Orson Welles Had it Right....

... when he said "I will sell no wine before its time."  Of course, I think he was pimping himself out for Paul Masson wines at the time, extolling the virtues of the grape and vineyard. That was back in the 1970's, when wine was in its infancy here in the States, and Gallo Wines was the biggest thing going, which goes to show you just how bad the state of the grape was back then.  Of course, Mr. Welles, the director of a movie that most consider the most important film EVER made, didn't actually drink Mr. Masson's final product and was subsequently fired for saying so on talk television a few years later.  Which got me to thinking about how dramatically things have changed with wine consumption here in the good old U.S. of A.....

I admit that I probably have spent a good amount of time over the years consuming the stuff, some very good, some very bad, and some downright ugly.  I remember in the 70's, when I was young and tender and the drinking age was 18, we bought our swill wine from the convenience store, mostly because we could not afford the good stuff and didn't even know good stuff existed. And mostly we had ABC stores; wine stores simply did not exist.  Our selections consisted of Lancer's Rose (still sold by the case loads in Portugal, 'cuz I saw it there not too long ago.....) and Blue Nun wine. The thought of consuming either of them now is SO less appealing.

Wine actually began as sort of a medicinal beverage .  New research shows that it has been around since the Paleolithic Age, which means the proverbial hangover has been with us since that time also. Some things never change.... but I digress.  As a professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania describes it, "a beverage that tasted good,  provided energy, and was a social lubricator with mind altering effects." Well, duh!!!!!  About 9,000 years ago, it was the Chinese making rice-honey wine in the region of Jiahu in central China.  Then along came the Persians, using the common grape Vitis vinifera, and started making their version of the fermented fruit, although I would imagine that bouncing around on the back of a camel with a hangover was a bit punishing. The Egyptians got in on the act around 5,000 years ago, although they are better known as the originators of hops and Pabst Blue Ribbon. Wine finally got its due when the Greeks and Romans started using the libation for their worship services of Dionysus and Bacchus, which the citizens of New Orleans still carry on once a year.

Fast forward to the 1920s and the Volstead Act.  Now if you think the Volstead Act was a bad thing, think about this:  it gave us organized crime, an estimated 30,000 to 100,000 speakeasy clubs in New York alone, and provided the impetus for what some consider the greatest sport in America, namely, NASCAR. (I personally can't believe that I am using NASCAR in a post about wine.  I must have had too much of it last night to desecrate wine in such a manner.) In 1933, the citizenry of America sobered up and repealed the Volstead Act.

I perused Etsy to see who was doing what with what now is a $44B industry, and that does not account for cocktail napkins, wine stoppers, and anything/everything else related to the consumption of our favorite beverage.  I was pretty impressed with people's imagination.

iCustomwines has some really great looking and innovative labels that can be personalized for you.  They have some really great ideas which may have never occurred to you. These are great gifts for Sucking Up to the Boss Dinner and occasions such as that. https://www.etsy.com/shop/iCustomWine?ref=ss_profile

Thevinyards does a lot of interesting things with reclaimed wood.  The thing I like about their shop is that not only are their pieces recycled but that type of application can be used in homes that are very contemporary to the very traditional.  They have many one-of-a-kind pieces, sure to be the talk of any wine consumers at your next party!! Plus, they have provided me with our Useless Factoid of the Week: The world’s oldest bottle of wine dates back to A.D. 325 and was found near the town of Speyer, Germany, inside one of two Roman sarcophagi. It is on display at the town's Historisches Museum der Pfalz.
https://www.etsy.com/shop/TheVineyards?ref=listing-shop-header-item-count

newspinstore is exactly that, a new spin. I love the outside-the-box thinking.  They actually have a wine apparatus that allows you to drink wine and ski at the same time.  Okay, that is a gross exaggeration, but they do have a nifty wine storage piece made out of skis. This takes great imagination and I mean that in all sincerity.  https://www.etsy.com/shop/newspinstore?ref=ss_profile

DestinationLtd makes some unique and interesting wine stoppers.  Sure, there are a lot of choices for stoppers out there, but they have some great ones that can be personalized.  Again, great gift idea for weddings, hostess gifts, and just something that can be reused time and time again, unlike the bottle of wine that everyone else brought to the party.  Not that there is anything wrong with bringing a bottle of wine to a party.....
https://www.etsy.com/shop/DestinationLtd?ref=ss_profile

My absolute favorite is this great wine storage that was built and designed by GreenDesignsSanRamon for a well known, very famous person whose name is withheld to protect the innocent.  I love the ingenuity and thought that went into the piece and their prices are very reasonable.  It's a great storage piece, made from staves of the wine casks. Plus now you can get something made for the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous in your wine tasting room!!!!!   https://www.etsy.com/shop/GreenDesignsSanRamon?ref=ss_profile



Well, that's it for this week.  It's 5:00 somewhere and I am headed for my first cocktail of the day........

