Creating an in-home gallery (Part 2)

“I believe that if you love everything you are consuming/purchasing/ collecting/surrounding yourself with, it will all go together. I suppose that’s the idea behind eclectic style, that if you love it, it matches.” ~ Megan Hunt, It matches if you love it Since 2008 my home has undergone a few small improvements, but my library […]

Overcast Waterfall Glen

Last week I defied the weather forecasts and drove up to Lemont determined to revisit Waterfall Glen. Fortunately the rain subsided on the way there and the predicted Thunderstorms passed us by. (Warning: slugs and millipedes in this post-if you don’t like them, don’t scroll down) The droplets were gorgeous. Nature always has a way […]

NEW’s first Birthday

“In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.” ~ Albert Schweitzer Last year, an inner fire went out on a group I was a part of. […]

Close encounters with an Atlas Moth

Just before Memorial Day weekend the Chicago Botanic Garden announced the arrival of an Atlas Moth in their Butterflies & Blooms exhibit. I eagerly drove up that Saturday, but many in Chicagoland had the same idea, and I didn’t feel like wasting fuel in a long line of cars. Instead, I returned last week and […]

Celebrating Ruth McBride at NEW

Time flies when you’re having fun, and so it has been with NEW. We founded the Network of Entrepreneurial Women to incorporate some fun in networking while being truly supportive of our members, and add some geographic scope to our business endeavors. More than a year later, we have 159 Meetup members and 61 ‘likes’ […]

Spiffying up my shelf display

It’s been a year and three months since I started showing at Aurora Rose Boutique, and since then my shelf has undergone a few transformations. Owners Kim and Amber take such pride in their store and I love seeing the rearrangements they make to best display the handmade products created by more than 40 vendors. […]

Life is Blossoming

So yeah, I’m the eccentric woman crouching in front of other people’s gardens these days. Only my photo time stamp tells me I do this for 40 minutes or so. Ooops. To me it feels like I only spend ten minutes snapping pretty petals. Oh well, call me crazy, but seeing these blooms fills my […]

Escaping to Glen Ellyn

I’ve had some introspective weeks where it felt like I was working on lots of things in the background and mulling over much more in my head. So it was nice to get out of my head and venture to Escape Salon & Spa for a spell. Located in one of NEW’s favorite suburbs, Glen […]

Creating an in-home gallery (Part 1)

When I moved in 2008 I had one big wall that I wanted to turn into a gallery, but didn’t have much art to fill it up with. The vintage walls are also quite “rubbery” which makes putting nails in the walls a tricky process. So the project lingered until 2012, when I started collecting […]

Pinning my Butterfly Specimens

In late 2012 I took a butterfly pinning class at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum. Thanks to my drawing workshops I learned to de-sensitize to the morbidity of handling dead butterflies and appreciate the preservation of these lovely creatures. With the ambition to raise my own I decided it would be good to know how […]

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