The Intersection of Design & Motherhood
Sarah sent me this video and it made me smile. I bet it will do the same for you. : )
P.S. — Have you ever organized your books by color?
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My name is Gabrielle Blair. I'm a designer and mother of six. We're currently living in a farmhouse in the French countryside. It is dreamy as can be. I post on where design and motherhood intersect.
Like what you see? Join me.
New to Design Mom? Here are 10 posts to get you started:
What to Wear To Middle School
Napoleon Dynamite
Our Birth Announcements
Potato Print Clothing
Having Another Child
Young Einstein Birthday Party
Little Red LightHouse Outing
Porch Makeover
Waving Goodbye To The Atlantic Ocean
Build Two Toddler Beds for $75
Pimp My Ride: Family Edition
We've used our base in France to do lots of traveling. It's addictive! Here are some of our adventures:
A trip to Amsterdam.
Canoeing on the Dordogne River.
A Belgian Waffle Tour.
A wintery visit to Cologne.
Three cheers for Barcelona!
The tulip fields in Holland.
We saw the final match of the French Open.
One of our favorite spots is Mont St. Michel.
I wonder where we'll wander next! To see more of our travels, click here.
Wow! Time Magazine named Design Mom a Top Website of the Year. I'm blushing! See the writeup about Design Mom here. And see the full list here. You can find more press links, interviews and articles here.
{ 30 comments… read them below or add one }
Absolutely amazing! And really really beautiful – thank you for sharing.
Haha, Yes indeed organized my books by color. I still love the look of my book case. Now my friends think i’m obsessive about it….
Ha, yes! Thanks to you & my cousin’s gorgeous San Francisco apartment, I organized my bookshelves by color about a year ago! I absolutely love how it looks, and love that it’s the first thing you see when you look left from our front door! Thank you!
Love the video! Haven’t organized them by color yet… I’m trying by category now (ie. biography, travel, etc.). We have a LOT of books, as you can see here! http://makingroomwithus.blogspot.com/2011/12/making-home-in-sicily.html
Oh, I love every single thing about that movie!! We keep the kids’ picture books organized by color, and a couple of months ago my then 11-yr-old organized the DVDs by color as well. (I was so proud! :))
Just magical!
i have never organized books by color. i like how it looks, but it makes it too difficult to find anything!
Gosh… this is great! :-)
I’ll pass the word “organization” to the next… can’t do much around the house w/ my 1 month old baby. But I’ll keep it in mind! :-)
Have a beautiful day!
xo
Luciane at HomeBunch.com
Yes! We organized our books by color a year ago and I absolutely love it. It made our bookshelves into art instead of stashing places.
I think books look gorgeous organized by color, but I think you can tell who is a reader and who is a design fan by how they arrange their library…. I would love to arrange books by color, but I can’t! I feel like authors would stare at me and cry if I put their books near other just because the cover is red, haha! I have them by language, then by subject, then by author. And kids and art books go on the bottom shelves, so they can be easily picked up at any time.
You inspired me to organize my books by color a few years ago. Since I have a lot of books, and my anti-clutter husband does not, this was something I did in hope that he would like it. He LOVES it! A great compromise as I prefer books in alpha order by author’s last name (fiction) or by Dewey Decimal (non-fiction.)
This is my book store! It’s a brilliant independent shop with a few locations scattered around Toronto. I always find the best gifts and less familiar, but totally fabulous, book titles here. Thanks for sharing the video!
Yes! My books were organized by color + placed in certain areas according to the feng shui bagua. That is until I left the country and donating hundreds of them to charity. ooooo I love books…especially their covers!
organizing books by color is as useful as tearing their cover off…
The video is nice!!!
Glad you liked the video! Thanks for the shout out — always fun to be on Design Mom. :) So glad “old-fashioned” and “not-so-digital” books still have a life of their own!
lol I tend to agree with Ale!
On a whim I decided to organize -by colour- my daughter’s undergrad book collection (at the time 4 floor to ceiling shelves) … she’s an English major; you can see why this was a huge mistake! The poor thing couldn’t find her references, novels, or whatever she needed quickly enough. It stayed “pretty” for about a week and then I put it back for her before I flew back home.
If you have the luxury of “just picking up a book” without regard to topic, colour organization is an excellent way to display. If you don’t want to search for a title, best to keep them organized by author, title, or subject.
Love that you posted this video. Type is my favourite Toronto bookstore, actually one of my favourite stores in general. I always find the best books and gifts there.
All our books–and we a lot of them–are organized my color. My husband tries to find one and says….hmmm…I wonder what color that book was. :-)
Yup. I’ve got the books in my art studio organized by color. They are all my art and design books, so they are already organized by topic. :)
I don’t organize my books at all! I just shove them into the bookcase willy-nilly, but I did work on a Nike March Madness photoshoot last year where we rented a private high school library as a location to shoot a college library scene with a marching band peforming. We got carried away and replaced all the seen bookcases with school color bound books! Then we had a tornado warning (we were in Memphis) and 15 of us had to hide in a paper closet for 45 minutes. Our shoot ran late (we had a professional basketball player – you don’t get much time) and they told us just to leave the books – they would fix it – probably kept them busy for days!
Thank you, I loved watching this. And yes, even though I’m a total bookworm and feel kinda guilty, I do have the books in my living room shelves arranged by color — it just looks more cohesive. But I have way more books with white or black spines than other colors, so there’s no “rainbow” effect.
My books absolutely are organized by color! All the kids books are and then my books are organized by color within their categories (cook books, religious, everything else). I feel like it’s a way to make them aesthetically pleasing–they’re beautiful to me (because I love books), they should be beautiful to everyone else, too! Thanks for sharing this! I love stop motion stuff too, so it’s perfect!
This post just solved my problem. I have been trying to get my daughters bookshel to look neat all day. I am going to organize it by color now! Thank you! I absolutely loved the video.
Wow! What a feat that movie i. I can’t imagine how long it took to make that! And yeas, I have one tall think book case organized by color and I love the way it looks. It is a bright spot (like light broken up by a prism) in my my mostly neutral-colored room.
Wonderful video! I don’t think I have enough room to arrange my books by color and I prefer them by subject and height.
http://thirteenredshoes.blogspot.com/2011/12/colour-coding.html
I arranged by colour last year. We still have the books this way and we find it lovely. It looks inviting as well.
Yes! I did it last year after reading your post. http://www.amomsyear.com/2011/02/15/my-risky-bookcase/
I didn’t think my editor-brain could handle non-genred, non-alphabetized books, but it’s good to push ourselves in new directions. So I gave it a go and ended up loving it. The shelves are in the loft and they make me smile every time I walk up the stairs. Thank you, as always, for the inspiration!
love the video and yes my books are organized by color, so pretty!
I organize mine by color! I love it, though it is VERY controversial. :)
http://thenestinggame.com/2011/11/15/feeling-vignette-y/
I was watching this, and when I was done, my husband asked for the link because he really likes the music.
Go, Gabrielle.