Things are in the works...

Summer approaches. My plate is full of projects due to some big changes in my life. However, they are also the perfect opportunity to start this blog up again. Look for more soon...hopefully...

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:

My Other Summer Project

Hi, my name is Danielle and I'm amateur writer, among other things. I work as a substitute teacher during most of the year, but that means I have my summers off. I always try to find something to occupy my time during the summer, a project if you will. Well, this blog is going to be my summer project.

I live in an enchanting little lakeside cottage. It's enchanted, in part by its location, but also by all the work I put in to decorating it and all the fun projects I try to come up with for my daughter and myself. I hoping to post these here as the summer goes on. I like to introduce the rest of the world to an enchanted lifestyle, full of fairies, magic, nature, and all sorts of other wonderful things!

Like I said, I'm an amateur writer and I do have another writing project going on. Its a novel called Dusk of Innocence and can be found here at Elfwood. It also has an associated blog here at LiveJournal, though if I like blogger enough I may move it here.