Classic Connor

I was working in the kitchen and went into the living room to get something. There was a beam of sunlight shining down on Connor, lighting him in such a lovely way. It reminded me of some of the old Dutch Masters paintings with the clear light. I grabbed my camera and took a couple of shots.

This is my favourite.

KWID is in the House!

I stopped by Debois Textiles this morning to pick up the letter for their auction item for the Groundhog Day Party tomorrow night. They’re generously donating 20 yards of your choice of fabric from their collection. I will be accepting e-mail bids!

Naturally, I had my camera with me and took the opportunity to take some pictures of the newest fabrics that they have on display.

First up was a selection of KWID/Kelly Wearstler linens in some of her most popular patterns, including the best seller, Imperial Trellis, in several colourways. I also found this gorgeous Barbara Barry linen.

I can’t remember the name of this one, but I love the colour combinations. These make me realize that summer is just a few months away!

If you are heading to DeBois on Saturday, pop me an e-mail and maybe I will be there at the same time! I would love to have the chance to meet you.

Also, I’ve put in a new tag called fabrics, so you can see all of the posts I’ve done in the past few weeks about this amazing fabric resource.

I am SO Excited

I finally got to see the Elle Decor story about Baltimore. I flipped through the pages until I found the article on Baltimore and just beamed at seeing my name in such an influential publication! It was a great validation of the work that I’ve been doing on this blog for more than three years now!

Of course, I was also thrilled to see that a lot of my good friends were mentioned, too. Housewerks had a great picture across from my quote and “is a mecca for industrial artifacts, furnishings and decorative items”. McLain-Wiesand “brims with hand-crafted metal and wood furniture, mirrors and lamps”. Antiques Exchange “mixes old and new, vintage items porcelain and prints…”. Gore Dean is “the go-to destination for tastemakers in search of high-quality antiques, home goods and tableware”. I stopped by to give David Wiesand (above with his killer pup, Pinky) the good news that McLain Wiesand is one of the shops mentioned, and found that they’re having a clearance sale! There are lots of incredible things in the shop that I fell in love with. I am on a buying moratorium until I figure out when I am moving, so I just took pictures.

I would love to use some of the fabrics at DeBois Textiles to recover this sofa! It’s only about $400 and is very comfortable.

I love the portrait of this woman. She’s so classic and serene. Instant ancestors!The other classic figure in the image above is Cleopatra.

David always has an excellent selection of sconces.

I’d be pretty happy to stare at this view all day, wouldn’t you?

The funniest thing I saw was actually on the drive home… this is what pulled up to me at a red light! If Connor did this, I wouldn’t be able to see!

News & Notes

The house guest leaves early Wednesday, so we had a rollicking dinner with some old friends tonight. Luckily, he’s much easier than my last long-term houseguest, who was hellish… Oh, the stories we could tell about her!  David will be heading back to Wales with presents for “my” three boys over there, whom I miss greatly.Thanks to everyone for their extremely kind comments about my upcoming quotes in Elle Decor. I am hugely flattered that they chose to include me. It should be on the news-stands in early February.

I am getting ready for the big Baltimore Architecture Foundation’s Groundhog Day party this weekend and am putting together the auction catalogue. I’ve gotten some friends to donate items for the auction including a pair of bookends from McLain-Wiesand, tickets to the House Beautiful lecture series at Evergreen this spring which will feature houses with theatres in them and 20 yards of fabric from DeBois Textiles, either all of one pattern if applicable, or a mix of patterns.There are still tickets to this fun party, here. I will be taking an empty memory card and a spare battery so I can take loads of pictures to show you the amazing and very private club where this party is being held. Lots going on this week!

Rock the Vote for Eddie!

I was delighted to have the chance to meet Eddie Ross and his partner, Jaithan Kochar last fall at My Notting Hill’s delightful cocktail party, and then to spend much of the next day with them at the Big DC Flea. I was even more excited when Eddie bought some of my French Ivory-handled cutlery from my Etsy Shop (there’s more left!).Eddie has just finished decorating a window for Bloomingdale’s Big Window Challenge in NYC. The other two windows have been decorated by Apartment Therapy and Bloomingdales. Eddie’s doing his window in conjunction with Elle Decor, my new best friend!You can go here to see the top three windows and vote for your favourite {that would be Eddie’s} window.

