Where the Pretty Things Come From...
I make a lousy house-wife.
I have a very limited repertoire of dishes that I can cook and invest very little time in improving my culinary skills.
Also, I think I'm allergic to manual labour. Whenever I clean the house I fly into a tiny rage that elicits a stream of unladylike cursing and a tendency to snap at unfortunate bystanders.
We have no children (bar a fur-child). In fact, having a child seems like the scariest thing in the world to me and I often wonder what all the fuss is about.
Instead, I spend my days obsessively nurturing a slightly unorthodox lifestyle- one where I provide a kind of nourishment through art and design rather than homemade lasagne. I litter our home with colourful and, oftentimes, childish knick knacks and plan the aesthetics of dinner parties with infinitesimal detail.
I struggle daily with trying to eke a living from a creative existence. And in the process, I've converted our living/dining room into, what appears to be, a messy snapshot of my brain. Piles of colourful props and remnants of paper, twine, glitter and sequins are constantly scattered across our dining table. Bright pink IKEA boxes line the walls in my attempt to curb the ever-expanding chaos.
And yet, despite lacklustre domestic skills, the ostensibly frivolous nature of my interests and a creative anarchy that threatens to consume us whole, my husband still loves me (!) and seems genuinely in awe of what I do. He says I make this house a home, albeit, in my own peculiar way.
For me, collecting, composing and making pretty things is the only truly successful way I've learned how to communicate myself to the world. Where others are articulate, social creatures who use themselves as a canvas to express their art, I prefer to hide behind these things that I make. It's just who I am, and with all the faults and limitations it presents in the real world, I am slowly learning to accept and even embrace it.
I seem to be creating this home, and this blog, in an effort to communicate only the beautiful parts within me and, perhaps, with a belief that somehow this will banish the wealth of darker, messier and far less glamorous traits; to show others that although I may verbally stumble through a sentence or carry myself hesitantly, averting my gaze and swerving from the reach of friendly strangers, that there is something in this world I am capable of contributing... however tiny and frivolous it may seem.
Thanks for listening :)
P.S. I am attempting to spend a bit more time over at Instagram lately.... Please follow me if you're interested in keeping up with the visual frivolity!
