photo by a sweet customer!
Smashing: extraordinarily impressive or fine, wonderful, excellent or first rate, great, brilliant, fantastic, magnificent, fabulous, marvelous, terrific, awesome super, out of this world, good. shattering or breaking.
Rubbish: refuse, garbage, useless material. unwanted, litter, trash, scrap. codswallop, wish-wash, pants, nonsense, wack, hogwash, horsefeathers.
Smashing Rubbish (SR) is the name i gave my blog when i began it a few years ago. then SR was the name i gave my brick and mortar shop that i owned and curated for nearly two years. there i sold cool vintage junk, hand made goods, trinkets, whatnots, loot, treasure, you know, good junk, smashing rubbish. today my Smashing Rubbish shop happily exists, as a physical location, within a local antique mall where it is sought after and still delightfully thrives. releasing control and ownership of my own brick and mortar shop space was liberation and freedom for me in the end as i had discovered that during my 40’s was no time to pine away in a shop all the days of my life! i am multi-passionate with many dreams and desires and being confined to a brick and mortar store simply didn't allow enough time for me to follow my bliss, so to speak. plus i was doing it all on my own with no business partner so burn out was eminent. but i am ever thankful and grateful for the chance to have had my own shop as i had spent many years of my life dreaming of my “eventual shop,” scheming its design, imagining the lighting, hearing the music i would play and smelling the signature scent i would offer. i did it. i did all that. and it was grand. it was a total success in my book. i came, i saw, i got on with it. i did love it. but i wouldn't do it again anytime soon. it did give me a blank canvas, besides my own home, to try my hand at what i’ve loved:
boho-naturalist styling, decoration and design as a creative outlet and Make-to-Mend strategy. boho-naturalism has long been my trademark...it’s natural history museum meets witchy apothocary. its boho world traveler meets vagabond hobo circus. it's cowgirl thrift store meets gypsy paris flea.
it’s good, good stuff, true smashing rubbish, and i am joyfully absorbed in it.
since boho-naturalist styling, decoration and design have been big players in my own Make-to-Mend action plan i have noticed how enchanted and bewitched spaces draw us in, spellbound, and make us want to stay, settle in. in my home, shop or styling gigs you can expect your senses to be nourished through a sacred visual narrative and by the ethereal vibrancy lurking in every little corner of the spaces i create. my creating expressive ambiance is deliberate and intentional because a meaningful and revealing display is more than a random collection of unrelated objects. no one charming object will grab your attention more than another; groups of treasured items exist in harmony as do my colonies of honey bees out in the lower field. In the way each of the evocative objects interacts with one another they create a magical energy, a soulful vibration that is greater than the sum of its parts. just like what i hand make, in my home and what i style or curate, there is a place for every punctuated quirk and a place for the fingerprint of the maker to radiate. i aim to capture a sacred yet accessible feeling in my home and in my work, that when you come within, a different time seems to begin. i want others to experience the pulse, to feel the magnetism in my creative assemblages of treasure and loot. a palpable sense of otherworldly mystery, an ancient and primal essence, just under the surface, is important to me. i am often trying to recapture the feeling i had the first time i experienced new orleans over 20 years ago and the quintessence of what it felt like every time I visited my cousin and aunt growing up near seattle.
it's all about the amplified layers of soul nectar juiciness that is meant for more than mystics.
