Make Yourself at Home

Why Didn't You Think of That?

Putting It Together

Design for Living

INCIDENTAL TREASURES

Vintage decorations are such a lovely way to create a festive mood without using items that are cookie cutter bland. Vintage artificial flowers are rare to find because of their perishable nature, but when you do find them they're lovely for small decorations. We're featuring darling vintage flowers made in Japan after the war before the days of computers and micro-technology that took over Japan's economy in later years. Unlike the realistic representations of flowers found in stores today, these are deliberately fake looking, and made from charming materials like velvet and cotton fabric and paper tape. Their soft faded pastel colors dictated the color scheme for our blank slate set. They were mere pennies at the time, but now are coveted collectables, along with things like the lovely wire umbrellas that we've painted in lavender and blue. These are charming additions to any celebration and will stand the test of time, unlike the garish paper honeycomb decorations and streamers that seem to adorn most events nowadays.

HELP ME BRINI!

Can you celebrate with a shower for your second, third or fourth wedding or baby? Well, yes and no. for an intimate group of friends and relatives, it's fine to have a shower for a second wedding, but people will tire of ponying up for the bride with the drip dry wedding dress, so use your discretion.

RANDOM THOUGHTS

One of our art department interns this season was Amanda McCall. She was a whiz and a delight to work with. She was very hands on in the projects for this episode and did a great job. She was the one who created the apron with the sayings on it. Accidentally repeating the word "you" in the phrase about registering your toasters made for one of the cutest spontaneous moments in the episode. She also had a hand in creating the beautiful floral decked umbrellas for the buffet table. Thanks Amanda!

The scene when I'm sewing without looking at the machine was another irreverent moment. That was taken after we had completed the action of the scene and they asked me to just sew so they could get cutaways of my face to pull up time in the editing room. Because I wasn't actually sewing on the project I could look away from what I was working on. Our editor Michael Dimirjian used the cutaway in a totally unexpected and delightful way.