A summery wreath

I have been thinking about making a new wreath for our front door since springtime. I have a few things I like that I alternate throughout the year, but nothing that really stands out for spring/summer.

I like my wreaths to be cute and themed, but also somewhat neutral. I need to be able to forget to take it down after the season ends and not have it be totally out of place!

I was extra inspired when I asked my friend Mandy what she wanted for her birthday - and she wanted a summer door hanging. Done and done!

I came across this wreath on my friend Biz's blog and knew it was the right one for both of us. I won't bore you with how I made mine because her instructions are great. I actually went to Hobby Lobby and bought the exact same supplies she did!

It's a pretty simple creation - a wreath from Hobby Lobby, wooden letter painted in whatever color, and some fabric rosettes.

They're pretty easy to make, though be prepared for a glue gun burn or two and it does get kind of tedious to make a lot of them. Biz has the cutest video tutorial if you haven't made them before.

Here's what it looks like on the door. I'm happy with how it turned out!

What do you think? Does it make you want to come inside and visit??

Click HERE to see the blog parties where I'm linking!

Knock Off Anthro Letters

Our decorating projects are always a compromise and collaboration. It usually starts with me having an idea, Zac throwing in his two cents, and then us settling on a design or idea that's a mix of both. It usually works out well for us, and we end up liking our compromise idea better than either original.

The cool thing about planning a bedroom remodel is that every night as we laid in bed we ended up brainstorming ideas. You might remember that our bedroom has two closets. One night, Zac suggested that we add some cool letters above the closets that said "his" and "hers." To be honest, I wasn't on board at first. No one goes into these closets but us, and we know whose is whose.

The idea started to grow on me, though. I looked up getting the metal letters from Antropologie.... but $18 a piece? Yikes. It was time to go all DIY on this project.

We started with these paper mache letters from Hobby Lobby. At $2.47 a pop, they were a steal. We went with the paper mache version because they were thicker and stand off from the wall a little bit, plus we liked the font. They had flatter wood letters also.

We took a gamble on the Krylon metallic spray paint - we weren't sure how it was actually going to look on the letters. The verdict? What else in my house can be spray painted metallic???

Beautiful, and not even close to finished. We did one coat on each letter and made sure to get the sides, but that's it. We went inside thinking it would need a second coat later, but when we saw this we knew we would be fine.

Isn't that spray paint amazing? It must have other uses in my house - anything that isn't as shiny metal as I want it to be!

We took the letters upstairs and attached them to the wall with poster gum. They are really light, and there wasn't a good way to use nails to hang them. I did have a flashback to being in 8th grade and using poster gum to hang N*SYNC posters on my walls. Oh, the memories.

Here's a close up of my letters. Can you tell they aren't metal? The light even reflects the way it would if they were really metal.

Zac's letters.

Here's a shot of them over my closet.... 

and over Zac's. I love the textured element the silver adds to our greyish/blue and white color scheme. They look fantastic, and they've been up for two weeks and haven't fallen down yet. You've gotta love that poster gum.

What do you think? Would you be fooled into thinking they are the real deal? And most importantly, what else can I spray with the metallic spray paint??

Click HERE to see the blog parties where I'm linking!

This post is brought to you by the letter N.

Isn't that from Sesame Street? It's what went through my head the whole time I was making this letter!

We have a fireplace in our living room, which is great. It's the mantle from you know where, which is not great. I know no one ever believes me, but it's awful.

Here it is empty:



Those columns are the death of me. I painted them to blend in with the wall, but they're always in the way. Putting things on them makes them too high, but if you just decorate the inside of the mantle, it's too narrow. Oh the problems I have.

As a reminder, this is what I did for Christmas:

                                  

I think it worked to be crazy overdecorated at a time of the year that you crazy over decorate things, but for every day? I'm not so sure.

I gave you a sneak peak above, but the only permanent additions we have so far are the mirror and the yarn letter "N."

Note to self: immediately take a photography class. I found these daisies at Michael's a few weeks ago, and I thought they were worth a shot to add to the mantle. I don't usually love fake flowers, but these are big enough that they don't look like I'm pretending fake flowers look real. This is what you would see as you walked in our front door.

I swear it doesn't look this cluttered in person. Yikes. They do add a fun pop of color though, right? Although like my living room needs any more pops of color. It's borderline over the rainbow at this point.

