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Ch-ch-ch-changes

September 30, 2011 in Dining Room, Downstairs Bath, family room/office, Guest Bedroom, Kitchen, Laundry, Living Room, Master Bedroom, Projects with 10 Comments

When I first started blogging, I thought maybe it would be fun to document and show off all the home decor and crafty projects I ‘d be doing anyway. I had no idea that my little project-completing engine would be hurled into overdrive. I’m so motivated by the desire to always have more new and interesting projects to share with y’all! I’m awestruck when I think about how many projects I’ve tackled just since I started blogging.

Can you believe that this was my entryway for the first year that we lived in this house?

And just look at it now (sporting a new bench and shelf)…

I took the porch from this…

To this (after I added a mailbox,painted the door, added plants, brought in art, stripped the original hardware, and finally spray painted the deadbolt to match the knob and lockplate)…

In the living room, I made a zebra-print floorcloth, constructed a shelf out of a floorboard I found on the side of the road, brought in a vintage quilt, made a pouf, and am almost done reupholstering the wing chairs. (not to mention some smaller projects, like a throw pillow, some wall art, and patterned coasters)

Before:

After:

The dining room isn’t quite as dramatic, probably because I’d already brought in the dropcloth slipcovered sofa, leaning bookshelf, blue painted dresser, and floating wall shelves before I started blogging. But even with all that work already done I’ve tweaked it by switching out the coffee table and painting it mustard yellow, creating a set of eclectic dining chairs, and swapping the tablecloth for a fringed burlap runner.

Before:

Dining Room

After:

There are lots of smaller projects in here as well, like the paper garland on the dresser, the fabric flower pillow I made using a brooch that I wore with my wedding dress, and the acorn silhouette I made just last week.

The kitchen is woefully stagnant. Nothing has changed at all, but I’ve got big plans for this space, like painting over the fleshy beige, adding some upper cabinets on either side of the stove, and opening up that awkward pass-through to create a casual eating area. I just gotta save up some moolah, which isn’t easy when I’m always blowing through my monthly home improvement budget to fund more projects to blog about.

The laundry room was so sad before I started blogging that I didn’t even include it in the original house tour. But Nick and I painted it blue and switched out those awkward cabinets for some open shelving that spans the full width of the space, adding tons of personality and function.

Before:

Laundry Room

After:

Upstairs, in the master bedroom, we got new bedding, reupholstered the hope chest, painted the armoire and chest of drawers, made a little chalkboard message area, put curtains on the fifty billion windows, added flair with some homemade throw pillows, and brought in some art.

Before:

Master Bedroom

After:

Even the rooms we’re not really focusing on got a little love, like new hardware in the guest room…

Before:

After:

Some fabric organization in the office…

Before:

After:

And a new shower curtain (with ribbon detail), bath mat, and art wall in the downstairs bath…

Before:

After:

I’ve been a busy lady these last seven months! I just can’t believe how quickly things have changed. The whole house just has so much more personality now. A few years ago, I couldn’t have cared less about home decor. But something about having a house awakened the creative bug in me and I’ve had so much fun discovering and refining my personal style (luckily I had a rental house to practice on first–imagine lime green bedroom walls and all my stuff from college. I’m glad those days are behind me). I’m sooooo excited to see what the house looks like six months from now. Maybe I’ll finally have saved up enough dough for some upgrades in the kitchen? Or be decorating a nursery (for the child I have yet to conceive)? Only time will tell, but you can bet I’ll be blogging about it.

P.S. check out the house tour page for more pics of each room!

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Yella Pella

August 29, 2011 in Crafty Goodness, How To, Master Bedroom with 11 Comments

By that I mean yellow pillow. As in this little bit of awesomeness…

I dreamed up this idea for a pillow yesterday morning and was totally inspired to create it as soon as possible. This yellow fabric has been sitting in my stash for over a year. Clearly it was just waiting for the opportunity to become a pretty little pillow for my bed.