Commenting by Anons.

I have been inundated with stupid anonymous spam comments over the past few days, including about 50+ today. I already moderate comments on posts more than two weeks old, but this is getting ridiculous. It’s such a waste of my time to have to reject these spammers, and so for a little while, I am going to turn on word verification and see if that will stop it. So sorry about this.

Elle’s Belles

One of the outcomes I’d like from writing Pigtown*Design is to inform people about Baltimore and all that it has to offer. I worry that perceptions of Baltimore are derived from either John Water’s movies, especially some of the early ones, and the HBO series, The Wire. Don’t get me wrong, there are parts of Baltimore that do reflect those two realities, but neither one of them is my reality.In each issue, Elle Decor Goes To… an American city. In the March 2010 issue they visit Baltimore. I was honoured to be included as one of the people they interviewed about the city, and when the March issue hits the stands in a few weeks, you’ll be able to see what Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, an architecture and design writer, Deborah Buck, the owner of Buck House, a Manhattan art and antiques gallery, and I say about about the city we’ve all called home.

Thank you to Jill Gerston, the article’s author, for interviewing me and including me in the article!

A Kid in a Candy Shop

Okay, so I am not a kid anymore, and it’s not a candy shop, but being able to spend a few hours in the back of DeBois Textiles and pick through the fabrics is nearly as good… and plenty!

Because DeBois is more about the actual textiles, and not the colours, patterns or designers, I asked if I could look through the stacks and pick things that I knew would interest buyers like me. I would go through and pull the fabrics by the major designers and the up-market fabric mills. They were kind enough to let me do this to my heart’s content and even gave me my own bin to fill!

It seems that the owner, Bob, has just recently become acquainted with the term “Fabric/Textile Whore” and is now also discovering who we are, as I’ve heard stories of people visiting nearly every day (not moi!) since they discovered the store (Tracy!). Even though we don’t have anything specific to do with the fabrics, we can’t resist buying them or looking through them.

Here’s the daily dose of candy!

A Thibault linen print called Bayou, with a detail of a little frog.

Three colourways

Sultan’s Serenade

Gladiateur – A Winterthur Museum documentary fabric

Three blues. I know that the one in the center is a Carleton V. print.

Three blues. Three Ralph Lauren prints

Victoria Hagen – Lucky Match.

Playing with colour mixing

And more…

I guess that being addicted to fabrics is a lot better than being addicted to drugs, and I even get a workout hoisting all the fabrics around! 

The Story of the Snowman

A lot of people have commented on the great snowman, so I thought I’d tell you the story.

Baltimore is also known at Small-timore. Everyone knows everyone else or has some funny connection. I am a 12th generation Baltimorean, with three siblings and 28 first cousins, so the tentacles are all over the place. My mother lives in a compound with a lot of people she’s known for years and I have lunch with her on Sundays. Several months ago, someone stopped me and said that they read the blog (Thanks!) and then told my mother’s neighbour who was tutoring the woman’s children. Whew! Did you get that?I was at lunch at my mother’s with my cousins from Atlanta on New Year’s Eve. We had gotten about four inches of light powdery snow that morning, and when I arrived, there was the most amazing snowman in front of the building. When I went to look at it, I saw the charming details, including arms, eyes made from faded flowers, a chain of ivy around its neck and some holly in its hand! What I really liked was that you could still see the handprints on the snowman and could tell how they’d patted the snow into place. Last week, I received an e-mail from another of my mother’s neighbours telling me about the snowman. The neighbour who tutors had been shown the blog by her tutee, informed the neighbour who’d made the snowman and he’d e-mailed me… with the information that his wife and my mother were schoolmates 60+ years ago!His Estonian daughter-in-law had made the snowman with her daughter. The snowman was dressed with the greens of nature rather than lumps of coal.

Thanks for making such a cheery snowman!