Aww. Aren't they pretty? Maybe I just need twenty more daisies??

So here's where I need your help. I still hate the mantle. I still think it looks empty and boring and un-inviting. I still think it needs other things. But I don't know what.

Here's a straight on shot so you can get an idea. And give me ideas!

What else do you think it needs??

Quilts on a Ladder

I found this picture on Pinterest awhile ago, and I'd been dreaming about finding an antique ladder to hang quilts on ever since.

Love this one too. Especially covered in cashmere blankets. Sigh. As if.

Quick side note - when was the last time you said, "As if?" It seemed relevant in this post.

Fast forward to the day I decided I wanted a ladder for my living room. If you want one too, here's my advice. Good stinking luck finding one. If you can find one on Craigslist, it will likely cost a zillion dollars. And that's a huge IF. So unless you are already a garage saler / antique fair stalker, I don't know how you will find one.

Unless you are supremely lucky and the universe is smiling upon you.

I'm working on a project with a teacher whose parents love to antique shop. I mentioned months ago how much I'd love to have an antique ladder, and that if her parents found one I'd gladly buy it. This was pre-Christmas. It was awhile ago.

Fast forward again to last week. I came home from a meeting and saw this beautiful piece of wonderfulness next to my front door!

Even Instagram can't save my crappy photos. Oi.

I asked Zac where it came from and he said, "Some lady just came by and said it was for you?" My teacher-friend's parents had found it and gave it to me! And it's GLORIOUS -- It's about 8 feet tall, and has so many rungs, for so many quilts!!

My grandmother is bringing me some of her quilts when she comes to visit in June, but here it is filled in the mean time:

Do you love it??

It is SO tall!! Here's a view of it in the living room:

Another shot:

Don't worry. Taking a photography class is high up on my list of things to do after graduation!

If you're curious about the quilts...

1. Second quilt I ever made... still my favorite.
2. Quilt Zac's grandfather made. So precious that we have it.
3. Quilt Gramma made me for Christmas a few years ago.
4. Our Christmas quilt. It's a placeholder!!
5. I love this quilt. My gramma pieced it by hand from scraps. We only saw her a few times a year when we were younger, and I remember her making it over multiple visits. There's even a square that I added that has my name on it! It's GIANT, and it's so special.

What do you think about the ladder? Be honest. It's more country chic than we usually do in our house, but it's so unique and I think with modern quilts it isn't too much? Reassure me, please!!

Picture Wall Close Ups

Yesterday I promised you close ups of some of my favorite things on our picture wall. This wall is a mix of things, but I do have a few that I just love the most. Let me warn you now that I take terrible pictures normally, but pictures of pictures taken at night time are especially awful.

This is my very favorite shot from our Trash the Dress session, which gave it the prime spot on the picture wall. This is a bridge that usually has cars on it, so we had a lookout at either end and did this shot quickly!! The wind blowing my dress is my favorite part!

This is one of the very first pictures we ever took together, and it makes me smile!

Oh, I love everything about this. The day of our wedding it downpoured. I mean, rained cats and dogs. Rained so so hard. We had to take pictures inside at a Conservatory, and there was a woman there sketching. She walked up to my sister and handed her this -- it's me! Isn't it amazing??

Just when I think the last one was my favorite. This is a picture of Zac's grandfather taken more than 50 years ago. My favorite part? How much it looks like Zac! We've had three friends ask what Zac was eating in this picture -- I love how they resemble each other so much!

This is my grandmother and her brother when they were younger. Isn't the reflection so neat? When you're looking at it in person, it's really difficult to tell which side is right side up.

So there you go -- a close up of our picture wall. Is there anything you display that you love that I haven't thought of yet??

Picture Wall Re-Do

Our family room was one of the first rooms we decorated when we moved in. There were some things (like buying a couch) that just couldn't be avoided unless we wanted to sit on the floor.

I love this room. It's where we spend most of our time, and I really do think it's comfortable. There are a lot of bright colors (the pillows, the rug, and the pallet art), but the neutral walls and television cabinet provide balance.

There's only one part of this room that's always felt a bit off to me, and that is the picture wall. We had envisioned a wall of photos that wrapped around our sectional similar to the way the couch wraps around the wall. But, and I'm not completely sure why, we just never accomplished that goal.

