Ocean Side Deck

I know, I know.....

I haven't been writing my blog.....

I've been in the throes of a creative frenzy.

When I get like this I have tunnel vision.... 

and can't focus on anything else.

I become obsessed with whatever design project has caught my interest.

Next year I plan on launching a fabric line that will be available at Studio 534 in the Boston Design Center.

I will be doing this with Josh, who owns the showroom.

He want's to do it next year.

I thought.....

Well that's so far away....

I want to do it now.....

and then I realized that I had to design a whole lot of fabrics,

 which I had never done before.....

Soooooo.....

I have gotten off my lazy @$$ and started designing.

I am figuring it out as I go.

I am having a ball.

I'm trying to do pretty...

and quirky....

a little humor....

and a whole lotta style.

Wish me luck.

I need it.

Anyway...

back to the cottage on the Cape.

I will next show you guys the deck that overlooked the ocean.

See????!!!!

It's overlooking lots of water!!!!!

I had slipcovers made for my outdoor cushions.

They slipped over the outdoor fabric that was already on them.

It was just a boring white, and I wanted something more colorful for the pictures and for parties.

This is in the days when I actually had parties.

a long long time ago.....

Way back in the dark ages, when I decorated this cottage, there wasn't anything available in outdoor fabric other than plain simple colors and stripes.

That's why I used the indoor fabric for the outdoors.

Nowadays there's tons of stuff to choose from.

The fabric I used was the same one I put on the cushions for the Pier 1 wicker lounge chairs..

While rummaging through several salvage yards, looking for things for the renovation of this house, I found the trio of concrete pelican figurines.

I just love these guys and have 

hauled them around to my different homes.

I used them on my screened porch in the cabin on Lake Sunapee,

and I now have them by my pool in Flerida.

They keep me company and are my life guards in my 66" deep pool.

Isn't he handsome?????

Over by the dining area is my grill.

I made it out of an old egg crate.

An egg crate is a pottery container that was used to transport 100 year old eggs, and were the Chinese equivalent of cardboard containers.

I used to pick them up in China Town in Boston.

The grocery stores gave them away.

You had to time it right, to go by the store when the pot was empty.

After a while, the merchants got savvy, and started selling them for a nominal fee.

But I still had to time it to buy them when they were almost empty,.

According to Wikipedia,

Century egg or pidan (Chinese: 皮蛋; pinyin: pídàn), also known as preserved egg, hundred-year egg, thousand-year egg, thousand-year-old egg, andmillennium egg, is a Chinese cuisine ingredient made by preserving duck, chicken or quail eggs in a mixture of clay, ash, salt, quicklime, and rice hulls for several weeks to several months, depending on the method of processing.^[1]

Through the process, the yolk becomes a dark green to grey colour, with a creamy consistency and an odor of sulphur and ammonia, while the white becomes a dark brown, translucent jelly with salty or little flavour. The transforming agent in the century egg is its alkaline material, which gradually raises the pH of the egg to around 9–12, or more during the curing process.^[2] This chemical process breaks down some of the complex, flavorless proteins and fats, which produces a variety of smaller flavorful compounds.

Today, while looking up stuff about these eggs, bopping around the internet... I found this YouTube video.

you may want to click on it for some amusing info!!!!

The pot for my grill was oval and  larger than average, I bought it in an antique store.
I had never seen one this size or shape, so I had to have it.
I figured that I would think of something to use if for, once I bought it.
It was really heavy.
But I really wanted it.
Luckily I was able to come up with a place to put it.
I had a wooden top made to fit over the lip of the pot, with a hole cut out to hold the grill.

I wanted it to be higher, for easier cooking, so I designed a frame work that bracketed some gargles that I picked up at the same place I found the pelicans.

Then for added flair, I tied it all together with a big hemp rope.

To create a nicer look on the back of the fence, I hung some trellises I picked up at a local garden store

They turned out to be a great place to hang my barbecue tools.

That's it for today.

I will try not to have such a gap before my next post.

On that note,

Latah, Gatah