Marthas and Simples and Pottery Barns, Oh My!

I finally did it. I have saved every single Martha Stewart Living, Pottery Barn and Real Simple from the past six years. And now they are in perfect order.

Well, Martha got cut from my mail box A-List a few years ago, when she was in prison and the magazine really, really took a hit in the excellence department. I think Martha's probably back with a vengeance now, but, I'm not missing her enough to come back. I can read it at the library any time, oh, and she puts anything useful and good on the Internet anyway, so I'm not convinced I need a hard copy.

And so to get to the point, I always just had them saved in boxes, in no particular order and Jim lovingly lugged them around through five moves.

I know everything's logged online these days, but I love them too much. I needed to be able to get my hands on them...someday.

Last week I finally got legit and sorted them by month and year, and season. There are now four nice bins (I had them anyway, leftover things I didn't need after our move), sorted into groups of winter, spring, summer, and fall. This way, each season I can go back to them and get fresh ideas I may not have had inspiration or need for in the past, as I prepare for the coming months of cooking, decorating and homekeeping.

They used to be tucked away, heavy boxes under a bunch of other heavy boxes in the basement. Now, they are out in the open, spines out for clear reading and I adore it. Yeah, a picture of what they look like would have been personally rewarding, but, I forgot to take one and I have a limited amount of time before the girls are done cleaning up their stuff. You get me. But, can't you just see it in your imagination? Breathtaking. Now once a season if I want I can spend some time leafing and thinking and planning, which is just what I did last week, and it was great. It was so exhilarating that when I finished for fall, I dove into Christmas too. When I find some inspiration, I rip that baby out. Then I organize them, either to the kitchen, recipes ready to be tried out or ideas for random projects ready to be used, or to the decorating binder, which I hope to show you later this week.

Recipes that might have seemed intimidating to me several years ago seem beautiful and simple now.

And projects I didn't care about then might just be a long-lost "good thing" waiting to happen.

So I got it together, and I'm feeling fine.