Here's what I'm talking about:

As a side note, we paid $8.99 for the lamp hanging over the couch at IKEA. It's the best lamp ever.

Do you see what I mean about the picture wall? We thought that the mix of frame colors would be awesome, but it wasn't. We thought this would be the punch of color the room needed, but it wasn't. We thought this would be a lot of pictures and make the wall feel full, but it didn't.

We went to IKEA to get some more frames. We went like fools and didn't measure or count out how many or anything. We just bought a bunch of different sizes and got SUPER lucky. We were short two small frames, but that was it.

The next step was to create newspaper templates of all of the frames. This didn't take very long at all, and it was well worth the effort.

Hey there, pre-Christmas advertisements.

I know some people lay out their frames on the floor, but that doesn't work for me. Fun fact you probably didn't know - I am terrible at visualizing things (which is probably why I struggle so much when I'm sewing patterns). This helps me get a better idea of the actual layout.

Looks easy, right? WRONG. Fast forward SEVEN HOURS LATER, and we finally got to this point:

This process was exhausting. We started with the large frame, and worked out. We didn't want the frames to be completely symmetrical, but we also didn't want them to be too wonky, either. We initially wanted the whole thing to be a large rectangle, but ultimately we had to give up and allow the bottoms to be staggered. I'm really glad we did this -- it's one of my favorite parts about it now!

We pulled some pictures from the old picture wall, ordered some new ones, and found some other frame-able things laying around.

Together, they make magic!

Side note about the naked lady? I bought her at a farmer's market in Seattle. I brought it home and showed it proudly to Zac. He said, "You bought a naked lady?" and I said, "What naked lady? I don't see a naked lady?" He turned it right side up. And I said, "Ohhhhh...." And I took these pictures before putting in the last two pictures. Oops.

We are thrilled with the results. I think the change to all black frames (so they pop on the white walls), putting them closer together, and adding more frames solved our earlier problems. The wall adds a lot of color to the room, and also lets us display some of our favorite pictures and memories.

Hope you like it, too! Tomorrow I'll share close-ups of some of my favorite pictures, but in the meantime, click HERE to see the blog parties where I'm linking!

And just for fun, a blog picture outtake...

Bedroom Makeover

While looking at my calendar last week, I noticed a small miracle. We had nothing planned from Friday afternoon until Monday morning. NOTHING. That literally never happens. Well, it literally happens once or twice a year. I frantically called Zac to see what home project he wanted to tackle.

We threw around the idea of the dining room, downstairs bathroom, painting the kitchen cabinets... but nothing seemed really exciting. We had been planning to do our bedroom last, like, way way years from now last, but Zac suggested we tackle it this weekend. We hadn't picked out bedding but we had a vague idea of what we wanted, so we went for it!

And we worked HARD. As in, painting ceilings and trim and doors and walls hard. Not putting down drop cloths and having to scrape paint off your laminate floors hard. But it was so so so so worth it.

Fast forward to picking out bedding. I accepted long ago that I would probably never again sleep under a printed duvet or quilt. There just aren't any that we both like. In fact, the following conversation occurred mid-bedding hunting:

Me: "Do you like this one?"
Zac: "No."
Me: "What about this one?"

Zac: "No."

Me: "This would be much easier if you didn't sleep in bed with me."

Zac: "Ditto."

He is a man of few words.

I'm not ready to show it to you quite yet because we don't have curtains or art hung yet, and we're waiting on our duvet cover, but I'll give you a small preview. This is the quilt we found that I adored and Zac thought was "fine." I didn't ask one single question after that. I just bought the damn thing.

                                         

It will have a white textured duvet on the bed, too. It's hard to see it here, but you can see better pictures if you visit the Pottery Barn website. The pictures really don't do it justice - I actually looked at it online but didn't think much of it. When I saw it in person, I was in love.

I had a friend ask why I didn't just make the quilt, but I didn't for a few reasons. One, I can't sleep under something I made every night. I'm too crazy and all I'd see would be uneven edges. I'm not proud of that. Secondly, it honestly isn't cost effective. It would have cost me way more money to make it than to just buy it. Finally, I wanted a solid looking quilt without a lot of piecing. I can't get giant fabric the way Pottery Barn is. And, it took me 20 minutes to buy it. If I made it, I wouldn't have had a new quilt for months.

