Dancing With History

Yesterday I was honored to guest host on the Instagram "party" #magpiemonday.

My duty as a guest host was to read and comment on every tag and then select a favorite - this stack of colorful tea towels shared by @patch_russell was my choice.

What I loved most about reading all the entries was the stories shared about the collections.

Ann of @collectingmama shared her grandmother's china.

Sandra of @vintageticking shared her thermometer collection which was started by her mother 3 years ago.

Cheri of @queenastuff started a teapot collection for her mother 25 years ago and she shared a portion of it.

As I scrolled through the Magpie Monday collections, the lyrics to the song, You Mean So Much To Me, came to mind and I looked around the house for pieces that have meaning to me.

There are lots of things on display in this cabinet, but there is only one collection that means a lot to me.

One of my childhood chores was dusting and these little pieces of Torquay Pottery were among the things I hated dusting.

Today, they remind me of my mother and as you can see one of the little pieces is broken yet I keep it on display out of love.

There are lots of things I love in this photo, but that yellow platter (another chipped piece) is what "means so much to me" - it sat in our family kitchen when I was growing up.

I vividly remember the day 42 years ago when I bought these little enamel bowls in an open market in Kingston, Jamaica - we didn't get to bring much home from our time as Peace Corps volunteers, but the bowls fit easily into our bags.

The red bowl sits on Steve's kitchen scale and is used daily.

This canvas bag goes with us on long walks with Lulu and the pink bowl is always inside the bag and ready when Lulu needs water.

I love the line, "dancing with history".

Our house is filled with pieces of history like the painting Steve did of a family vacation in Kauai,

furniture passed down from generation to generation and

and new treasures like the tablecloth and napkins from my dear blogging friend Rita, of Panoply.

"It seems to be like heaven to me, with you at the end of the day" might be referring to a person in the song, but for me it alludes to all the treasures that create our little piece of heaven.

In Living Color

I shared this photo on Instagram the other day and it got me thinking about my increasing use of white.

The dining room is looking more white than colorful.

as are the entry

and the guest room.

I post one pic on Instagram each day and when I scrolled back through my gallery I expected to see lots of white.

But contrary to my expectations, I see that my life is still full of color.

Red,

green

and blue still abound.

Despite the fact that I truly am using more white

in my vignettes,

there is always color tucked in.

I love white, but in the end, I'm a color girl.

change . . . always change

A couple of years ago we bought 2 chaises at IKEA

with plain old black cushions.

The first thing I did was make covers for the chaises out of a pretty striped fabric that I had on hand.

I loved the colorful stripes, but they faded quickly.

I replaced the striped covers with new covers made from an old duvet.

I really love these covers, but I thought it might be nice to have a fresh look for summer.

I found my old childhood chenille bedspread in the attic and cut it in half to make new slip-on covers for the chaises.

All the pillows were borrowed from a garden bench and

the nice thing about the white covers is that I can use just almost any of the plethora of pillow covers I have cluttering the attic.

These pillows covers will be what I use next on chaises if I can just find the second red floral pillow in the attic.

A sad change in the garden is the clearing of the jungle.

The Matilija poppy plant that was nearly as tall as the windows had to be trimmed back, but things are slowly growing back.

Last week I showed you how I used my father's old pitchfork in the garden.

This morning I dug out more of my father's old tools, stuck them in the flower bed and decorated them with last year's beach toys.

I know it's silly, but we look at the wall of studio when we sit by the fire pit at night

and the colorful toys combined with the vintage tools make me smile.

You might be surprised to hear that I like this little change in the garden - I asked Steve for a tall, skinny painting for the living room.

He brought his easel and paints into the yard to do a bit of plein air painting of the view from his favorite bench.

This change is only temporary for the garden, but it will trigger some changes in the living room soon.

The one constant in our house is CHANGE!
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Happy 4th of July

It's a beautiful day to celebrate our nation's birthday!

Simple Pleasures

It's been a crazy week for us with out of town guests, a late Father's Day celebration, 8.5 hours of driving for me on Wednesday . . .

But even on busy days, I take time to look around and enjoy life's simple pleasures.

I am loving the canna lilies

that are slowly blooming all over the garden.

Steve and I escaped the heat and hit the water in our kayaks.

That long drive on Wednesday (4 hours each way) for a reunion planning meeting led to me spotting a gorgeous garden.

I moved a little table onto the back porch - 

it needs to be painted, but for now it's dressed up with a patriotic display.

Out shopping the other day, I came across these little pieces of wood in one of my favorite shops

and that led to me writing words on a piece of driftwood.

I gathered shells, sea glass and starfish

to create a summer centerpiece for the dining room table.

Along with shells and starfish, my beach bucket collection is on display for summer.

While tackling the jungle the other day, I propped a shovel against the house - that gave me the idea of displaying my father's old garden tools all over the garden.

My final pleasure was actually Steve's - while I was driving in LA traffic, he spotted our resident bluebird hanging out on the most recent addition to the garden.

What were your simple pleasures this week?

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