“Freckle & Fair,” a home and lifestyle blog, makes an aspirational lifestyle attainable with attitude.

by Kaylen Ralph

photo courtesy of “Freckle & Fair”

Since the early 2000s, lifestyle and “shelter” blogs have increased in popularity and volume, which means it’s harder to find the real gems. Although I’m definitely biased, “Freckle & Fair,” a home and lifestyle blog collaboration between graphic designer Theresa Berens (who also happens to be The Riveter’s creative director) and freelance photojournalist Katie Currid, is the best possible combination of aspiration and attainability. Their attitude makes DIY projects and a well-curated lifestyle at least feel within reach, which is hard to do. They describe Freckle & Fair as a “Midwestern love letter between two friends,” and even though neither of them live in the Midwest anymore (Katie is based in northern Italy, Theresa in Brooklyn), their roots ring through their content.

A big bonus is that these ladies love their whiskey; they were even kind enough to share some Freckle & Fair whiskey cocktail recipes with us as we continue our month-long “Women & Whiskey” celebration (those are soon to come!). Because it’s easier to start a blog than it is to maintain it, my interview with Katie and Theresa focused on what it took for them to turn a pipedream into a reality, and what it’s been like to grow F&F over the last year.

Kaylen Ralph: Y’all started Freckle & Fair with the idea that it would be a good way for the two of you to keep in touch while living oceans apart. Pre-Freckle & Fair, were you simply swapping recipes, projects, etc.?

Theresa Berens: We launched the blog when Katie came to visit me in Brooklyn after months of brainstorming — right before she moved to Italy! Prior to that, we shared projects via email, text, etc. Before starting the blog, I had stayed away from a lot of social media after college (without a really articulate reason for doing so). In the months before we launched the blog, I’d often text Katie photos of whatever I was working on (I think we called it a Theresa-gram) to see if she thought it’d make good content for the blog. I later started an Instagram account like a normal 20-something.

Katie Currid: We were also just sending each other insane emails constantly about whatever we wanted to make (also a lot of Snapchats of our cats, or Snapcats). In my case, I was baking a bunch for friends and coworkers, and then probably telling Theresa, “Damn girl, I made this bomb-ass pie the other day and it won the in-house baking contest in the newsroom against all these Southern women!” Also, Theresa sends really thoughtful homemade gifts, and typically if she’d make something, I would somehow end up getting it in the mail later — old-school style.

KR: You met while attending the University of Missouri School of Journalism. What are your respective backgrounds, and what has it been like for you to combine your talents in this venture?

TB: I was a magazine design student and dropout art major in college, and I did art internships at magazines in New York during and after college. I did feature design and illustration at my hometown newspaper before moving to New York last January to take a job as a graphic designer at a film nonprofit. I think our skills complement the each other really well, but there’s also a lot of learning going on on both ends — and that’s intentional. We’re both pretty into Skillshare and the idea of lifelong learning. Food photography is so hard, guys! Katie’s photos are so beautiful and it’s something I really struggle with. In some ways, being apart is a good thing because it has forced us to try new things we might not otherwise have attempted.

KC: First of all, I am so surprised Theresa is still my friend after she was my roommate our freshman year. I am so neurotic and also cried a lot about my long distance relationship with my then-boyfriend (now-husband). My background is in photojournalism, but I always, always loved working with Theresa on basically anything in college. She would take my photos and just treat them just the way they needed to be treated and make them shine, which, from my perspective as a photographer, was the sign of an amazingly talented and humble designer. Theresa is absolutely that.

Before now, I have worked in traditional newspaper jobs — interning at various newspapers from Portland to Dallas to Long Island, and eventually was a staff photographer at an amazing community daily in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. I obviously do like, zero photojournalism on the blog, but it’s really nice to branch out and do something different than what I’ve been doing as a job for the last five years. Sometimes it seems silly — my super talented friends are covering very serious issues and I’m over here photographing some pie I made. But I do it with the same passion that I do journalism — because that pie also has a story, and my recipes are very much inspired by culture and tradition, and my photojournalism was also very anthropological. So I don’t really see them as that different — it’s just the subject matter that has changed.

