late to the party, as usual

pinterest. i used to despise it. in fact, when i first started using it, nearly a year ago i thought it was completely pointless. mostly because i'm a bit old school with my mood boards - i like them to be tangible objects. i love nothing more than a giant piece of foam core and a heap of magazine swipes. hell, i'll even tape things up to a blank wall.

when i was a teenager, my parents let me literally wallpaper the walls of my room. in 1994 (gasp!) it was all gavin rossdale. wall-to-wall gavin: stuff i had printed out off the internet (!!! do you know how LONG that took in 1994 with a dial-up AOL connection?! oh, to be that dedicated again), magazines i had cut up - all meticulously gridded on the wall. nothing meant more to me than a well-organized wall of gavin. i wish i still had pictures of it - it was truly epic (see the very last of it, on this blog, right here) it went quite nicely with the sunflower duvet set + matching drapes. i painted the ceiling of my room half light blue, and half midnight blue. on the midnight blue side i decorated with glow-in-the-dark stars (above my bed, duh) and on the light blue sky i sponged fluffy white clouds. needless to say, my sanctuaries reflect my inner mind, and i'm big into nesting.

in design school, i had decorated my workspace with everything i could find: bits of string, scraps of paper, fabric swatches, until the head of our program demanded that we put all of it into books, so as to not be distracted. that worked for awhile, and i still have those precious books in my burgeoning library, but i missed staring at the wall of things. now we talk about the "internet of things" but i miss the "walls of things." when i moved to LA, i continued my love of putting things up on walls by joining no less than three record label street teams. i loved going into coffee shops and vintage stores, chatting up the fellow comrades-in-retail-arms, and sticking up posters of my favorite bands.

my handiwork, in LA. yes that's a poster for hitch in the background.

now that i live in a studio, it's a lot harder to create mood boards, but it hasn't stopped me. and every few months, if you come by my apartment there will be pages and pages of drawings taped wherever they might fit. now, i have one piece of foam core that informed the first embroidery projects - i often wish instead of having to write and artist statement, i could have a visual statement. the board accurately reflects and references back to the work so much that i think it communicates far better where the work is coming from than i could write. because of this lack of space, and lack of funds to purchase more foam core, i've turned to my old nemesis: pinterest.

brought up in a recent skype with my bff in NYC, i expressed my disdain for pinterest. she countered that she can't see my boards if they exist only in my apartment. so, i downloaded the app, and promptly fell down the pin-hole. pinned about 225 things in two days. now i love it. now it makes sense. i still kind of hate it because it sucks my time, and it lacks the tangibility of a proper board, but it'll do for those things that exist only on the internet, or i don't want to bother printing. so i'm sold on pinterest. for now.

pin my boards (? i don't know the pin-lingo) here: black hearts