October is for coziness.  For making soup while hanging out in one's pajamas, perusing cookbooks and planning dinner parties.  For ordering firewood and spring bulbs.  For staying in bed to read instead of leaping out of bed in the dark morning hours, and tucking in early to read some more.  I'm reading The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, Volume 2.  What are you reading?  This is what I'm listening to, an appropriate soundtrack to today's note.

The Brits know something about the special sauce for coziness.  After all, how do they make drafty 300+ year old country houses feel like the epitome of a timelessly chic cozy snug?   Perhaps it's their embrace of floral upholstery, in tones of blush pink combined with browns and softly muted pastels.   Perhaps it's their inherited disdain for stark neutral interiors, or their refusal to banish either dark wood or an enormity of books from a room.  Or maybe it's that they're British and most of us are not, and that is just something pretty "brilliant" right there.   READ MORE

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I thought it might be fun to have a little look behind the curtain, into the evolution of Meg Carter Designs.  The year was 2008, and I had just wrapped up a successful showing of my latest collection at NYNOW, but .... many buyers from wonderful boutiques had walked into my booth and said, "I love what you're doing but we can't sell shells".   All while the vast majority of my line didn't include shells.   Hmmm...

After a lot of head scratching, I thought, so what if we serve that up with a silver spoon?   We could take all the classic pieces, oodles of earrings, chains, and pearl necklaces, package them up on an engraved silver platter with nary a shell or even a fish in sight, and put a pretty new label on them.  How about "TOWN by Meg Carter Designs"?!  READ MORE

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I have some notes on my phone that I've been saving for a little Love Note inspiration.  They refer to things the French just do differently.  Often it's something Americans find amusing (and perhaps mildly annoying). 

Take for instance, the universal edict to "Dites bonjour!" and better still, a stream of pleasantries before asking a simple question.   If you are wagging your head in disbelief, just try this.  Walk into any French shop, from a rural boulangerie to the haute world of a Place des Vosges boutique, and inquire about the time, WITHOUT first, God have mercy on your soul, prefacing that with a hearty "Bonjour Madame!"  You will be greeted with an ice cold stare, chin down and back, eyebrows arched, implying, "Foreign pig, how dare you spit upon my mother's grave?"  READ MORE

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