A Poem

Yes, I've fallen in love with polyvore. I love scrapbooking and this is like the ultimate online scrapbook. I hope you like the poem, I thought it captures the spirit of the Enchanted Life quite nicely.

Inspiration Boards

Inspiration Boards are simply collection of graphics that have a related theme. They are great when planning a project. You can grab images of things that inspire that project or objects you might like to use in such project. Inspiration Boards are great for planning, whether its for a party, a wedding, a room, or even a house.

There are lots of ways to do an inspiration board. They easiest is probably to copy and paste pictures from the web (or scan or your own photos) into a program like Microsoft Word or Powerpoint. If you have graphics program, like Adobe Photoshop, you could use it as well.

Or, you could try Polyvore. This site has a little applet you can install that lets you clip images to it. You can then use those to create an inspiration board or you can draw from the thousands of pictures that have been clipped by others. It's easy and fun. The interface is pretty simple and lets you search pictures by keyword, category, or even color. My only complaint about it is that it doesn't seem to handle photographs very well. Still its lots of fun. Here are some boards I did:

Ideas for a forest themed living room.

Ideas for renaissance Midsummer's Night Dream Wedding

If you are interested in trying out Polyvore, I've even started a group there for those of us into the Enchanted Life.

The Henry Ford: Furniture and English Cottage Style

For those of you who don't know about it, The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn, MI is an awesome place to go and experience history. Part of the Enchanted Life is looking toward the past for inspiration. Not only is it a place to learn about history, both the museum and the village provide opportunities to be inspired for your own house.

The museum has a huge collection of cars, trains, and planes. But it also has collections of jewelry, pewter ware, old stoves and my favorite, the furniture collection:

Greenfield Village is also an amazing experience, with a variety of living history exhibits, as well as several hands on crafts for the kids (and grown ups too). However, for inspiration, one doesn't have to look any farther than the collection of historic house that have been decorated as accurately as possible. A walk around the Porches and Parlors District is a cornucopia of examples of period style from the 1600's to 1930's. My favorite is Cotswold Cottage, an authentic English cottage. Of course, on my last visit, I took tons of pictures.

And if you like tea, the cottage is also a "tea house" and the tea is served in nice fat teapots covered floral tea cozies.

My other favorite spot at the village is the Herb Garden. It very much has the feel of a "secret" garden:

Playing Dress Up

It figures. I say I'm going on hiatus and then the next day I get brilliant idea for a post. I thought I'd write about playing dress up as it has been a favorite hobby of mine for as long as I can remember. When I was little, my mother created dress-up trunks for my sister, my brother , and myself. These were old, large trunks filled with old Halloween costumes, old prom dresses and garage sale finds. So when playing pretend or putting on plays, my siblings and I always did it in costume.

So it follows, when I had a daughter of my own it seemed only natural for her to have her own dress up trunk. Hers if filled with many more store bought costumes than mine was. My mom caught a sale at the Disney store, so she has every princess costume there is, complete with some very nice wigs. I also discovered that you can get Halloween costumes dirt cheap if you buy them a few days before or a few days after Halloween. Originally, I used a small trunk I bought on sale at Hobby Lobby, but it got a bit beat up. On a recent trip to Ikea, I came across these. They are made out of fabric and Velcro and work a lot better than the wooden trunk I had before.

So yesterday was a rainy day, which made it a perfect day for a fashion show. Here are some pics:

Of course, as from the first picture, you can see I've never really grown out of dress up either. After all, I can't think of a better escape from the mundane than putting on a fabulous outfit. And the great thing is, there are all kind of excuses now for adults to play dress up. My favorites are Renaissance Fairs and Conventions. There also event like the Labyrinth of Jareth. I've never attended but have heard it is amazing from those who have. Recently, I came across a great blog, called Your Fantasy Costume. It's definitely one to watch if you like fantasy costumes.

However, sometimes its fun to do to a mini-dress up with your everyday clothes. I've been known to wear this top and vest with jeans. If your looking for "fantasy" style clothes that you can blend with everyday where, try The Pyramid Collection, Hot Topic, or if you're little on the curvier side, there's my favorite store Torrid.

A Short Hiatus

I've been spending a lot of time trying to get things going here and at Dusk of Innocence. Despite my best efforts, I'm not getting a lot of traffic. I'm not really sure what to do. My purpose with the Enchanted Cottage was to share my thoughts and ideas and connect with others who had similiar leanings.

And its not like I haven't been trying. I hate spamming, but I've basically spammed every message board I belong to. The problem is that I'm so busy trying to promote DoI and the Enchanted Cottage I haven't been able to actually work on them. So, I'm taking a two week hiatus from the blogs. Hopefully, this will give me time to clear my head and work on actual content for them (say like starting the Fairy House). And if there is actually someone reading this and you have thoughts about how to get people to check out DoI or the Enchanted Cottage, please let me know.

Letters to the Fairies, a variation

If you've read the Fairy mailbox post, but find yourself lacking a place to put such a thing, don't despair. My daughter has come up with an interesting way to write to the fairies and all it requires is a sidewalk and some sidewalk chalk.

Sidewalk chalk is fun, even when you aren't writing to the fairies. For a little extra decoration at your next door party, use the chalk to draw pretty swirls, flowers, or vines on a sidewalk or patio.