I don’t recall ever having visited a circus, but I also have the spottiest memory in the world, so you never can tell with me. (Heck, I could have starred in the circus and wouldn’t remember – truly, my memory is that bad.) So when my girlfriend asked me to design a circus-inspired space for
And then I realized something else. Sometimes (often times), it’s not really about us. The world needs hostesses and storytellers and baristas and quick change artists – they’re the fiber of the society we’ve woven. They’re the workers, the hat-wearers. The hand-raisers and go-getters and do-somethingers. The volunteers and leaders and magic-makers – we’re all in it together, tipping our hats to each other as we do our best to work with what we’ve been given.
Art director Kate Law noticed a pretty significant gap in the market for boys: leggings that weren’t overtly girly. “My boys used to attend a circus school at weekends and I would send them in crazy coloured and garish patterned leggings – normally reserved for girls – when they were young enough not to argue!” And although the boys didn’t mind, Kate did. “I wanted an accessible and universal unisex staple brand with an edge that didn’t patronise children’s taste,” she writes.
What an industrial designer can teach us about moving mountains…at a snail’s pace.
The Fourth of July is one of my favorite summer holidays, full of starry nights and bonfire stories and watermelon seeds. Enjoy your celebration, and if you’ve got some antsy littles hanging around, might I suggest tackling this sweet DIY firecracker craft?
Last weekend, Bee and I enjoyed a perfect mom+daughter date. There was sunshine and swimming and lemonade, stroller naps and bananas and jazz bands. It was just… perfect. Sure, there were meltdowns from bouts of boredom (Bee) and impatience (me). But the day inspired us to get outside more often and enjoy these lazy summer days as much as we can. Because before we know it, this season will have passed us by. (And I’m not talking about summer, am I right?)
I’ve been reading Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit in preparation for a new project and was particularly inspired by the metaphor in this opening passage: “I walk into a large white room,” she writes. “It’s a dance studio in midtown Manhattan. The room is lined with eight-foot-high mirrors. There’s a boom box in the corner. The floor is clean, virtually spotless if you don’t count the thousands of skid marks and footprints left there by dancers rehearsing. Other than the mirrors, the boom box, the skid marks, and me, the room is empty.”