Wednesday, 19 August 2009

Monday, 17 August 2009

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Dear Shelter Mags, So Sorry I Dissed You

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Over the years of my long career in design I must have read of thousands of shelter magazines. In the beginning I treasured every copy, reading them thoroughly from cover to cover and analyzing every picture. I even saved some my favorites and referred to them over and over again.

As my career progressed and became busier and busier I began to neglect and disrespect my mags. I would flip through them quickly scanning for items of interest or inspiring rooms. If I found something that struck my eye I would rip out the page in question and throw it in a messy pile to be sorted at a later date.



The remainder of the magazines corpse was tossed unceremoniously into the garbage can. I will admit that I put very little thought into the time and effort of the many individuals who worked tirelessly to produce the issue for my reading pleasure. I took them and the magazine for granted. I believed there would always be another volume showing up in my mailbox to entertain me, plus, I did not want to clutter up my meticulously styled bookshelves with magazines! How Tacky...


I developed a system that let me store the pages I tore out in a quickly referenced series of notebooks labeled and organized to hold images of a certain subject such as kitchens, or bathroom fixtures. I would tear pages out and my assistant would seal them in plastic page holders and file them away in their appropriate binder.



This system served me well for years but now I am living to regret my lack of respect for the many magazines that have ceased to exist over the past two years. I feel that I should have realized the importance of each issue instead of dissecting it and tossing it away with little or no regard to its content. Should I have saved them all, intact, for posterity? Are we seeing the permanent demise of the once thriving shelter mag industry? If so, should we treasure our remaining magazines before they also go the way of the dinosaur?



Personally, even though I have confessed to misusing and abusing my shelter mags, I always had a deep and abiding love for them. I always felt a rush of anticipation every time one would arrive in the mail and I neglected my important duties of the day to read them immediately upon arrival. I did store my chosen pages reverently behind plastic in binders for eternity. Now when my copy of Glamour magazine shows up in place of whatever subscription to a fabulous shelter mag that was canceled I want to gag.




I find myself jealous of other bloggers and designers who gave these magazines the respect they deserved and now have vast reference libraries of past issues to refer to. They show them off with such pride and dare I say, superiority at their having the foresight not to trash them as I did ( this may just be my imagination but I feel like they know I threw mine away, paranoia? I think not) I feel an immense sadness that I did not erect a huge monumental bookcase to store all of my mags in. It would have had to be a big one to hold them all.




Perhaps I should have wrapped them all in custom covers to make a style statement.




Or should I have gone reverent and stored them like this? They probably would have preferred this environment over the trash can.




I wish I could have foreseen the future and kept them all. This bookshelf would have held a few.


Thankfully it's never too late to start so from now until the last shelter mag left on Earth showcases a product or room that I can't live without I will refrain from tearing them to pieces and give them a respectable home in a bookshelf devoted to their own kind.



In closing, to all of the individuals who worked so hard to produce the issues that I tore apart with my bare hands; I am very sorry and I promise not to do it again.

How do you store your old magazines?

Do you plan on saving magazines now?

Let's Discuss.

Tuesday, 11 August 2009

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Vicente Wolf in Las Vegas

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International design star Vicente Wolf will be honored as a Design Icon by the Las Vegas World Market at the September market. Wolf, a longtime favorite of design bloggers and now an enthusiastic blogger himself will give a presentation on his work followed by a question and answer session and book signing.



The event will take place on the 16th floor of Building B on September 16th at 4:00 p.m.




You know I will be there!

Saturday, 8 August 2009

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Big News in My Little World

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I came home the other night and there was a UPS box at the front door. Not an uncommon occurrence at my house as my husband is addicted to buying tennis shoes and other vital goods he can't live without on Ebay. But as I picked it up I knew it felt too heavy to be shoes and one glance at the shipping label and I knew it was my new book, here a whole month early!!!



It takes about two years from start to finish to complete one of these books and get it onto bookstore shelves. By the time you finally receive your first advance copies you've inevitably moved on to the next project.



For me the whole process loses some of it's intrigue by the time I finish the last illustrations. That's the fun part! Editing and proofing layouts doesn't do much for me ( sorry Madge!). However, when you see the completed book you can see how important all of those small decisions and adjustments are in creating a beautiful book.



This book is just about he same size as my first one but for me it was much more fulfilling to write and illustrate because the subject of bedding has really been neglected by the industry. It was a chance to really show my own unique designs and creativity as well as standard industry designs.


It is hard to say which are my favorite to draw but I do love all of the draped beds and canopy designs. I had always wanted a canopy bed as a young girl but I never got one. As one of seven siblings I spent my early years as the cohabitant of numerous sets of supremely ugly bunk beds. I did try to always get the bottom bunk so I could tuck sheets into the top mattress to form a tent of sorts for my lower bedchambers.




I'm crazy for pillows and I drew well over 500 individual designs for the book. I was truly amazed at how many combinations I came up with. For every design that makes it into the book there are probably just as many that don't.

My self imposed rules for a designs inclusion in the books are:
The design must exist in real life, be easily constructed as shown using standard workroom techniques, and it's design must be driven by pattern or construction and not by fabric choice.



There are pages and pages of individual element images and pages containing full bedding ensembles. These pages include designs that are not shown in the individual drawing pages.



There are lots of interesting applications of hardware for bedding.



Hundreds of pillow case and pillow sham designs.



And all of my illustrations ( over 1200 designs) are included on this CD-ROM attached to the back cover of the book. They are done in black and white line format so you can use them free of the distraction of color.

(Check out my new fabric pattern, Birds & Branches, on the inside covers! So Exciting!!!! Yes, those are my new fabrics underneath the books - more about that later....)


Minutes Matter will begin producing bedding modules of all of the illustrations in this book as soon as they complete the Jackie Von Tobel Window Treatment modules. I'll keep you posted as to the release date of the first module.

The Design Directory of Bedding is due for release on October 2 or you can pre-order via Gibbs-Smith or Amazon.com. I put everything I had into this one and I hope you enjoy it at much as The Design Directory of Window Treatments.

As soon as I get my promotional copies in a couple of weeks I will hold a raffle for a signed copy.

Thursday, 30 July 2009