Daffodil Sheets Meet John Deere

I was watching television the other day and saw this pretty terrible advertisement about a pretty terrible spaghetti sauce, or nowadays "red sauce," that comes out of a jar.  You all have seen it, the one where she wonders what other bad choices in life she has made. Apparently hers are limited to bad hair styles, while the rest of us have to wrangle with things such as bad husbands and unappreciative children.  Which made me wonder about the worst  home design choices I have ever made. All right, that wasn't the smoothest segue but work with me. 

No one really ever wants to admit that they have made enhancements to their abode that, well, just didn't make the cut. Mine was (and I am not making this up cuz there is a picture to prove it......) back in the '70s, there was this decorating idea I am sure was found in some savvy home decorating magazine, about using sheets as drapes and pillows for the living room. At the time, I was living with my younger sister and our living room furniture consisted of some old platform beds that were about 18" off the floor, covered with bright yellow textured vinyl, and had fake brass ball feet. We had purchased this fine furniture at the now defunct Levitz Furniture in Atlanta. I know it is hard to believe that, after selling quality furniture such as this, they went out of business.  So....... we go to the discount linen store and found what we thought were the perfect sheets to make covers for the mattress forms on the beds and fabulous drapes for our living room.  We had visions of all the interior designers in Atlanta calling our style all the rage and magazines clamoring for pictures. What could go wrong?????? Apparently plenty. Just check out the picture here and you can see why, even through the smoke and mirrors of the 70's, our friends laughed and laughed at our design faux pas (which were not even words in the English language back then). 

Actually, I can blame that whole nightmare on my sister, after all, that is what sisters are for!  As you will see in the examples below, there is plenty of sisterly love going around.  To my sister's credit, she did not let this Daffodil Disaster stop her resolve, and she went on to become an award winning commercial textile designer.  I chose the path of least resistance and went into the cosmetic business.

 I decided to get some expert advice (actually, other people with Etsy stores....) and see what experience they had in home decorating nightmares, just hoping that somewhere, someone had a story that was equally as bad.  And they did not disappoint...........

If you are reading this and thinking boy, that whopper I laid back in 1972 was pretty bad and no one can top it, well, sister, you are in for a rude awakening. People did things that you cannot imagine.  Below are a few stories/comments submitted.  In order to protect the innocent, some names have been withheld.

justgivemepeace   https://www.etsy.com/shop/justgivemepeace

My sister painted her living room Fuscia.....baseboards to ceilings.... AROUND the furniture.  Her hubby had no idea she did that until years later when they got a new couch and went to rearrange the furniture.

OR......

Covering the cracked and yellowed bathroom walls with liquid nails using a cake spatula to mimic stucco....and then painting the walls a myriad of yellow, greens, browns, and blues to look like....
"Mildewed old walls"....

CarolBradley https://www.etsy.com/shop/CarolBradley

Using the "sponging" glaze technique in a (fortunately) small hallway - with beige over white. It looked like a smelly diaper had exploded.

Designer Dwellings LLC https://www.etsy.com/shop/DesignerDwellings      

When I first bought my house I painted my bedroom "Sultan Red" thinking it would be glamorous. It wasn't - my head vibrated when I entered the room. So I picked a different color "Snugglepuss" maybe it was the paint fumes or the fact that I giggled at the name but I thought this rich purple (what we are now calling radiant orchid BTW) would be a good choice. *Sigh* no, it was even worse. Like trying to sleep in a giant Easter Egg.  I have learned from my mistakes and gone on to become an interior decorator.

FabFunky https://www.etsy.com/shop/FabFunky
About fifteen years ago I decided I wanted to build a wardrobe in my bedroom. There was no recess, so it would just be built against (attached) to the wall, and would go about half way the length of the wall. I decided that I wanted it clad in tongue and groove. And also it wouldn't go right to the roof, so I could store stuff on top. So I set to work and built my wardrobe. I should mention I had done nothing more than hammer a nail in a wall before. It took me about a week, but finally I finished. I remember clearing everything away and taking a step back to look at my amazing, incredible and very stylish creation. And that was when I realized that I had in fact built what looked exactly like a shed in my bedroom.  I never lived it down....