It was really easy and fun to make. I thought about making it in a circle shape, but I didn’t have a round pillow form or any loose batting. I decided to make it 14″ square to work with a pillow form I already had. I cut two 13.5″ square pieces of fabric (I like to make my pillow covers a little tight so they look nice and full), then just cut looooong strips from the same fabric. This was the most time consuming part. I just cut and cut and cut. I could make one really long strip out of a relatively short piece of fabric by cutting almost all the way to the end, then turning around and starting a new cut going the other direction, like you see here:

Make sense? I eyeballed my strips to be about 1″ wide, but they certainly weren’t uniform or anywhere near perfect. The beauty of this pillow is that sloppiness just adds interest to the final product. Every now and then I would stop and kind of lay out the strips on the square of fabric to measure my progress. By the time I was sure I had enough, I had three long strips.

I joined the strips together using my sewing machine.The edges didn’t match together perfectly, so I just sort of folded the bigger one a bit.

My original plan had been to sew the strips to the pillow, but as I sat there staring back and forth from the fabric to my sewing machine, I started thinking about how much of a pain that might end up being. Plus the sewing machine is so loud that I can’t talk to anybody or even listen to music or the TV while I sew. I decided to glue the strips to the fabric while I watched TV with Nicholas and his brother. A much more pleasant way to spend my Sunday afternoon than slaving over a sewing machine.

It’s worth explaining that I’d decided at this point that I won’t ever be washing this pillow. If I wanted it to be washable I would need to A) do something to prevent the strips from fraying (either by hemming or by treating them with liquid fray-check), and B) use fabric glue. I much prefer to use regular ol’ craft glue over fabric glue (which I find tiresome to squeeze). Craft glue doesn’t fare well in the washing machine but is mega-sturdy for all other purposes, so craft glue it was for this little pillow. I ran a line of glue down the edge of my strip, then pressed it onto one of my 13.5″ squares in a circular fashion.

I just kept wrapping and wrapping around, gluing and pressing as I went. Whenever I got to a weird part (like where I’d reached the edge of the fabric in my strip-cutting) I just folded it about the right width and kept going.

At some point I decided the strips were lying too flat and started ruffling them a bit as I glued.

Glue and press, glue and press…

Then I got the genius idea to run a line of glue where I wanted my strip to go, instead of on the strip itself. This was much more efficient.

Almost done…

When I got to the end I just squeezed a bunch of glue in the middle and twisted what was left of my strip up into itself.

Voila!

I gave the glue a while to dry (maybe an hour or so), then followed the same steps as I did for my blue chevron pillow to get it ready for action. I laid the other square of fabric face down on top of it, sewed around three and a half sides, trimmed my corners, turned it inside out, stuffed my insert in, and stitched up the opening by hand.

Bam.

I love love love the way it looks on my bed. I’m also loving how much more of my bedroom I’m able to photograph with my new camera! I’m working on taking updated pictures of the whole house so I can update my house tour page.

Speaking of updates, check out the new header that I made! (if you read my posts via email or a reader, click on over to the homepage to see it) I am far from being a graphic designer, but I wanted something new to let folks know what this little corner of the internet is all about. I write mostly about my home, but every now and then my crafty escapades take me outside the realm of home decor (as in my ruffled fabric necklace), and I like to throw in some posts now and then about general “life” stuff, as well, like the one about staying calm even when things aren’t going your way. Because a pretty house and a talent for crafts does not a great life make. You gotta have the emotional slash relationships slash health slash balance stuff there too. So the new header gives me license to write about that sort of stuff without feeling like I’m straying too far from my core mission. Holla.

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Love on a Canvas

July 1, 2011 in Crafty Goodness, Master Bedroom with 10 Comments

Remember that blank canvas I hung next to Mr. Pavo Real while I waited for inspiration to strike?

Well, feast your eyes on this!

