June reading: history, mystery & gossip

Wow! How did it get to be almost-July already? For me, June begins like a sweet promise — long, sunny days strung out for months. Then that image is interrupted by the flash, sparkle, and bang of July. It’s hotter, and the beach seems like a really good idea, but if you don’t act fast August is here and summer is waning. It’s back-to-school time and hay fever. Yikes! I’m making myself older just sitting here on my laptop.

Forget the calendar, what I really meant to report on today are some books I’ve read over the last several weeks. My reading life has finally moved on from a seemingly endless stream of Stephanie Plum mysteries. I was just digging into London: The Novel by Edward Rutherford (a slow start but it does get better) when I was side-tracked by Tina Brown’s The Palace Papers. The hoopla surrounding the Queen’s Jubilee got me started on this. (I’m a sucker for the Queen, the rest of the royals not so much.) I’ll be honest — it begins with Camilla and Diana and ends with Kate and Megan. And the Queen is always at the center because, well, she is the Queen. Charles, Andrew, William and Harry play their respective parts, because no soap opera is complete without the men. There is definitely a soap opera quality to the book.

Brown draws from credible sources, though she rarely ever names them relying instead on her reputation as a journalist. What did I glean from this besides a lot of juicy gossip? First, power is everything in royal circles. If you have it, you need to keep it; if you have no power, you need to find some. It’s pretty simple. Second, a lot of this power is granted to secretaries, schedulers and PR teams (and, yes, everyone has one of them too). In fact it seems the royals often communicate via secretary to secretary. And if you have ever played telephone, you know how that goes. What a complicated life!

After that read I needed a bit of a palate-cleanser, so I picked up A Flicker in the Dark by Stacy Willingham. My daughter-in-law gave me this book for Christmas, along with a membership to the Book-of-the-Month Club, but then I got so focused on moving I put it aside. It was the perfect read! The story focuses on Chloe Davis, whose father was jailed 20 years earlier for a series of murders of young, teen-age girls. Now, after two decades and just as Chloe is about to marry, two more young women die in the same way. Chloe is oddly connected to these victims and forced to revisit the earlier murders to resolve the current ones and clear her own name. Solving the crime isn’t simple, and the mystery takes a number of twists and turns. I thought the unexpected ending was a stunner — when I finally got there. If you love a good mystery, this is for you.

Looking ahead, this is my to-be-read stack, above. I’m really looking forward to This Tender Land by William Kent Kruger. I read and loved his earlier novel, Ordinary Grace, more than a few years ago. It’s one of those books that just stays with you. Read it if you can. My daughter gave me The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd. It’s one of her recent favorites. We both loved The Invention of Wings, also by Kidd. Finally, I’m looking forward to All That She Carried by Tiya Miles, a true story of an enslaved woman in 1850’s South Carolina and the bag she prepared for her nine-year-old daughter before they were separated. The bag continued to be shared thru subsequent generations. This may not be a “summer read,” but I’m looking forward to it.

And that’s my summer reading plan for now. How about you? Any recommendations?

I’m so glad you stopped by & wish you a star-spangled July 4th holiday.

See you again soon.

Finding inspiration

I have always loved magazines. My first subscription was to Seventeen. Then I moved on to Glamour and Mademoiselle. It was around this time that my dad was an editor for Conde Nast. We always had magazines around; now we had more. In my early years writing ad copy, I was mentored by a former editor at House and Garden. In my last professional position I edited two trade magazines. Do you see a pattern here?

I have also always loved decor, arranging and rearranging my teenage bedroom, putting my personal stamp on my first basement apartment furnished with the land lady’s cast-offs, hauling home estate sale bargains to refinish for our first house. This is just who I am. So this weekend when I was sorting miscellaneous papers and discovered what is left of my old decorating files — essentially pages I had torn from magazines featuring furniture arrangements, color schemes, collectibles, centerpieces, window treatments, holiday decorations, you name it — all the ideas we now save on Pinterest and Instagram, I felt like I’d unearthed hidden treasure. After I took some time studying these pages, I realized they were not historic (although some are more than 20 years old!) but rather the backbone of my personal design “aesthetic.”

I sat down and took the time to savor them, page by page, the way I sit down to dig into a new magazine. I went thru them once, just to see what I had, then again more slowly. I remembered these photos and have even seen some of them on Instagram. But rather than feeling stuck in the past, I realized that good design (however we define it for ourselves) is always in style. Had I chosen that well? Or do I just know what I like? Maybe some of both.

Style seems to morph with the times. The reds, blues, greens and golds I started out with have now mellowed into white and pale grays. The plates and photos that once crowded occasional tables are cleared out, along with some of the tables. I’ve been through a wallpaper phase and then stenciling. I loved them both until they seemed dated. I’ve been editing a lot, or at least a lot for me. As I said in one of my earlier moving posts, I’m looking for leaner and cleaner these days, keeping the best and getting rid of the rest. Which takes me back to these pages…

I realized how many of these ideas I had actually implemented in my own home. Here’s an image of Dan Carithers’ own kitchen, decorated decades ago and still looking timeless when it appeared in Country Home or Traditional Home (not sure which) several years ago:

The late Dan Carithers was a master at timeless design. His rooms were layered and detailed
but never standoff-ish.

And here’s a parade of white ironstone pitchers on top of a cabinet in our new house:

As soon as I saw this niche in our new home, I knew my old green cabinet and white ironstone pitchers were meant for the space.

Here’s a good example of inspiration that somehow stayed with me, however subconsciously. I tore this image from Country Living in 2009.

A few years ago, looking for something simple on my farm table, I gathered up my own collection of brass candlesticks. Then I re-did it with glass candlesticks. You may have noticed I did the same thing on one of the library shelves in the Reset.

