Anna and I became friends a couple of years ago through blogging and we would, every now and again, email each other about life. Small but precious exchanges during those hectic advertising days when we were at Rona Road.
I followed Anna on Pinterest, when I had time, as she clearly had a gift for it. As Anna filed her ideas for the barn they were renovating, more and more people also noticed her gift. Anna has an innate ability to find beautiful spaces and objects. She’s the lady to go to for inspiration.
Anna very kindly said yes when I asked her to help me style our future home, the one we are buying in East Sussex next year. We are pinning our inspiration together on a Pinterest board here.
Anna also very kindly agreed to answer some of my questions about how she uses Pinterest. It’s become even more clear to me there are no special secrets to Pinterest, or being successful in general. The only secret is to love what you do, do what you love.
Anna’s love shines through her pins!
1) Photograph by Jeroen van der Spek, via style files on flickr 2) Home of emersonmade. Photographs by Amy Azzarito. 3) Red Hill property of Lucy Hill and family – photo, Lucy Feagins 4) Photograph by Birgitta Wolfgang Drejer from Sisters Agency 5) Home of tina lakkonen
Anna, when did you first start using Pinterest – what was it that attracted you to it?
I first started using it just a few months after it began and was so excited to finally have a place where I could store all of the images I’d been finding online. Before Pinterest I had saved images on various computers but they were disorganized and not easy to find or look at.
I was also a hoarder of torn out magazine pages that I’d leave all over the house — what my husband called my “little rat piles” — and now, instead, I have a nicely organized collection of ideas on Pinterest. For this reason he’s a big fan, too 🙂
How much time do you spend pinning?
It depends on how much I have going on in other areas of my life and whether or not I have a particular project that I’m thinking about — a design project for the house or for the crafty sessions I have with my friends most Sundays.
I can spend hours at a time going through pins and following them to their original sources — discovering all kinds of wonderful stuff — or I might steal a few minutes between projects at work when I need a blast of inspiration.
Where do you get your inspiration?
I am inspired by the beauty of Vermont, where we’ve lived for the past four years. I’m definitely inspired by cities, although I don’t spend nearly enough time in them. I’m inspired by the creative people around me — I have some wonderfully vibrant friends whose creativity is a constant source of energy and ideas.
I’m inspired by our home, which is an old, renovated barn; sometimes I’m overwhelmed by all I want to do with it, but that’s just because there are so many different options and I have a hard time picking just one!
Where do you find things to pin? Are you a re-pinner or a new discoverer?
This also depends on what’s going on in my life; if I don’t have a lot of time on the internet then I tend to do a lot of repinning. I really enjoy repinning because while the images are inspiring, it’s also really wonderful to get a sense of people through their pins; of course much of what we pick up on is a pinner’s aesthetic, but it also feels like I’m getting a glimpse of who they are as people.
There’s one pinner who I started following early on, Kate Lyden, and I fell in love with her visual sense; I later discovered her blog — she’s a wonderful, wonderful writer — and it became clear that her pins were an echo of her overall sensibility. I love that.
How did people hear about your Pinterest? Did you do anything to get the word out?
To be honest, I have no idea how people found out about my board — I haven’t done anything to get the word out at all!
What are your top three Pinterest tips and tricks?
As silly as it probably sounds, I don’t have any — Pinterest is, quite simply, a visual filing system for me — I pin what I love!
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