I'll send you pictures as soon as we have the rest of it finished, which will hopefully be soon. In the meantime, does anyone know where I can find some affordable faux silk white curtains? You might remember my curtain rant from last year. I want these to look luxurious, but I want them to be cheap. Let me know if you find any!

A very holiday mantle

I have a love-hate relationship with our fireplace and mantle. I love that we have one, but I hate that it has these ugly half columns that break up the entire space and make it really hard to decorate. I suggested to Zac that we try to remove them, using the "how hard can it really be?" argument. He didn't fall for it - maybe it was the idea of smashing bricks and replacing dry wall that didn't appeal to him.

So... I took on the challenge of decorating and disguising. Here are before pictures of the mantle.

Believe it or not, this room has flat paint, so I'm not sure why it has crazy flash bounces on the walls. Oh, and it's since much cleaner than in these pictures.

See what I mean about the columns?

I'm going to skip a bunch of steps and just show you our finished holiday mantle. I finished some of our permanent, all year round additions just before Christmas, so I'll give you more details on those once we take down the holiday decorations and make it "normal" again. 

But in the meantime... it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

We still need to get a stocking for Derby! The bride and groom English Carolers were a present from my mom last Christmas. The mirror and N were DIY projects that I'll tell you about later (they're part of the permanent collection. Like our mantle is a museum). Oh - I've also since watered the poinsettas and they're slowly coming back to life!

I'd love to see your holiday decorations too. How long do you leave them up? These bad boys will find themselves living in a box by December 27 at the latest. As soon as Christmas is over they start to drive me crazy - and funny enough, both my mother and my mother-in-law do the exact same thing! My co-worker who leaves her tree up until Easter is a whole different story...

Fingerprint Art

My neighbor/friend Clare is an awesome person to have close by. She actually was friends with my younger sister in college, and we connected through a professional association. When we found out we only live a few streets from each other, we (well at least I) were in heaven.

And this is why. Clare and her husband like art that is unique and meaningful. When Tony went away for the weekend, Clare decided to surprise him and create art based on their fingerprints. I know, you already love her.

This is the master bedroom they started with.  The floors are light wood, the walls are a cream color, and the bedding is tan. It was a whole lot of tan, and Clare and Tony decided they wanted to add some color. They had agreed on a navy accent wall behind the bed, and Clare got to work while Tony was gone!

To make the art, she first scanned their finger prints on the highest quality setting and uploaded them to Photoshop CS3. She did some rasterizing of the zoomed-in imageds (I have no idea what that means) and then digitally over each other. 

After playing around with the prints in Photoshop, it looked something like this.

She printed the images, and made them 8.5" x 8.5". This is solely a personal preference because Clare loves square art. I love square art too. And pretty much everything else Clare likes.The black and yellow represent Clare and Tony's fingerprints - this will make more sense in a minute.

She taped the image under tracing paper and...

Started painting! She painted each layer in a different color using the color scheme from the bedroom. So, brown for the furniture, cream for the bedding, and blue from the walls.

Clare called this part painstaking. She literally pulled an all-nighter. She is so cute/crazy. And she did this four times....

After the first color had completely dried, she went back through and added the second layer.

Here's the final print with all three colors added together. She made four total, so mixed the main color so that the prints felt modern and fresh.

Another print with more blue. When they had dried, she matted them on white cardstock, leaving a 1/4" border around each edge.

She matted the pictures using fancy tools like this. Y'all, I was not kidding when I said that she is a crafty fancy artist person (if I didn't say it yet, I'm saying it now). This woman is tal-en-ted.

Here's a sample of the finished product. Totally unique. Totally modern. Totally gorgeous.

Here they are matted over the bed! Aren't they gorgeous? They totally pop against the navy blue wall.

A close-up shot.

There you have it - some of the most beautiful and personalized art I've ever seen. Her husband loved it by the way... how could he not?? Be super jealous that Clare is not your neighbor/friend. Right now I'm trying to figure out how to con her into helping me make some sort of art!

Think of the possibilities with her method too - there are a lot of cool things you could paint onto tracing paper and them frame! Thanks, Clare, for sharing your creativity and talents!