It all started when my friend Brittany suggested I try my hand at a button monogram pillow. I loooved the idea and ordered a bag of mother of pearl buttons for about $10 from etsy. The more I thought about it, though, I thought the button monogram would be a really cute idea for the canvas hanging above the armoire, especially since my original idea to do a meaningful quote had pretty much been scrapped when I realized that a quote on the canvas plus a quote on the chalkboard might be a little too much of a good thing. Plus the likelihood of a cat chewing off all the buttons was significantly lower on the wall versus on a pillow. So the graphic + easy to DIY + cat proof nature of a button monogram canvas was perfect.

I cute a scrap piece of linen to fit my canvas and printed out a big ol’ letter T to use as a template for placing my buttons. Fortunately, I had the foresight to test out the button arrangement ahead of time. Turns out these buttons weren’t going to stretch as far as I’d hoped.

Hmmmmm….what to do. I printed the T out in a smaller font and tried again.

My buttons still were not providing ample coverage, and I feared that if I shrunk my T any further it would look dinky on the 11×17 canvas. I needed a plan B. I pinterested (just made pinterest a verb. like googled. it was inevitable) “button art” and discovered lots of lovely ideas, but these two (by etsy seller Cloth and Patina) particularly caught my eye.

Cloth and Patina

Cloth and Patina

And so I was inspired. I went ahead and stapled my linen around the edges of the canvas and then laid out the buttons to spell “Love.” Then, I took a scrap of ivory cotton, folded it in half, and cut out what I think of as a hipster heart, the tall and skinny kind as opposed to short and round (like me). I used my sewing machine to stitch around the outside edges of the heart so it would look like it was sewn on, but since my linen was already stapled to the canvas it wouldn’t be sewn in real life. I used craft glue to adhere the buttons one at a time, then ran a bead of glue around the perimeter of the heart and stuck it on there.

I let the glue cure for a few hours before hanging it up to admire.

My only regret is not flipping the buttons over to all show their pearly sides, which I think would look a little prettier. If I get real ambitious one of these days I might just check and see how strong that craft glue really is. If it’s not too difficult to pop off the brown-ish ones and flip them over then I’ll be on that like white on rice. Overall, I’m really pleased with it. It balances out the neutral tones in the bunny silhouette without being too matchy-matchy, and of course it ties right into the white cotton and oatmeal-ish linen bedding. I even ended up with 18 buttons leftover. Any ideas about what to do with those? It’s my dream to someday have enough mother-of-pearl buttons to fill a big jar and sit on a shelf. Like this:

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Improvised Art

June 16, 2011 in Master Bedroom with 0 Comments

I love love love sticking notecards and postcards in picture frames and acting like I’m fancy so when I got these two little freebie notecards with my print from Valentina Design I was stoked.

“The day you decide to do it is your lucky day.” Love it!

I thought they’d be a nice counterpoint to these vintage New Orleans postcards I got at an estate sale a while ago for 25 cents each. While Nick and I are both from the N.O. suburbs, he’s the only one of us to have actually lived within city limits so I framed and hung them on his side of the bedroom to represent.

I hung all four notecards in matching frames from my Ikea stash (the smallest ribba), and they looked quite dapper, if I do say so myself.

But when I stepped back to look at the big picture, something just wasn’t right.

Maybe it’s because the contents of the frames are so different, or because of the vertical vs. horizontal orientation, but I feel off-balance just looking at it. Maybe it would be better if the vertically oriented frames were hung side by side, rather than one over the other? The wonky lampshade certainly doesn’t help. I seriously need to get to the “lamp repair” portion of my bedroom to-do list ASAP. Truth be told, I’m a bit scared of how much it’ll cost to get my grandmother’s lamps rewired (tried it myself, epic fail).

I feel like either the Valentina prints or the New Orleans postcards will stay, but not both. We’ve already got Mr. Peacock and the bunny silhouette and that may be enough wildlife for one space, so I’m leaning toward keeping the NOLA postcards in here and putting the Valentina prints in the guest bedroom. If you came to visit my house, wouldn’t you like to roll over and see one of those pretty pictures? As long as you don’t have an issue with birds. Every time I look at that first one I imagine the bird squawking out “Hello” like a parrot with a British accent. Adorable. But I could see how it could quickly turn terrifying for the bird-phobic among us.

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