You’ve heard the saying, “All that glitters is gold.” But my sister and I have our own saying: “All that glitters is messy!”

My sister is the undeniable South San Francisco Glitter Queen. She’s glittered everything from 150 pairs of Mardi Gras shoes to blinged-out signage for Mitzvahs and parties. Over the years she’s probably gone through 100 pounds of glitter easily, and I can attest to the fact that it gets everywhere. As my sister’s fiancé Coire once exclaimed in frustration (after a particularly long glitter session held in their Oakland apartment) “It looks like a fairy farted in here!” There was so much glitter it was showing up in clothing, hair products, and in inflamed pores (I won’t go too deeply into that one, lets just say it was gross... sparkly... but gross).

However, in the many years that my sister has been glittering for the masses, she has learned a thing or two, which she has wisely passed on to me.

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Recently I was at a client’s house and was introduced to one of the more amazing things I’ve ever seen: a “collage” wall. Quite simply, it’s an entire wall dedicated with a year of artwork, ideas, and memories. This wall was in a long hallway that led from the garage to the kids’ playroom, and it was amazing! Chock full of artwork, concert flyers, dance recital notices, birthday invitations, tickets to movies, pages ripped out of magazines extolling this athlete or that cool toy, pages printed from the internet, bits of ribbon, report cards, encouraging notes, funny doodles, letters and cards, photographs, plane tickets... basically the family’s entire life on one 8 foot tall by 18 foot long wall.

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