About

Carlie here, the trusty authoress of Twinkling Along, a blog about beauty in many forms. If you love to sew, write, read, cook, paint, weave baskets, compose music, or even collect antique wrenches...then you understand the deep craving within the human soul for beauty. I believe our very survival depends on sucking in the small moments of exquisite loveliness in life and taking it to our marrow. I write about the many ways beauty is crossing my path, gargantuan or tiny, and the myriad plans I have for bringing a little more of it into my life. If you want some too, then I'm super glad you're here.

I am from a family of storytellers and have a cocktail of ink and tall tales running through my veins from my mother's newspaper editorship to my grandfather's movie experiments and my early Native American and traditional Jewish roots. I've always loved to read and write and thought stories were one of the best past-times around so when blogs crossed my radar I jumped. In 2005, I gave it a try and posted my very first blog post to the big wide world.

I wrote for five years on another blogging platform, trying to work out the bugs and understand what this new story making thing was all about before coming here to the current site in early 2010 and have been merrily clicking away (twinkling along as it were) ever since.

I hit the "Publish" button five days a week, in the office of a snug, rehab-project Dutch Colonial for five years. We lived in Stamford, Connecticut, not so very far from New York City...the center of it all and then suddenly my whole world shifted and we picked up roots and dreams to take wing for the other coast. Now "The Bay" is our new home and I am making my peace with being a California girl and learning that it is not the same thing as being a Malibu/Hollywood bimbo. We have a rose fronted cottage in a small city below Oakland where we pick lemons off our own tree, prowl the neighborhood for fallen fruit and order tacos in for panic nights.  My sons, Ru, Dee, Nib and Pom (not their real names, of course) all live here with me as does my geek squad husband, A and whole troop of houseplants. I cook perpetually, scoop furniture up off the curb, go around with garden dirt under my fingernails and lose hours to the hypnotic swish of my paint brush and the turning of the pages of library books.

I grew up in a log house my Papa built in the backwoods of Northern Michigan where I was taught to can food, sew, draw, stack wood, identify mushrooms and juggle babies with the best of them. I came to the East Coast as a newlywed and after a slow burn, I fell madly in love with New England and the city way of life. Now we've struck off across the country for a new adventure in The West, a whole world of new and different and we are loving squishing ourselves into a smaller house in the beauty of a Mediterranean climate.
I am influenced by my deep love for books, my connection to nature, my little boys, my homeschooling roots and future, my faith in an eternal God, my desire to create, my travel dreams, and my curiosity about all living things. Someday I hope to work in architectural salvage, be a laughing old woman with colorful stories, own a round-hipped 1950's pick-up and the be the best fiddler on our block.

Until then, we're living on dreams we create together....and I'm so glad you've come to join the fun!