Dear friend,

Summer is here! We can't wait for family adventures, big or small, days in the sun, and all the yummy foods (sign us up for any and every picnic!). We were feeling inspired to take a little break from the heat and journeyed up to Mt. Lemmon with the new summer collection from House of Hatters (available in-store now!) and some of our favorite in-house hats. Here is a look at a few things that we are taking into the warm months with us, and a few of our favorite things for a little mountain-top adventure.

Story writing is one of the stranger of the forms of craft. It allows readers a glimpse into the workings of the author’s mind, and their tone, their interests, their very person is often reflected in the product in a tangible way. The inner workings of the human mind, put on display in the joyful hope that those stories will inspire the same thrill in the reader that they do in the author.  Often it’s not writer’s block that is the issue—it’s that there is so much that lives in the head of the author that is begging to be transcribed, and it simply cannot be done fast enough. The motion of fingers on a keyboard hardly seems adequate for translating the entire worlds, those that exist so easily and vividly in the author’s mind, into the stark black and white of the written page. We desire, so much, to sweep readers into the whirlwind of life and color that causes such joy in us—we want it to do likewise for those that pick up and read our written offerings. Often, though, it can feel as though the author and the reader are sitting and looking up at a sunny summer sky, trying to agree on what shapes the clouds make, the listener struggling to fully understand the lifts and puffs and swirls that the teller is attempting to relay as a cohesive image. Those exacting efforts of description, however, are what make the process worth it. We all remember as children listening wide-eyed and with rapt attention to stories of adventure and courage—how much better, then, to produce that same sense of thrill and wonder as adults?