Watercolor Crush

I have a confession to make.  I have a problem.  It started when I visited one of my favorite places, The PA Fabric Outlet.  I stopped by to check out the $0.99/yd. and $1.99/yd. tables and look for some fabric for new bedroom curtains.  I was looking for something with a neutral background and a floral print, when I spotted this beauty from across the room.

It reminded me of a dreamy watercolor painting.  The picture makes the fabric look a little more green, but the leaves are really more of a blue-green.  I didn't think that the fabric would fit my bedroom, so I continued looking.  I found fabric that I thought would work in my bedroom.  The sales associate told me that I could take a swatch of the drapery fabric so I thought, "it won't hurt to take both swatches."  When I got home, I couldn't believe how nice the blue, watercolor linen looked with my green walls.  I knew I had found some material for new dining room curtains! (Yes, I decided to make new curtains for both my dining room AND my bedroom!)  Sorry kids, that's a post for another day.

And so, my obsession with watercolor began.  Stay tuned for a few more posts featuring watercolor.  This fabric inspired me to make curtains, create some art for my bathroom, and to make invitations for an event I'll be hosting.  Have you noticed this trend?  Lately I've been seeing it everywhere!

A watercolor cake?  Gorgeous!

Wow!  What a beautiful manicure to celebrate spring!

  

 Check out this hand-painted wedding invitation!

I love this look!  It's so fresh.  And just in time for springtime temperatures to hit Central PA.  One of the great things about watercolor is that it's inexpensive, and you can easily DIY a few things for yourself.  I'll be sharing my ideas soon!

Linking up to the Inspire Me Please Linky Party at Liz Marie Blog

Springtime

We've had a long, cold winter in the northeast, and although it's technically been spring for a few weeks, it has really only started to feel like spring the last few days. Saturday was the first day I've been able to get outside in the garden and start to get ready for the upcoming growing season. It was so exciting to push some of the dead leaves away and see some signs of life. The first thing to come up in our garden is, of course, the daffodils. They began blooming just in time for Easter.

Here in central Pennsylvania it's too early to plant annuals. You should wait until the danger of frost is gone. The safe bet is Memorial Day, but I can usually get away with planting annuals around May 15. Even though May 15 seems like a long time from now, there are still some things you can do to get your yard ready.

1. Cut away any dead parts of your perennials. This weekend I did that with my sedum, black-eyed susans, and yarrow. It's important that you make sure sure you can see some new growth before you do this. You should not do this to shrub-like plants like lavender or thyme. Wait until the middle of May to trim these plants back.

You can see the green, new growth.  I've cut back most of the dead, woody stalks,
 but I've left a little bit there.

Bachelor button is looking good!

2.  Cut off your ornamental grasses.  I recently read a tip to tape around the grass or use bungee cords around the grass to make this process a little more neat.

Oops!  I see a weed I need to pull under the grass.  Ugh!

3.  Prune Russian sage, Butterfly bush, and rose bushes.  It's a good idea to add some fertilizer after pruning.

4.  Prepare soil.  I have a small vegetable garden that is weed infested  I sprayed Round-Up in that area and in a week or two I'll turn the ground over and add some compost.

Herb Garden

Weed infested vegetable garden.  :-)

Some of my favorite signs that life is returning to the garden. . .

New growth on a hydrangea.  I was worried that it may have died at the end of last summer.

A tiny yellow blossom on dwarf forsythia.

I hope you have some lovely weather to get out and get working in the garden.  Now is the perfect time to get some work done, so you can enjoy your garden later!

New Bedroom Curtains

I mentioned about a week ago that our bedroom is featured in Apartment Therapy's "My Bedroom Retreat" contest.  Recently I've been working on a few changes to the bedroom. One of them is a set of new curtains.  I'm not the greatest seamstress in the world, and I don't have a fancy sewing machine, but curtains are just about the easiest thing you can sew.  If you would like to sew curtains for your windows there are many great tutorials you can find around the web. 

You may remember from last week's post that the curtains we had in our bedroom were bright white.

I like these curtains, but there were a few problems with them.  First of all they don't cover the windows.  We have really long windows in our house, and we need four panels to get full coverage.  For these pictures, I took the other two panels off.  There are kind of an ugly brownish, yellowish color.  The second problem is that they let a little too much light in for my liking.

Lately I've been craving more pattern and color, and I found exactly what I was looking for at my favorite fabric shop, The PA Fabric Outlet.

I wrote that curtains are easy to make, and they are, but these curtains did cause me a few problems.  I added the border to the bottom.  The fabric outlet only had ten yards of this fabric, and I needed about twelve.  That's one reason that I added the border.  I also think it helps this heavy floral to seem a little more modern.  Here's a closer look at the pattern.



Remember this image that I posted in my first blog post?

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My new curtains remind me a little bit of these curtains.  Here's a closer look at the border.

The other trouble I had with these curtains came when I discovered that my curtain rod is not straight.  It sinks in the middle, so I had to measure the panels on the rod to make sure I hemmed them evenly.  Through this process I discovered how to sew with a blind hem stitch on my machine. 

I highly recommend making your own curtains.  Find a fabric outlet where you can get discounted fabric, and get to work!  If I would have bought these curtains they would have been at least twice as expensive as making them.  Get sewing!

I'm linking up at Liz Marie Blog's Inspire Me Please Linky Party!

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Entryway Ideas

Entryway, landing strip, call it whatever you like, everyone needs a spot in their home  to drop and sort things when they come in.  Different houses have different types of layouts.  We enter our house through the kitchen so that's the most logical place for us to set up an entryway.  Our house does not have a designated "mudroom."  Here is some inspiration I've found around the web.

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Do you have an entryway?  A mudroom?  How do you keep your things organized when you come into the house?   Which one of these pictures is your favorite?

Our Bedroom Featured!

Hello!  Apartment Therapy is having a contest called "My Bedroom Retreat."  I thought it would be a great opportunity to test out my new camera and practice staging a room.  I was so excited that they accepted my our room for the contest.

I could only submit five pictures for the contest.  Here are a few more of my favorite shots.



It would be great if you could head over to AT and favorite my room for the contest!  See my profile here.

I have some new curtains in the works for this room that I can't wait to share!

What do these pictures have in common?

Like every other blogger out there, I love collecting pictures and links that I find around the internet on Pinterest.  I probably have a few hundred pictures of home decor pinned.  This week I decided to choose my very favorite design pictures and put them together in one board.  I thought that I might be able to look at the pictures and see what it is that I'm really drawn to in design.

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Take a look at my board and let me know what themes you notice.



Dresser Turned Buffet

When I was directing the high school musical one year, we needed a dresser for one of the scenes, so one of my students brought one in.  I would tell her how much I liked the dresser, and when the show was over she said, "my mom said if you like it so much, you can keep it."  Well, that was nice, but I really didn't have a place for it until about a year and a half ago when I got married.  It is a nice piece of furniture, but it was definitely in need of some tlc.

This is the only before picture I have.  It was missing some hardware and had a blonde finish with the details painted in blue.  I decided to sand down the top and stain it and paint the rest of it a glossy black.  Here's how it turned out.

Detail on the top.



It was too bad I couldn't use the original hardware.  The most difficult part of this process was trying to find hardware to fit.  I ordered a set of knobs from eBay that I really liked, but because the drawers were so thick, I couldn't find any screws that would fit.  I ordered this set of knobs which I also like and had to get metric screws.  I still need to get some washers to tighten some of the knobs.