house, there is an element of that color in almost every room. When I was a young girl we moved around frequently with my dad's job. To ease the adjustment, my parents would let us chose the color to paint our new room. My choice was always blue. As I got older that color preference has stayed with me and despite a brief dalliance with green, all my bedrooms have been blue.

If you read my blog, you saw this picture in my Mother's Day wishes. After our renovation, my bedroom is now my favorite place in the house...although the one in which the least amount of time is spent in it! The linen curtains are a pale blue that I matched to an entertainment center that I designed and my artist friend Jennifer built. We were stripping old black shutters to make the doors and after a couple of hours we had gotten it down to a shade of gray. We decided to just prime over it and this lovely shade of pale blue was the result. 

I found this beautiful blue sink at the tile store and used this to pop blue into our Bathroom. This and the bedroom were the only rooms that we had to gut and redo when we moved in. I had the builder mount these sinks on an old farm table that they cut down to fit into this spot and I love the way it turned out!

This is the tile that I chose to match the blue sinks for the shower. We have a great old fireplace in the bathroom of all places! To help bring down the cost my artist friend Jennifer painted the pattern of the tiles on the fireplace surround.

Love the way this brought together the patterns and brought a pop of blue into the room! The "painted" tiles look as if they are the real deal.

All of my son's bedrooms have blue running through them in some way, shape or form (by their design) but the pictures will have to wait for another day when they are clean enough to photograph...I hope I am still blogging then!

To me, blue brings the beauty of the outside in. I often use greens with the blues to give a feel of the contrast of a bright blue sky with lush green grass.

In my dining room there is this fabulous fish pond...yes, I did say a fish pond! The room was added on in the 1920's and at that time it was very fashionable to have a water feature in a formal room of the house where there were windows. This would allow the sun that came through the windows to heat the water and create a humid environment. This environment was perfect to grow your orchids (also very fashionable at the time) as they would sit on or hang above the tile of the fish pond. When we moved in, we nixed the fish pond and the orchids due to 4 boys who thought swimming in the dining room was a novel idea. Sorry to digress, but I love that historical little tidbit of info! So instead of orchids, I placed objects that brought the inside out around the fish pond and combined rich shades of blue, green and chocolate brown together.

For those of you who know me, along with a penchant for stationary and paper items which I have already disclosed...I have an even stronger penchant for dishes. The now blue and brown dining room was the perfect place for displaying the blue and brown china that I have been collecting from yard sales, barn sales and antique stores.

In the kitchen we retiled the back splash with a neutral earth tone natural stone as well as the floor. The cabinetry was a lovely cherry that I wanted to keep but my artist friend Jennifer (here she is again) painted and distressed a few select cabinets a deep blue and creme to make them pop out. I found these hand printed silk screened garden tiles at the same fabulous tile store (Devon Tile) and had them installed over the wet bar sink. In doing just a couple of beautiful tiles it kept the cost down significantly.

With a few paper mache' balls from Ikea in a glass bowl, the scene is complete.

Don't you just LOVE the way the moonlight is coming through this night sky and down through the trees as the leaves are falling from the branches? This photo does not do this picture justice but it is an oil painting by an artist in Canada, Yan Eric Cote'. Yan has perfectly captured the movement of the trees and how they splay their branches up into the sky. The vision is as if you were lying on your back and staring up at the moon. We fell in love with this artist's work when we were up in Canada on vacation with the kids. 

Thank you for indulging my love of blue! Do you have a color that you love? I would love to hear about it!

Happy Mother's Day

"Making the decision to have a child is MOMENTOUS. 

It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body."

                                  ~ Elizabeth Stone

To all of you, whose hearts are out in the open, may your day be spent in whatever fashion that makes that little ticker sing!

I am about to jump back in bed so that my family can surprise me with breakfast in bed...

Happy Mother's Day!

The Perfect Sunday Evening

A perfect ending to a wonderful weekend! We made a road trip to my husband's home town where we celebrated my in-law's 50th Wedding Anniversary with both of his brothers and their families. We then came home to impromptu fishing in the pond. The dogs made sure to be at the ready just in case something was hauled in.

They did catch a few but mom was too late with the camera. 

I hope your weekend was filled with special moments!

Meg

Happy May Day!

When I was a young girl and up until my High School years on May 1st my mom and I would go outside and collect whatever flowers were blooming at the time to make a "May bouquet" as she called it. We would cut from branches of flowering trees especially because they always seemed to be the most profuse at that time of the year. I grew up in a Catholic household, so not only were those flowers a symbol of Spring and the rebirth that is going on at that time of year but it was Mary's month. Sometimes we put the flowers in a vase that had a bust of Mary on the front.  I have to admit that I covertly continued the tradition into High School (it really wasn't cool at that age to make that activity public) and totally left it behind in my college years. I was able to get back to it upon getting married and having a family and a home of my own. 

Yesterday, I went out with my youngest son and he with his little pocket knife and I with my scissors cut from the flower laden branches that we could find around our house. We assembled them into a loose flower arrangement and viola...we have a sign of all the glories of the season that is upon us, right on our kitchen table. Not a chance in heck that I would have asked my older boys to join in. One of these days in the not too distant future, I will be  back to completing this activity solo, breathing in all the memories of the past.

Many sincere wishes for a Happy May Day to all of you!