Seattle Times: Secret Hideaways and Craft Rooms

Did you see my office featured in the weekend section of The Seattle Times article "Personal Spaces: From secret hideaways to craft rooms to parent retreats and kid studios - creating a personalized space" by Erica Browne Grivas? You can read the article as a PDF here.

As an artist I love to create, but I also love to talk about color, inspiration and delight. I've been writing and speaking about Finding Delight for years and the truth is it boils down to ideas like the Beauty of Everyday Life; The Power of Cute; Getting your Visual Vitamins. It was fun to be explain how my creative space came to be and how I make it work for me. 

I hope you enjoy looking around my blog and getting to know me. If you are on a computer, you can see the sidebar, which is loaded with links to articles about my Christmas traditions, Cookie Baking, or how I started designing Cigar Box Purses.

You can see the 3 books I've written (Moments of Delight, Paris:  Delight in the City of Light and Finding Delight) and listen to a podcast interview. Thank you for coming! 

My Instagram is @FindDelight

#seattletimes #seattlerefined #Seattleartist #momentsofdelight #cigarboxpurses #homeoffice #zoomworthy #creativespace #lectureseries #delightclasses 

Creative Home Office: Driven by Color

I call myself an Architect of Delight. I look for beauty in everyday life and am thrilled by the intersection of things that are beautiful and interesting. When we were moving to Seattle, I kept saying that I wanted the office we set up to be overwhelming. I wanted to be able to see what I have and to look at what I love. I needed my huge stash of fabrics, ribbons, beads, threads, buttons, tapes, paint etc. to be clean and organized in a dustfree environment, but I also wanted to be able to arrange an area into a little color story if the mood struck. 

I thought that I would make a creative hive - and that it would be a mess. In truth, it looks great because I found the right wall unit that allowed me to contain and display.

I was hoping I could find something at IKEA and the BESTA cabinet with glass doors turned out to be perfect. They are like a giant Lego wall unit with spring hinge doors. The sections with glass doors also have glass shelves to enhance viewing. 

(Note: We paid to have a professional IKEA installer put this Besta unit together because it came during a hectic week for us. It took him more than 6 hours and he is proficient with IKEA instructions. If you buy this marvelous unit, you may want to budget that kind of professional help into your office project too.)

My home office is working well for me. I can be creative and handle my business all out of one room, depending on which half I'm focusing on. When I'm really making, everything explodes everywhere and consumes much of the first floor. For this post, though, it was important to me to show everything in order so that you could see these fabulous cabinets and get a sense of how they might work for you.

One of my favorite elements inside the cabinets is my bead and bobble storage in empty Bonne Maman jam jars. My best friend in Michigan gave me a steady supply there for a while and it set me up for a remarkable system. Isn't it pretty?

On the other side of the room is where I can write, print, sew and think. This is where my next book is percolating. I'd really like to write a modern coffee table book about Finding Delight in the Pacific Northwest. Someone asked me what my favorite word was recently and I immediately thought: potential. Stay tuned.

P.S. Do you like my watercolor palette? Would you believe it is a panel of fabric by Hoffman Fabrics? I loved it so much I had mounted on foam core as art. 

#homeoffice #creativespace #ikea #craftspace #beautyofeverydaylife #wherewomencreate