Who we are
Camille’s first wreath was a homework task
A few years ago, Camille Sutton’s therapist told her to find a hobby she could do with her hands, something she could start and finish in one sitting.
Knitting was her first try, but a single scarf felt like it would never end. Painting was worse, because she kept going back over the same corner until she hated it. Two hobbies in, she was ready to give up on the whole idea, so she signed up for a weekend wreath-making workshop at a local craft studio.
The instructor showed the group how to secure the first bundle of stems to the wire frame, then how to layer each one so it hid the stem before it. By the end of the afternoon, Camille was holding her first wreath.
It wasn’t perfect, and she didn’t mind. It was the first thing she had made that she could start and finish in a single sitting.
She hung it on her front door. On hard days, it reminded her that she could finish what she started.
Most tutorials skip the hard parts
Camille kept making wreaths, and soon friends wanted to make their own. When she looked online for help, most tutorials showed a perfect photo and skipped the tricky steps, like wire that slips, glue that shows, or a wreath that looks full on the table and thin on the door.
So she started writing her own.
The site now covers your whole home
Wreaths were just the start. Today our writers share ideas for every room and every season.So she started writing her own.
Decor and styling
Decorating starts with the practical side, from where furniture should sit to which lighting suits a Room. Knowing common curtain sizes helps you hang panels that fit the window, and styling ties it together so the space feels like yours.
Gardening
The gardening guides focus on growing flowers, herbs, and more. They’re written with beginners in mind, so no prior experience is needed, and the advice stays simple enough to follow while you learn what works in your own space.
Paint and color
Choosing paint is easier with real examples. An honest review of HC-114 Saybrook Sage shows how a shade behaves on walls, and the section also covers matching palettes and special finishes for old furniture.
Crafts and holidays
Hands-on projects fill this section, including DIY guides, crochet patterns, and seasonal decor. The holiday ideas cover every occasion on the calendar, so there is always something to make or put on display.
Meet The Team
Camille Sutton wanted a hobby she could finish in one sitting. Knitting took too long, and painting had her fixing the same corner forever. Then she tried a wreath-making workshop. By the end of the afternoon, she was holding a slightly lopsided wreath, the first thing she had ever finished in one go. Now Camille shares wreath tutorials on The Painted Hinge that are actually doable, not just pretty. Readers return for her clear, friendly, no-nonsense instructions. She also leads local crafting workshops, which keeps her techniques grounded in what works.As she experiments and makes new things, she believes in sharing everything she learns in the process.
Clara Nelson has rearranged her own living room more times than she can count, chasing that moment when a space finally feels right instead of just looking right in the listing photos.She holds a B.S. in Interior Design. That training sharpened her eye for layout, function, and design, but she still trusts what months of daily use teach her more than any textbook.Clara writes the way she talks. Her sentences are clear, direct, and free of fluff. She knows most readers don’t want design theory. They want to know if a layout will work in their space or if a finish will hold up to spills. So she keeps her advice simple and honest. She shares what worked, what failed, and what she’d change next time. Nothing makes it onto the page until she’s tested it in her own home.
Colin Archer fell in love with DIY the first time a $12 can of paint completely transformed a thrifted dresser. That obsession with turning overlooked, ordinary pieces into something worth keeping has stuck with her ever since. With a Visual Arts degree and over 10 years of hands-on experience, Colin tests everything herself before she writes about it, mistakes included, so readers get advice that actually holds up in a real home. Her approachable, no-judgment style meets people wherever they’re starting from, and she regularly hosts community workshops to keep that connection hands-on and real.
Ella Fell picked up crochet to keep her hands busy, and it turned into a genuine love for the craft. She loves the rhythm of it and the way a pile of yarn slowly becomes something you can actually use.She tries different crochet patterns while watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and now her friends, family, and neighbors all own something she made.At The Painted Hinge, Ella writes for beginners fumbling through their first chain stitch and for people who’ve been at it for years and just want a new pattern to obsess over.She tests every pattern herself before sharing it, so the stitch counts and steps hold up when you’re sitting there trying to follow along.
Kendra’s earliest flower arrangement memory is not from a store or a fashion magazine. It comes from home. Having grown up in the early 2000s, her mom decorated their house with flowers for any special occasions such as birthdays, holidays, and even Tuesdays that required some extra coloring, and it was usually based on whichever peonies or daisies were available at the corner store that week. Kendra grew up learning how to make flower arrangements, and one day she felt that craving for making a space more cozy by using flowers to achieve it.
This desire stayed with her through college, working in a retail store, and answering phone calls at a dental clinic until 2016, when she decided to give it a try for real, having taken courses, becoming certified in AIFD, and spending the next 8 years making a career out of what she has always been passionate about. Now her work can be found in various lifestyle magazines; she still organizes her workshops, and she writes for The Painted Hinge simply because she likes passing on that feeling to someone else. She writes for anyone who wants flowers that look thought-through, not thrown together.
Rina Thompson studied marketing and then spent close to seven years as a brand copywriter at a mid-size consumer goods company, writing taglines and campaign copy that sounded effortless only after four or five rounds of revisions.
Somewhere in those years, life got messier in the best way. She got married, had two kids, and started collecting a running list of half-finished home projects that never quite got closed out.
It was a Tuesday morning in 2021. She had burnt the toast, her youngest refused to put on his pants, and Sunday’s laundry was still lying on the couch. Somewhere between scraping the burnt toast into the sink and losing the pants debate, it dawned on her: she made things seem easy for a living, but she had never read a single honest word about mornings like these. That very week, she started writing it all down on her phone.
She quit the brand job in 2022. Today, she writes about the stuff that fills up a normal week: morning routines that only work some of the time, weekend plans that get derailed, and the small habits that end up sticking around longer than the big ones. She’s not trying to sell anyone on a perfect life, just useful ideas from someone actually living in the mess of one.
Joel had zero business fixing that patio, and he’ll be the first to tell you so. He bought a house with a cracked, sinking slab out back, a bank account that said “absolutely not” to hiring a contractor, and outdoor skills that topped out at mowing a lawn without hitting the mailbox. So naturally, he watched four YouTube videos and called himself qualified.Three weekends later, the patio was done. Not level, exactly. There’s a corner that turns into a small pond every time it rains, and Joel has made peace with it, the way you make peace with a weird noise your car makes. But he liked doing it more than he thought he would, so he built a pergola next. Then a deck he had to redo twice. His backyard now looks nothing like the one he bought.
His backyard now looks nothing like the one he bought, and neither does his confidence. He writes about outdoor projects as the guy still making it up as he goes no formula, no shortcuts, just whatever actually happened when he tried.
Liam became an architect because of a sitcom, and he’s not embarrassed about it. In 2011, somewhere in the middle of a How I Met Your Mother marathon, half-invested in the plot but fully invested in Ted Mosby’s little architecture speeches, something clicked. He signed up for a design elective the next semester mostly on a whim, expecting to hate it and drop it by week three.
He didn’t hate it. He spent the next few years buried in models, blueprints, and building codes, pulling all-nighters over things most people never think twice about, and came out the other side in 2016 with an actual architecture degree, obviously. What he didn’t expect was how much he’d end up caring about the feeling of a building instead of just its measurements: why an old brick house down the street holds more warmth than something brand new and twice its size, and why nobody ever explains that part.
Now he writes about exactly that for The Painted Hinge, for people who’ve never opened a blueprint and never plan to. Some buildings are just functional. Others feel like somewhere you’d actually want to be, and that difference is what he keeps coming back to.
Finn is a dad of two who somehow became the family’s go-to cook, though it wasn’t always that way. A few years back, his idea of dinner was whatever came fastest: takeout, leftovers, cereal at 9 pm. It was watching his roommate treat instant ramen with hot sauce as a full meal that made him realize something had to change. So he picked up a $20 skillet and started cooking dinner himself, badly at first, then less badly.
After a few years of teaching himself, he wanted to understand why things worked, not just follow recipes. So, he enrolled in the Culinary Arts diploma program at Lincoln Culinary Institute, taking evening classes where he learned knife skills, classic sauces, and the techniques that make cooking feel less like guesswork.
These days, he writes for people with the same kind of evenings at The Painted Hinge. From the easy weeknight recipes, the basics that make everything else easier, and the occasional kitchen disaster he’s willing to admit to. If you’ve ever wondered whether scrambled eggs count as dinner, he’s been there, and he’s usually got a better idea.
In 2016, Preston bought a houseplant with no plan beyond “put it somewhere and water it sometimes.” It died in under two weeks. He didn’t try again for a while, blaming the plant more than himself. The tomato seedlings changed that. He’d followed the instructions exactly, and they still died, all of them, within days. That was harder to explain away. So he started actually reading about soil, light, and watering schedules instead of guessing and testing what he learned on whatever plant was willing to survive the process.
By 2018, things had turned around. The lawn stopped patching itself with dead spots. The houseplants stayed alive past the two-week mark, then past a year. What had been an embarrassing habit of killing things became, slowly, something he was actually decent at.
Now, with close to a decade of doing this, he writes for people at the same starting point he was at in 2016, the ones staring at a dead plant, unsure what they did wrong. He still remembers just wanting someone to tell him what to do, so that’s what he does now no lecture, just what actually works, whether you’ve got a backyard or a single windowsill.
Mallory Copeland has never met a season she didn’t want to decorate for, yes, quite literally, she has multiple stashes of things – season wise in her storage. And anyone who knows her knows that she’s usually pulling out pumpkins before October is even there. She changes her pillow covers before fall is officially here, and according to her, apparently there’s no such thing as putting up garland too early. As a perfectionist, Mallory has always paid attention to the little things, and this is where the habit began. 5 Years ago, she started with small changes around her own home. One fall, she switched out a few cushion covers, put an old wooden tray on the coffee table, and added some dried stems she had. And that’s her favorite, favorite decor to date. The room was exactly the same, but somehow it didn’t feel the same. That feeling stuck with her. Every year after that, she found herself doing the same thing instead of buying a new set of decorations. By then, decorating had become a bit of a ritual. Mallory experimented at home to find quick, reusable, and cost-effective DIYs, discovering some “easy” projects were not as simple as people claim. About 3 years ago, she tried making an autumn centerpiece two days before having people over and eventually dumped half of it for candles and branches from her yard. She loved doing it, at this point! Today, Mallory shares seasonal decorating ideas she has tried herself, along with practical ways to make a home feel festive.