When I wrote about our new “library” here, I said I had been saving bookshelf images for a long time. In fact, that idea pre-dates my Instagram.

The images are both from Traditional Home, 2000 (on the left) and 1998 (on the right).

Where am I going with this? First, good design, design that really speaks to you, is always going to be good. Decorating on a whim is fun, but like those old bell bottoms in the back of your closet, it just doesn’t last. Recognize its limits. The best rooms are edited. Early on when I was dragging home the estate sale finds, they were fun but intentionally temporary. The old tea cart I bought at an estate sale and painted tangerine to be a fun table in our tiny kitchen was a temporary fix. I sold it when we moved to the next house.

And it doesn’t mean I’m not going to try a few trendy things now, like faux greens in a glass vase between the sinks in our master bath or a trio of orchids in a large bowl (staged with plenty of moss) on the kitchen island. That kind of styling is way too much fun!

But back to my file of old magazine pages. They were really my home-grown, do-it-yourself design class. I learned a lot from those pictures: balance, symmetry versus asymmetry (they both have a place in design), scale, the difference between country and primitive and traditional (and all their variations), and the importance of detail.

To think it all began with Seventeen magazine.

Thank you so much for stopping by. See you again soon.

Putting our stamp on the Reset

Our second move — from rental to new house — has posed some interesting creative opportunities. This house is much more open with more flexible living spaces, making how we want to use them the challenge. We think we’re getting a handle on it, and Steve and I have dived in, unpacking boxes and making the Reset our own. For someone who loves tweaking and arranging as much as I do, this is the perfect project.

Once we saw the “flex room” under construction, Steve and I knew it would make a great library.

Those of you who visit Ivy & Ironstone regularly know I am a book lover and find it nearly impossible to part with many of my books. Add to that a shelf or two of books that I have kept from my parents, as well as Steve’s library and you can see why we moved 28 boxes of books. (Okay, some were partial boxes, with other items included. But still, 28 boxes!)

I have been saving images of library walls and bookshelves to a Pinterest page since long before we knew we were moving, so you can imagine I had plenty of ideas on how to stow my library. And this house has a “flex” room off the foyer that Steve and I both thought would be perfect for a wall of book shelves.

Sourcing the shelves

Now that we had the space, we had to find the shelves. Months ago i started looking into buying finished book shelves. That resulted in serious sticker shock. I knew it would be pricey, but yikes! I decided to search out other options just to see. Our realtor suggested her handyman, so after we moved in I asked him to come by and look at what I had in mind. Alas, I had a “furniture look” in mind and that was not at all what he was envisioning. So, I’m saving his talents for other tasks, but I still needed the shelves and a place for all those books.

Along the way, Steve and I had both been attracted to some Ikea hacks, including more than one involving their various bookshelf components. We made a few trips to Ikea checking out the options in person, coming home to measure again (and again!), and then finally purchasing three Hemnes bookcases in the black-brown finish. They’re made of solid pine with six shelves, five of them adjustable and one fixed for added stability. This was not a huge financial investment, so we thought we’d give it a try.

Originally, we assumed we’d use four bookshelves because that fit the length of wall perfectly, but the shelves are deeper than the adjacent wall. We didn’t think we’d like the idea of them extending five or six inches into the doorway. We also thought we would choose white, but decided it might be a little “blah” against the pale walls and all the white trim. I knew I was going to use these shelves to show off some of our collectibles, and the dark background is a great foil for the ironstone and transferware I’ve used there.

The shelves went together easily, but assembly definitely took time.

We used additional hardware to anchor the frames together and then to the wall.

Once the shelves were up and anchored, I literally flew into action unpacking books, collectibles and arranging. This was so much fun!

The shelves need some finishing touches: some trim top and bottom and perhaps some lighting. But we had to stop here and move on to other projects just to get the boxes unpacked. Here’s some of the styling I did with pitchers, baskets and candlesticks.

I had not started out thinking I would put my baskets on top of the bookshelves, but I think they really work!

I used to gang all these candlesticks on my dining room table (with candles of course) and I loved that look. So, I tried it here, I just couldn’t fit in the candles!

Lessons from moving a collection

One of the things I’ve learned in the moving process is that I need to let go of some of my ironstone and transferware collections. This is in part a space consideration. I just don’t have the display space I once did. But I’m also opting for a leaner, cleaner look. When the realtors finished staging our former home for sale, I wasn’t at all thrilled about what they kept and what they removed, but I really liked the cleaner look. And to tell you the truth the house was beginning to look a little too granny-ish. So my new mantra is “keep the best, let go of the rest. “

I know I said I left five pitchers on top here, but I “borrowed” one for flowers on the kitchen island. And I just noticed the crooked print hanging above. Oops!

When I was styling the bookshelf, I used four of my favorite ironstone pitchers. Then I put another five of the best and biggest ones atop another cabinet. But I still have eight of them on a shelf behind this cabinet door, along with assorted sugar bowls, sauce tureens, etc. I used to think that I could never have enough white ironstone; now I’m not so sure.

I have always loved collections — the bigger the better — and the character they lend to a space. And frankly I love the look of the blue and white transferware, the ironstone and the shelf of brass candlesticks on the library wall. I could “rotate my stock” from time to time or I could have a sale. What would you do?

Thank you so much for stopping by. It’s taken me a while to get my head out of the boxes and back into the blog. But there’s so much more to talk about, like what I’ve been reading (did you see my Instagram post of the Book Loft in German Village), what I’ve cooked now that my kitchen is open for business, and have you seen “Downton Abbey: A New Era” ?

See you again soon!