Hey, friends! I’m Elsie Larson. I founded A Beautiful Mess wayyyyy back in 2007. I started this blog as a way to share my life with my friends and family. I didn’t expect it to become a side job, much less to launch my career. But here I am seven years later, blogging for a living… with my sister and best friend, Emma Chapman!
(Oh! If you’re brand new, Elsie=dark hair and Emma=light hair.)
On this page I’ll share my story, embarrassing photos, and vital statistics (like what television shows we are watching and what I do on the weekends). I wish this wasn’t such a one-sided conversation. So I’m going to pretend we’re out getting coffee, meeting for the first time.
Got your coffee? OK, me too…
I work with my little sister, Emma. We’ve been best friends since I was a freshmen in high school and she was in middle school. We have worked together for about five years. We opened up a vintage store together, and it was pretty slow during the weekdays. So we started working more and more on my blog together. Emma started sharing recipes here, and then I invited her to become a coauthor.
Emma is my better half, my biz soulmate, and the main reason we’ve been successful. (insert dancing twins emoji here)
Since then our brand has expanded beyond our wildest dreams (to be fair—our dreams were not very wild). We’ve written two books together (one + two), launched a product line and multiple collaborations, and created two #1 selling apps in the iTunes store!
Our blog is now read by nearly 2 million unique visitors each month. Today, A Beautiful Mess is one of the most visited blogs in the world!
I feel like I’m bragging a little, so here’s an awkward photo to keep us humble….
OK—where was I?
So here’s what A Beautiful Mess is all about! We publish an average of twelve times per week. We strongly believe in writing a blog we would read, so our content evolves season by season according to what we’re excited about.
Gotta keep it fun, right?!
We write about food, home decor, photography and crafts. We also share personal stuff like our outfits and blogging tips!
A Beautiful Mess has grown into a company! We work with a team of people to do all that we do. You can meet our entire team here.
Here’s a sampling of some of our favorite posts! (Full disclosure—with over 4,000 posts in our archives, this isn’t a full list, but it’ll be enough to show you what kind of stuff we do!)
Before and Afters are one of our biggest passions! After months of DIY, planning and messes—words cannot describe how happy it makes us to look at how far our rooms have come. This one is the kitchen we currently use for our workspace. (photo tour/video tour)
Here’s my kitchen at home…
Full tour here.
And here’s Emma’s living room before/after. Pretty rad, right?
See that dining room table? We built that! (One of my favorite projects ever, and I’m still using it to this day!)
See that rug? You can totally make one too. Or this one. Or this one. Or this one. We’re really into making rugs.
I could go on all day, but I’ll move on to food for now. If you want to browse more, you can see our full archives here—CRAFTS/HOME DECOR.
We’ve got nearly five years of food archives to browse, but one of my all-time favorites are still these Strawberry Shortcake Donuts. (You can see all the donuts here.)
Double Stuffed Oreo Jello Shots (Laura makes the best jello shot recipes! See more novelty cocktails here.)
Homemade cookie butter is probably our most dangerous recipe of all time.
These honeycomb sugar cookies are one of our personal favorites.
And if this list is making it seem like all we do is eat sugar all day, here’s our counterbalance…
Salad in jars! (So yum. So healthy. And cute too.)
We’re about to write our 150th outfit post. We call ’em “Sister Styles” and you can see them all here!
We have a shop! We launched it last fall, and we come out with new subscription kits on the 10th of every month.
We have two monthly subscription clubs! The first is called Happy Mail. You can get $50 worth of cute stationery each month for only $15!
Our second subscription is called Messy Box. It’s a scrapbook kit designed by Elsie!
We are always dreaming about the future, so stay tuned for more adventures!
This has been fun! Thanks for taking a tour of our site! We’re glad you are here.
Please follow us on Bloglovin’, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. We respond to comments here on the blog daily!
xoxo. Elsie + Emma