And last but not least, my favorite offering was this post. This unfortunate incident gives a new meaning to "Dear John".......

MelaniesApothecary   https://www.etsy.com/shop/MelaniesApothecary

Painting my bedroom a very dark green because I loved the name of the color... I thought I was going for forest-y, pretty, tranquil, peaceful.... instead I got the inside of a John Deer Tractor... and I had nothing to tame the green down as far as pillows or curtains. It just looked terrible.

If you would like to visit the wonderful and creative Etsy store owners who provided these stories, please click on their name and it will take you to their store. Feel free to tell us your worst home decorating story, if you dare........ until next week!!!

Coffee Tea or Me

Ever wonder how we became a nation of coffee drinkers, people unable to live without that morning Java Jolt??  Was it that nasty incident several years back in Boston involving the incorrect brewing of tea in the harbor?? How is it our craving for that caffeine buzz can feed the frenzy of decorating with items that facilitate the arrival of that delicious libation??

Coffee undoubtedly came to America, or the colonies as such, by Captain John Smith, founder of Jamestown and BFF of Prisiclla Alden.  Captain Smith had been visiting abroad in Turkey where it is assumed he partook of the stuff, liked it, and had to have it.  Tea, on the other had, was brought to the colonies by the Dutch through the Dutch West India Company. I know this may sound a bit counter-intuitive given the fact that England is THE tea drinking country in the world, but the English didn't get in on the tea action until a bit later.  You might remember the ill-fated Stamp Act of 1765, enacted by his Royal Idiocy King George that taxed a whole lot of stuff, including tea imported from the Dutch. King George really wanted the colonists to buy tea imported by the British West Indies Company.  This action brought about the first American slogan for the masses:  No Taxation Without Representation, which continues to be the motto on the car tags for the District of Columbia to this day (am not making that up!!!). Then there was that incident in the Boston Harbor which I am pretty sure erupted over the fact that they were trying to brew iced tea not in the prescribed manner, which really set off a bunch of people who were attending a costume party dressed as Indians.  At least that is the version I heard....

Anyway,  Americans then, as now, were not a group to trifle with.  We did the normal boycott thing and started buying black market tea from the Dutch.  Even though the Stamp Act was repealed a year later, it was too late and colonists started getting that caffeine high from coffee.

Back in the 1800s, the citizenry of New Orleans, prior to the invention of the Hurricane drink at Pat O'Briens, drank an interesting concoction called bruleau, a mixture of coffee, orange juice, orange peel, sugar, and cognac that had been burned and added in.  It could only be found in the coffee houses there, which eventually turned into our now infamous saloons of New Orleans.

Neither coffee nor tea is grown here in the States; all imported. Useless Factoid:  Japan, one of the biggest tea consuming countries in the world, is the third largest importer of coffee.  Importation of our daily fix comes via coffee bags, normally burlap or some type of low grade linen, and tea comes shipped loose in wooden crates.  There has been a trend in recent years to recycle those used shipping vehicles into all sorts of home decor items.  There are the ubiquitous pillow covers and then there are some really fun and unusual creations..  Here is a picture from an Etsy store that, although a tablecloth is not unusual, I really like the addition of tulle, making it a great party item for weddings and such, but could also be fun as a tablecloth for a foyer.  Or for a grand entrance hall, placing a big chandelier with that rustic look, peeling paint and all, for    an entry hall that tells you this is a special home. This can be found at MyModernHome on Etsy.







And let's not forget tea crates!! Tea is shipped loose in crates marked by the shipper, sometimes with fun slogans on the side.  I took a picture of a tea crate being used as the base for a coffee table (sorry, couldn't resist....) and think they are interesting because of the fun slogan and shipper stampings.  They were purchased at the Dallas Market for $45.00 each, a steal after looking at prices for these types of boxes, and then the glass tops were an addition.  What great conversation pieces they are!!!!

  Now that I have covered coffee and tea, what about me???  Keep tuning in and learn about the fun at our home with four rescue dogs,  my three jobs, and my quirky view of life as I see it.  Let us know the wheres and hows of your caffeine fix and until next week, keep those comments coming!!!