Under Construction: Published!

If you grew up in the Western U.S., chances are you're familiar with Sunset Magazine. It's consistently been one of my very favorite "shelter" magazines with the perfect mix of home decor/renovation, gardening, recipes/food and travel with no pesky fashion section to take up space.

I can remember pulling issues of Sunset out of my parents magazine basket when I was in my architecture phase and spent time drawing blueprints of houses with no 90 degree angles and submarines designed to submerge in my friend Katie's swimming pool with a hose attached to a lifesaver ring for fresh air. Oh, and hunks of styrofoam for flotation. I'm sure that would have worked out perfectly.

Anyway, all that to say that I've been a fan of Sunset for some time.

So it was super, duper, incredibly flattering to have won their reader photo contest! Can you believe it? Me either. In my March issue I read about the contest to have your photo published on the last page of the magazine. If ever there was a magazine I'd like to be published in, Sunset is it but I never imagined it was actually possible. For June the theme was "my Western backyard" and I immediately knew I wanted an image of the hens with the amazing sign Biscuit designed and Mr. H made on the new fence Mr. H built.

I ran outside and snapped a few images, uploaded to flickr and believe it or not, a few weeks later one of the Sunset editors tracked me down (my flickr account was set to the wrong email so she had to work at it--oops). She let me know I was a finalist. I sent more info and the photo file and a few weeks after that, just when I had given up all hope, I got news that we won. It was a real team effort for our family and so, so fun to see in print. Can you tell I'm thrilled?

Here it is:

I think you can click to enlarge.

And now, if I might, can I urge you to renew your subscription to Sunset? They'll mail outside the Western U.S. so you don't have to be local. And there are five regional mags so if you are in the West your issue is sure to be super local. They totally didn't pay me to say this but with all the good magazines going down the tubes I thought I'd ask my 2 readers to consider subscribing to help keep Sunset among the survivors.

So excited!