In the first week of school, my daughter Hannah was asked to write about a childhood picture depicting one of her parents. She instantly chose the photo of Ellen and me that we used as our authors’ photo in DIY KIDS. These matchy-match wallet pictures are unlikely remainders from an itinerant childhood under the irreverent (and intermittent) supervision of our hippie-intellectual parents. As Hannah notes, “The girls only dressed alike on Picture Day. Usually they went to school kind of unkempt.”
For our new book, Design Your Life, Ellen commissioned her daughter Ruby to paint the two of us as grown-ups:
In her essay for school, Hannah referred to me as a “collage professor.” Needless to say, Word did not catch the error. I’m thinking of designing a t-shirt or even a door sign inscribed with that lovely identifier.
The phrase captures my multiplicity of interests (English literature, DIY design, and what passes for household management). And, with its evocation of torn paper and glue stick, it acknowledges that I still go about the world, well, “kind of unkempt.”
— Julia Lupton · 2008-09-30
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THE BOOK