Welcome to By Julie Sharp!
Hello! I’m so glad you’re here. Welcome to By Julie Sharp, the new home of Orchid Grey. This has been a long time in the making – over a year, in fact. Turns out, moving a blog that's been around for 11 years to a brand new platform is complicated and super stressful. And emotional. But mostly just incredibly time-consuming, and time was something I didn’t really have until a few months ago when suddenly I and many others found ourselves with nothing but extra time on our hands. Thanks, Pandemic!
So, why begin an entirely new blog? The short answer is: because it was time.
The long answer? Here we go:
It started because, as my Orchid Grey readers may have surmised, my blogging had been waning over the past several years. Turns out, when you work in editorial and photography as a job, mustering the motivation to keep up with your own blog and photography can be difficult – at least for me. I was sapped creatively, and no longer felt the design and layout represented ME and what I wanted my blog to be. So it sort of stagnated until I found a design through Go Live HQ and realized that Squarespace may be the right way to go – I was already paying for a professional account and was really tired of Blogger’s outdated interface.
That was nearly two years ago. Change takes time – especially when time is tight.
Even though this project was something I’d been working on pre-pandemic, the arrival of COVID-19 brought with it even more changes. Chris and I lost our jobs. Some long-standing partnerships were put on pause due to the economic downturn, and suddenly I no longer felt beholden to my original site. With so much change afoot, why not add a little more to the mix and finally make the move? So I did, and while it’s still taken several months to finally get this off the ground, I feel this platform offers so many more possibilities, and for the first time in awhile I’m feeling really excited about blogging again. I have ideas to share, I’m taking photos for the fun of it, I’m actually making stuff again. And making stuff not for the purpose of selling it! What a revelation.
While it’s a little scary thinking about building up this community again, what matters way more to me is actually being excited to create content that’s valuable. Not just for my readers, but for ME, too.
While you’ll find most of Orchid Grey’s original content here (and the old site will remain live for the foreseeable future), By Julie Sharp will offer more. I’ll be sharing more thrifted, vintage, and secondhand style and decor advice and inspiration; more New England-based travel (and hopefully to farther-flung regions once travel is safe again); more of what inspires me, and of course more outfits. I’ll still be sharing links on Fridays, and eventually, I hope to link my portfolio site here as well, so you can see what I’m up to professionally. I’m so excited to have a fresh space that feels like me and I hope you’re excited about it, too.
So why change the name? The name Orchid Grey was literally plucked from the ether, it had no meaning other than being a name that I liked. If I were a person who wanted children, it’s a name I would consider for a child. But I’m happily child-free, and so I used it to name my blog. And while it’s pretty – and admittedly a little painful to leave behind – it’s also impersonal. And I’d really like to connect more personally with you. On a more practical note, I also want it to be simpler to give out my handle in professional environments – and so here we are.
By Julie Sharp. Simple. But above all else, representative of who I am.
If you’ve joined me here from Orchid Grey, thank you so much – truly, truly, truly – for your support over the years, and if you’re new here, thank you for visiting – I hope you’ll stay awhile!