
Wow, I just had a lovely and unannounced blog sabbatical. Why? Because fall is the busiest time of the wedding season. And also......I had a VERY IMPORTANT knitting project I was committed to, and my children started school (hurrah) (I can say that because they don't read my blog), and I have been processing and posting weddings for my lovely clients left and right, and designing albums and all the other things that tend to eat up my time.
Oh, and a bit of travel thrown in as well. Enough excuses ; ) I'm back and heading in new directions.
Coming up the first week of October will be my SEVENTH BLOG ANNIVERSARY. Yes, I've been blogging for seven years, and have heard everything from 'What's a blog?' at the beginning of this journey to 'My Grandmother has a blog', recently. I started out on typepad or blogger (don't remember which) and migrated to Squarespace several years ago. I am proud of the hundreds of weddings I have shot in those years and only wish I had had the time to feature every single one of them.
I'm mentioning all of this because I am planning a slowdown on blogging. I have a huge project cooking I need to devote a lot of time to, so I plan to shorten the weddings I feature, eliminate 'Friday finds' and include more of a monthly roundup of fun stuff I've found. I started the Friday finds because my favorite part of following blogs is the exploratory aspect. I love being introduced to new artists, ideas and stuff on blogs, and the intent was to keep blogging fresh to me, as something I looked forward to sharing, rather than a chore (SEVEN YEARS, I remind you ; )
I am not stopping blogging at all, nor am I planning any slowdown on the shooting of weddings, which are as important to me as the air I breathe. I just have a BIG PROJECT cooking that I'll fill you in on at a later date. I tell you all of this so you won't think I have dropped off the planet. I plan to try to blog at least once a week, but we'll see. This is a journey, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for sharing it with me.
On to some fun stuff:

These are a few of the books I read and was inspired by this summer.
1) The Selby is in your Place. Todd Selby photographs the cool kids in their home environments. The voyeur in me loves to look at where people live, because it so often lets you in on who they really are. I love the photography: clean and purely editorial. And I've learned if I want to be cool, I need to collect human teeth, or prosthetic legs, or plastic Japanese anime figurines by the thousands. All I could wonder when I gazed at some of these habitats, is 'Who dusts all that crap?'. Which marks me as hopelessly middle aged and uncool, for sure.
2)Pork and Sons. Phaidon does is again. A book designed so beautifully I seriously thought long and hard about building my website around the idea of pink gingham. Oh, and the recipes and photos? Sublime.
3)Trains and Buttered Toast. The anglophile in me finds these essays (which were originally radio broadcasts) about Britain and its lovely heritage enchanting. Betjeman rhapsodizes about life's simple things and his love for the world he inhabits is infectious.
4) Silhoutte: The Art of the Shadow. An incredibly well researched, scholarly coffee table book about the history of silhouettes. I like to dive in for a few pages and drink in the wonderful imagery. I've been collecting silhouettes for about twenty years, so this book was like Christmas to me : )
5)Bucolic Plague. For years my husband and I have had a running joke about throwing over our busy, urban lives and becoming artisanal cheesemakers. Of course we know nothing about making cheese, or farming, or animal husbandry, but it's one of those dreams of the simple life we all have. In this book, Josh Kilmer-Purcell and his partner do just that (with about the same level of knowledge as most of us) and find, thanks to an endorsement by Martha Stewart and a huge amount of work, that they actually can grab the good life. Hilarity ensues.
6)Lastly, More Last Minute Knitted Gifts. Lovely photos, lovely projects. This one feeds my addiction to knitting, for sure. I don't have the time to knit sweaters and large projects, so books like this address my need for knitting variety with a carefully budgeted schedule.
Next up, Catherine and Nate at the Contemporary Arts Center. Yay!