Little Pink Houses



Think of the inside of your house as your soul and the outside architecture as something like your bone structure, your gentle inheritance . . .our true home is inside each of us, and it is your love of life that transforms your house into your home.

- Alexandra Stoddard

Cant get enough of those palm trees, old Florida stucco cottages, and early morning walks in the warm sunshine, where I passed all of these little charmers. I left my I pod and music at home  and chose to tote my camera instead - just too many photo ops to miss. I didn't miss the music at all, the birds and the ocean waves in the background more than made up for it.




There's Flamingo Pink

And  Banana Yellow

And Mint Green

And Ice White

. . . .who knows what color this one is - it's completely blanketed by a solid covering of  teeming tropical life. I can only imagine how many tiny little lizards are happily scampering in and out of the vines.

The monstrous mega- mansions that are slowly replacing the look and feel of so many neighborhoods can certainly impress, but too many original works of  historic Florida architecture have been sacrificed. It was really heartwarming for me to observe the many older homes that are obviously still cherished and lovingly maintained.

Here's a peek inside a special little Florida cottage, well loved and happily home over the years to countless seekers of the warmest and sunniest  hospitality to be found anywhere.

Wherever your address , whatever the climate you are dealing with,  whatever the color of your house,  know you are in a special place, the place where you live.  I wonder if the mailman smiles when he gets to this address each day?  I sure hope so!

Isn't this the  perfect wine for a beach picnic?  I wanted to save the label, but couldn't get it off the bottle, so I had to paint it instead. Cheers!

Under The Covers,

There is a special place . . . where good works are done-

where elegance is spun from snippets and scraps . . . 

The one and only quilt I can remember from my childhood graced my bed for a very short time. It was white with flowers embroidered on the squares, and it was made by my mother's mother. One day as I was playing on my bed with scissors, (Something I did a lot it seems!), I cut into the quilt and I knew I was in trouble.  I managed to cover up the cut for a few days, but when it was discovered by my mom, the quilt went away never to be seen again. I cant even imagine how she must have felt, and I don't remember how she reacted, but all these years later my heart aches for her. 

When I saw this stack of quilt squares in a tag sale a few years ago I recognized them immediately . The very same quilt of my childhood. I purchased them of course, with great plans to recreate that lost quilt, recapture that memory and heal the scar. Ah, the power of a quilt- pieces of  simple but lovingly stitched scraps of cloth by someone long gone.

The inspiration for quilts comes from every place in our world, especially the garden. 

Quilts in the nursery are the most precious -

 stitched  lovingly to keep the babies warm and cozy

Quilts are for beds its true - but they are so much more, they are memories of little girls dresses long ago cast aside, scraps of feed bags not to be wasted, and most of all, they are the work of many hands together , hands belonging to women who sought and found a way to bring art and beauty into the bleakest, simplest and hardest circumstances of their lives.  Piecing and quilting these warm covers was often the only outlet women had for the fire of creativity that burned within their souls,  and the only way to feed their hunger for community and companionship.

My first quilt, embroidered lovingly by a girl with dreams of her first home,  and how she would make it beautiful 

with the work of her own hands.

A pile of collected quilts , each one made by different hands in different years, settles easily into a blended  family.

Art comes in many forms, and fabric art is surely the humblest and most noble of them all.  Quilting today has evolved into a world of computer programs and machine stitching, but for me, the allure and the pleasure

is inseparable from the feel of the fabric in my fingers, the motion of  the needle as it slowly pierces the layers, and all of it laying right in my lap as I sit in my favorite comfortable chair.