Brittany Watson Jepson

One house, many ideas: A portrait of the creative DIY blogger Brittany

Brittany didn’t aspire to become a blogger. The term didn’t exist when she was deciding on a career path. And once they did, they were mommy bloggers writing personal essays about ordinary things and she wasn’t interested in living such a public life. Sharing her creative work didn’t occur to her until she was put into a situation where she had limited work options. Brittany started blogging while she studied interior design in graduate school. For a residential design class project, she invented a fictional family based on her real life father, whose alias growing up was Lars. She created a blog for the family so they could track the progress of their house and called it www.thehouse-thatlarsbuilt.com .

Although she only had 100 readers at the time, she created new articles every day after the project was finished. Ultimately, her collected DIY ideas found a place and her creativity found an outlet.

Realizing the growing power of blogs she decided to invest her time and energy into her 2010 wedding creating hundreds of paper flowers and other handmade elements. Her wedding circulated onto the many wedding blogs and entered the scene just as Pinterest emerged. Overnight she was getting asked to contribute DIY projects to various websites.

While living in Copenhagen from 2010-2012, she was unable to work in the country and started to treat her blog as a job, creating daily content. She continued to pour her energy into her DIY projects and when she returned to the USA in 2012, the first of many partnership requests poured in and the search for a »real job« was eventually forgotten.

Today, she is a full-time blogger and YouTuber and publishes an inspiring craft idea every day.

The initially shy Brittany who didn’t like to share pictures of herself and talk about private stuff became a confident DIY blogger who feels as comfortable in a hot dog costume as she does while interacting privately in her community. Today, four assistants help her realize her extensive projects and large client base.

In her kickoff speech at the CEWE event in Cologne she told us how she keeps her creativity fresh and where she gets new inspiration for her numerous projects.

Q: What do you do in order to stay creative?

A: I realized after my trip to Germany and Paris that I wasn’t doing my best to stay creative. I was approaching my work as a machine rather than as an artistic endeavor. Since my trip I’ve been pouring over my library of art books and letting old sources inform my work. I also collected interior magazines on my trip to bring back home with me.

Q: How do you find new ideas for your DIY projects?

A: DIY project ideas come from a variety of sources. One way I love finding new ideas is when I work with sponsors. I actually quite love doing sponsored projects because I often have to use my creativity to come up with a project that works in my vocabulary that perhaps I didn’t think I could. It pushes me to do original work. Sometimes I find new ideas by accident. For example, one time my niece had a balloon garland in her room. It was done in lovely sorbet shades.

For some reason I thought that the balloons looked like fruits on a line and so that informed my next project: Fruit-balloons-garland .Other ideas come from getting inspired by a certain material and figuring out all the ways that material can be used. Then I put it into a setting that works for my brand. And voila!

Q: What inspires you?

A: I’m inspired by a number of things but most recently my trip to Germany! New settings bring about new color palettes, new tastes, new graphics, new lettering, new fashions. I couldn’t help but note all the new sensations I was experiencing. In general I’m very much inspired by the fashion scene. I love incorporating the catwalk into smaller home projects.

Did anybody say »creativity«? That's the perfect transition to the practical part of the day! sisterMAG and CEWE planned three workshops for us that we successively completed in small groups.

Stefan and I started with my supreme discipline: photography. Together with David of mysnaptrip, we discovered the hidden places of Cologne Ehrenfeld and exchanged views on perspectives, light and lenses. Even though I am used to taking pictures everywhere when I travel, I looked for interesting motives in a more conscious way that day and photographed feathers on the ground, ceilings of bridges and poster walls.