Oh! To be like Martha!

I am not like Martha Stewart. I cannot make my own felt covered holiday tea cozy for my dog's bowl. My Office Depot bulletin board fell off the wall last winter and it is still resting on the floor next to my bookshelf. And rest assured: it does not have a linen cover with criss-crossed grosgrain ribbon to hold my meeting reminders. So you can imagine my surprise when I went through a back issue of Living magazine and found that, yes, indeed, I am like Martha Stewart when it comes to some things.

I am a garden nut. I have a brown thumb, but I absolutely love gardens and anything associated with them. One of my very favorite things to buy are garden ornaments. And I use them everywhere: even in the most unconventional places. I put a huge barn steeple inside a foyer and framed it with 19th century bird prints framed in silver gilt. I hang 19thc. cupboard doors for headboards or wall decorations. I use garden chairs inside. I use faux bois urns filled with huge branches on top of 18th c. tables. I plop sculpture down next to antique furniture or contemporary pieces because I love the "juxtaposition"..even though I loathe that overused decorating term.

So there it was: Martha's Maine living room (that would be as opposed to her main living room about which it can never be when one has so many living rooms, but that is another story). And pictured there on the sedate sisal rug framed between two magnificent windows and elegant draperies were a pair of tailored chairs with some age to them and a fabulous huge planted antique garden urn. It was so simple, but so very sophisticated and elegant. It was sedate, but interesting. And then I turned the page and there Martha had placed the most humongous branches in Maine in an antique garden urn on her faux bois French table. Oh, to be like Martha!

But I did notice one very interesting thing: the issue of the magazine was February 2007. My photos are from February 2006. ...Would I dare ever utter the words that maybe Martha is just like me??!!

Have no fear Martha: I made my dorm room draperies, but that was with Stitch Witchery. And I don't crush my own indigo for Easter Egg dye: I buy the little kit from Target. But I do have a famous mother whom you know, and she taught me very well about antiques and gardens and having "an eye", and I'm flattered to find that my garden ornaments inside are not so very different from yours.