KR: Is Freckle & Fair your first collaboration? Did you work on anything together during college?

TB: Katie was one of the very first people I met as a freshman when we were randomly paired as roommates. We weren’t BFFs immediately, but I do remember me designing a banner for Katie’s SmugMug account that year. It was awful. But we’ve been collaborating from the beginning. I designed covers for various college magazines, and Katie and I were always scheming on the best ways to shoot them.

KC: Theresa and I both worked at The Maneater, Mizzou’s student newspaper together. Theresa was very innovative as the editor of MOVE Magazine, their arts insert, and I was the photo editor. She would always come up with cool stories that would have great art to go along with them, and I would always get first dibs on shooting them.

The most notable thing that we worked on together during college was a cookbook that never saw the light of day, which was the basis for this blog. Theresa and I combined family recipes (most desserts) that we grew up with — banana bars and crème de menthe brownies, and Rice Krispie pinwheels and s’mores bars — and baked them and shot them in my ill-equipped college apartment. Nothing ever came of the cookbook — we graduated college and went off on our busy lives — but the spirit of that book, with recipes curated from our grandmother’s kitchen cabinets, is what inspired Freckle & Fair.

KR: When was the first time you actually discussed the idea of a blog aloud, and how long after that did it take for Freckle & Fair to launch?

TB: I think we talked about it in general, big-dream terms for as long as I can remember, but I remember making concrete plans at True/False last year (2014). We spent a ton of time brainstorming and Skyping in the next seven or so months. I work full-time and freelance, so part of it was just needing to make time for it. But we also wanted to be really happy with the name and overall concept because we’re hoping to be doing this for a while.

KC: We definitely talked about some sort of way to work together post-college a dozen times, but what finally got our asses in gear for the blog was my move to Italy. My husband is in the military, and when he received his orders for Italy, I knew I’d have to leave my much-beloved traditional path as a staff photographer behind. I also am not able to work in Italy as a freelance journalist, or in any capacity besides on the military base, because of a NATO agreement and my status as a military spouse.

So I knew I was in for a world of hurt in my transition from my publication-driven, type-A nut job, career-in-gear lifestyle to being basically a reluctant housewife. I knew if I didn’t have something active to work on and build, I would go crazy, so I was basically like, “I need this blog to finally happen.” I very much wanted a place to publish things, and wanted it to be bigger than just my personal photo blog. I also felt that Theresa was constantly working on cool personal projects that never saw the light of day because she’s just not a braggy person like that — and I wanted people to see the amazing work she was doing, too.

I visited Theresa in New York the month before I moved to Italy, and we decided it would be a blast to take some pictures, do a few projects together and launch our blog the week I moved. It was such a fun jumping-off point to start a very intimidating transition in my life.

KR: How has the blog evolved from that original concept of a “Midwestern love letter between two friends?”

TB: That’s definitely how I like to describe it, but it’s a blog; you can’t remove the audience from the equation! We’ve had a lot of conversations recently about our content — would our readers like this, does this fit in, etc. But it’s still so new that I think we can afford to be selfish and explore new things as the mood strikes.

KC: When we started, we were like, “OK, we’re going to do crafts, recipes, and photos” because that was our bread and butter. But then we’d start emailing about something that didn’t fall under that umbrella, and we’d ask each other, “Can I blog about that?” Of course we can! It’s our blog. So, we try to just blog about whatever we want. We like the feeling of it just being a place to express ourselves — whether anyone’s listening or clicking or not. And I think being genuine in that sense is more important than being like, “Oh, we should write about this because when we write about this, it gets a lot of views.”

KR: I love the “approachability with attitude” aesthetic and voice that you bring to Freckle & Fair. I think it’s important for “aspirational” lifestyle content to feel attainable to the everyday reader, and you guys just nail that. How do you balance inspiration from traditional shelter magazines and blogs with your own unique lifestyle(s)?

TB: What a flattering question! It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when comparing your blog or life with a shelter or food magazine or with a lifestyle blog with a huge audience and budget. I have to remind myself that it’s all fantasy, anyway. It’s kind of like models in fashion editorials: beautiful, aspirational, but not real. I don’t like to pretend our lives are perfect, even though that’s a really tempting thing. I hope that, by acknowledging that, the blog feels more authentic and attainable. Making stuff shouldn’t be hard or scary or intimidating, even though Pinterest Fail would have you believe otherwise.

