I love blues and greens. No matter what I do in my homes, I'll always incorporate different shades of those two basic colors in at least some of the rooms. I typically lean towards lighter, softer shades of blue. However, recently I have been interested in bringing some stronger color touches into the room.
Before, our large sofa area looked like this.
I still like this a lot, but since the spring I've wanted to bring in more blues with the summer season. There are a couple of different pillows in the room--I love the stronger blue lines around the border. It's a little more geometric in design than I typically use.
I changed out the large black Ikea frame from a vintage bird poster to these Natural History vintage shell printouts (Graphics Fairy blog). I painted some cardboard roughly for an edge and used Mod Podge to adhere four printouts to the center of the cardboard. I love the colors and the way it turned out overall.
Our TV stand used to look like this.
You can't tell from the above photo, but there is an open back under the top surface which allows a few cords to be visible. This always drove me nuts! So I did a new version, shown below.
The back is now finished with a cardboard shape I cut out to fit the space and covered with sale fabric. No more cords, and I like the beach vintage vibe of the fabric! You can also see that I tried to create a grouping of pictures. I've always loved that look but have never really done a random group of frames and photos. Some of the frames display printouts are from the Graphics Fairy blog. GREAT resource!
The bottom piece is a ceiling medallion from Home Depot. I made a background with a botanical print from Graphics Fairy and put a picture of my dad and my son in the middle. I am going to experiment more with different ways to use the ceiling medallions in the future, next time using paint to accentuate the designs around the border.
Our living and dining rooms are connected by a wide doorway with a nice flow. I don't like too many things out in both rooms, it makes me feel overwhelmed. It takes away from the beauty of a few items when there are so many to look at all at once. So I removed some items from the dining room to keep it simple.
In the photo below, I covered a piece of cardboard with a burlap remnant I found and used upholstery tacks I had left over from another project to update our dining room photo board. I used a couple of black and white photos my son and I took recently for Father's Day. I slipped it inside a garage sale frame that I got for about 50 cents and had already painted earlier. The burlap coordinates with the khaki sofa fabric from the living room.
A few tweaks and a few dollars and we're soaking in the beach vintage vibe I enjoy so much. My taste is still evolving and I can't change everything at once, but it's a lot of fun to experiment! Now...the craft projects and tweaking MUST be done as we have guests coming this weekend to stay for a week. The fun part of preparations is done and the grunt work begins...CLEANING. I have a wonderful friend who is going to take my son for a day while I do my best to get our apartment ready for nine people to live together. Whew.
