So yet again life has been a bit crazy here.  First, it feels like it has been snowing nonstop since the beginning of January.  In all this snow we managed to get our house on the market and under contract and we managed to find a house to buy and get that under contract. So yes, big changes afoot. We finished up all the little projects and it is so nice to live in a house that is DONE. Now, I get to enjoy it for a few more weeks before we have to start packing.
The new house is going to be another big project and believe it or not there were snowshoes involved in the home inspection. My brilliant husband brought two pairs and he and our broker easily manoeuvred through the 3 feet of snow, while I got stuck in snow up to my thigh and had to be carried back to the house. I haven't even started to think about where to start with the new house, I think I am in denial about all the work ahead.
I have instead turned my thoughts and attention to warmer weather and my cape house projects! So I am busily sewing away, making quilts for the kids bedrooms and thinking about which rooms will get my attention this year (the rule is 2 per summer).
I have also been busy working on my project up in Maine and it is so exciting starting to see it coming together. 
I thought I would share with you some finished pictures of the house:

I find that I move in color phases, my last home was yellow and red, when we moved in to this house, four years ago, I was in a grey and blue phase, lately I have been thinking pink.  I guess this all started as I was looking for a bold fun fabric to finish the last piece in my living room, which is grey-blue, navy-blue, and turquoise.  I decided that I needed a statement fabric for the wing chair in the back corner and I looked long and hard for the right blue fabric.  I never found it, but I did find bubble-gum pink velvet! 
The chair was delivered last week and it is so perfect, just what I needed, a bright, bold, pop of color. Now I am obsessively looking pink accessories of all types, and they are not easy to find, to tie the chair into the rest of the room, and I need a pretty soft grey or blue pillow to tie my pink chair back to the room.

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It is the last day of 2010 and seems like a natural time to reflect on all the hard work, challenges and blessings of the past year. So many wonderful things have happened in the past year, a friend urged me to start my own business and I am loving the sense of accomplishment that I have from working again. Our house is so close to being finished. We have all met wonderful new friends, and enjoyed amazing times with family and friends, old and new. My children are happy and healthy and love their schools, and they are another year older which is an adventure in itself! Life has been busy, and unfortunately I have not always stopped to appreciate all the wonderful things that have happened, but I am going to try and be better at that!
What will 2011 bring? We are planning on putting the house on the market in the next few weeks and while we are hoping for a speedy sale we are prepared for it not to sell. We will then just enjoy our finished house for a little longer. We are hoping to move closer to our children's schools and all ours and their friends. I am hoping that the new house will have a nice big space for me to carve out an office/studio, so that I can continue to build my business. Part of me also hopes that the house itself will be a nice big project that we can work to make our own and can grow into over the next 10-15 years. I hope that I can continue to spend amazing a special time with my children, who are getting big way too fast, and enjoy all the wonderful time we spend together as a family. I also resolve to be better about sharing all the wonderful projects I get to works on, the beautiful things I see in the world, and the interesting things that inspire me.
I hope 2011 brings interesting and wonderful people into all your lives, beautiful things for you to see, and lovely spaces for you to enjoy!

So last spring (maybe earlier) I fell in love with these shelves that were making the blog circuit. I decided that I had to build them.  I measures, designed, and even went out and bought the wood and the pipe.  Then like so many other good intentions, they got lost in a pile of to-do's behind a long list of must-do's.  The beautiful wood sat under the living room sofa all summer and the pipes sat in the garage, waiting just waiting!  Then came fall and I decided that alas there wasn't time and maybe it wasn't a resale friendly decision to , so the wood and pipe all went back to Home Depot.  
In September I was at Brimfield with friends/clients and kept seeing all this really cool industrial shelving made out of reclaimed material! By this time I was in dire need of accessible storage as I had started my business and reclaimed my office, so I thought hey maybe I should just buy something.  I found some at Restoration Hardware that I loved, but were too tall, and some at Wisteria that were way too wide for my space.  Then my hero came to the rescue...

He found these amazing 2.5" thick boards on craigslist, bought chunky black pipe at Home Depot, and scoured e-bay for the casters that I specified! Then he spent 3 days cutting, sanding, staining, poly-ing, and assembling my shelving.  He even went so far as to spray-paint the screws black to match the pipe flanges. Now I have the perfect size, height, depth shelves that hold anything and everything that I can throw at them, and the best part is that when we move they can come with us!
Yes, I did say move. More on that later! 

Busy, busy, busy... that is the one word that can describe my fall. Now the snow is falling, Christmas is over, classes are finished, we don't have to be anywhere or do anything and I am sitting at my, finally, clean desk watching the snow fall.  
On the 13th I finished up my Color Theory class, and I am finished with classes until the end of January when I start Intro Interior Design Studio.  If you have never taken a color theory class, I highly recommend taking one. I finally learned what saturated really means and I learned to see color in a whole new way.  It has also emboldened me to take more risks with color in my own home and my bubble gum (yes, bubble gum) velvet arrived for my wingback on the 23rd!  I cannot wait to get that beautiful bright pink fabric on my wingback for the back corner of my otherwise blue living room.
To show y'all how much fun it is to play with color, I wanted to share some of the color projects that I worked on in color theory.
For our mid-term project we had to pick a room from a black and white set of photographs that our teacher gave us an we had to create two color schemes based around one key color.  My key color was the primary cyan (that's blue) and I did an analogous scheme and a tetrad scheme.

For our final project we were all given a description of the same client and black and white pictures of five rooms in that clients home.  We were asked to choose a key color, and design a color scheme for three of the rooms.  The final project needed to look cohesive, reflect the clients likes and desires, and we had to have samples of the materials we were proposing to use as well as colored renderings of each of the three rooms. 
I choose to use green as my key color as I wanted to bring the outdoors inside and I choose the living room, music room, and bedroom.  

I know, I know I have been a very bad blogger this past week.  I was away for a few days, then had my good friend Jaime down for a few days, and have been busy with kids and work.  It's all really good stuff but has been keeping me on my toes!
So I wanted to share the photos from our club clambake, we have it every other summer and even though it was less than 2 weeks ago I am already planning what we will pt in our pillow case for the next one.  The clam bake is a great community activity, held on the beach of one of our members. It takes about a week to execute and a few weeks or months to plan!  There is a mountain of rocks delivered: