Welcome to How to Decorate from Ballard Designs, a weekly podcast all about the trials and triumphs of decorating and redecorating your home.

I'm Caroline. I'm on the marketing team. And I'm Taryn and I'm a product designer. I'm Liz. I head of the creative team.

We're your host. Join the expert team at Ballard Designs for tips, tricks, and tales from interior designers, stylists,

and other talents in the design world. Plus, we'll answer your decorating dilemmas at the end of each

episode. We love answering your questions, so don't forget to email us at podcast at balderdesigns.net.

Now on with the show.

We have one of our favorites. A big treat for y'all today. He is an A-Time author, and he's releasing his latest book, Home Again, A Return to Gracious Interiors, Mr. James Farmer from Perry, Georgia.

Hi, Caroline. Hey, Liz. Hey. You're one of our favorites. You've been on the show many times before. And I know that you're one of our audience favorites because I have multiple friends who tell me that yours are their favorite episodes.

That's sweet.

Such a treat to get to chat with you again.

Thanks, girls.

And talk about your new book home again.

Eight books is a wild number.

And I feel like we have to start there because I'm curious how you keep going.

What makes you want to keep writing books?

And what was the initial sort of inspiration vision for this one?

Well, okay. so loaded question and the answer really goes back to college. And even before college, it went back to kindergarten.

I know that sounds really strange, but so in kindergarten, our teacher, so we, you know, I'm from a small town and me and my middle sister and my three first cousins, we all had the same kindergarten teacher.

And so we all have these stories about, you know, her and, but one of our assignments in kindergarten was we took some construction paper and folded them and

you know we made a book and I was I was so excited because we have a big military base in our community

so I wanted to do this patriotic book and there was a kid a girl in my class named Amber. And so Amber Ways

of Grain. And so I drew Amber. She's waving in a hayfield and, you know, fruited planes. Well, I didn't

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