KC: This is seriously the most thoughtful question! Thank you.

We’re like, both 25. We don’t know shit about life yet, and are classically trained in like, 10 percent of what we write about. When I put up shelves, I don’t know what I’m doing — and mostly figured it out through a million phone calls to my incredibly patient, very helpful father. I figure I need to share that knowledge with the rest of the 25-year-olds who want to put up shelves who maybe don’t have a handy dad to call.

There are enough lifestyle bloggers out there with beautiful lives that we totally envy — we totally don’t mind taking pretty pictures and then telling you about the hiccups that happened along the way and the pile of dirty dishes just out of frame. We’re inundated with enough images every day from carefully-curated social media accounts. Your self-esteem deserves a rest.

KR: What inspires you (a broad question, but please be as specific as you’d like)?

TB: I’m inspired by people who build things with no resources (like True/False Film Fest or lots of other great non-profit art ventures). I think I’ve always felt like a fake because I didn’t go to art school, so I’m also inspired by anyone who can just pick up and create the company or career or life they want without family connections, fancy schools, etc. I think money is the dirty secret behind a lot of great startups — lots of people could have had the idea to start Warby Parker, for example, but without a rich family and lots of connections, it probably wouldn’t have gotten very far.

KC: I get most inspired by culture  — being an outsider and being able to recognize things that I am not used to that maybe Italians do not know is uncommon in other areas (like those magical bidets!). It’s a really great perspective to have for creativity. I also think changing seasons helps a lot with perspective — like seeing things in the spring fresh out of the dead of winter. I like looking at seasons and appreciating things, like food, in their time of peak perfectness.

KR: Freckle & Fair’s breadth of content is so expansive. What’s your favorite subject to blog about? What’s been your favorite post so far?

TB: Without sounding like a lush, cocktails. Whiskey, specifically, because it’s my favorite. I think that’s largely because I don’t have a lot of time and cocktails aren’t as time-consuming to experiment with as, say, a layer cake. I think my favorite post so far was our brown sugar cinnamon bourbon cocktail. I think it tastes pretty great and I just love the photos Katie shot for it.

KC: I’m kind of all over the place subject-wise. My staple is absolutely food, but I’m really loving doing travel photography and writing posts about where we go, and recommending restaurants and such, because I am reading so much more content like that now.

My favorite post we’ve worked on is probably the Friendsgiving printables. It was so fun to brainstorm all the ridiculous phrases on the pie boxes — like “Open your pie hole” and “FUTURE FEAST.” I was giggling so much when Theresa and I were emailing back and forth about it. It was just a really fun collaboration that I think highlighted our voice very well — plus, Theresa did a fantastic job on the design.

KR: What are your future goals for Freckle & Fair? Have they changed at all since you started the blog?

TB: We’ve talked about opening up a little online shop to sell prints and other merch with photos/illustration. We love the models of Sevenly and Art to Aid, and I hope to follow a “giving back” model with whatever financial success we find. Personally, I hope to do more illustration, both on our blog and in general. It’s something I’ve known I’ve wanted to do for a long time and just haven’t made the time to really focus on it. It’s time!

KC: The biggest reason we started the blog, besides collaborating on a project together because we love working together so much, was to be able to have a place to showcase our skills. It’s definitely still that, but I think for me, I just want to be able to fine-tune my craft into more specific niches and perfect them, while also exploring others, and be able to apply that to a self-sustaining career someday.

In addition to an online shop, Theresa and I also have pipedreams about opening a brick-and-mortar shop together in a Midwestern city someday. We talk about how we will raise our children there and definitely have a shop cat with a ridiculously fancy name, and make things every day together, instead of being separated on opposite ends of the world.

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Kaylen is The Riveter’s co-founder and editor-in-chief. She moved to Minneapolis, MN after graduating from the Missouri School of Journalism in August 2013. In addition to her editorial duties at The Riveter, Kaylen also works as a freelance researcher for The Sager Group. You can follow her on Instagram and Twitter at @kaylenralph.