Easy No-Sew Window Treatments for a Little Girl’s Room Complete with Bows
In a little girl’s bedroom, window coverings are essentially ‘bling’ for the room. It is a sure way to give the room a unique look and a feminine quality. However, in any child’s room safety should be a priority and hanging drapes and curtain panels are not ideal. On the other hand, often the only other option is a boring roller shade or drab mini blinds.
More on Easy No-Sew Window Treatments Project
A Victorian Christmas Tree: Get the Look for Your Home
A Victorian Christmas tree is all about over-the-top opulence and excessive detail. The Victorian Christmas tree style started in 1841 when Queen Victoria and Prince Albert put one up and all of England followed suit. Victorian Christmas trees do not use the traditional red and green coloring that is typical today. Instead, more elegant colors were used, such as dusty roses, brilliant blues, deep burgundies, delicate ivories, and sparkling gold.
Victorian Christmas trees were often decorated with small toys, candy, popcorn strings, fruits, nuts, handmade ornaments, and baked goods. Individual candles were originally used, but with the invention of string lights the use of clear white lights are a much safer option for today’s Victorian Christmas trees.
More on Creating a Victorian Christmas Tree
Shelves are the simplest, least expensive, and most versatile type of storage you can buy. Your choice should depend on practical considerations, such as strength and adaptability, as well as on good looks.
It’s tempting to imagine that tile first item a caveman invented was a shelf. At the very least, he would certainly have utilized any fiat ledge in the cave to store his tools and cooking pots. Finding somewhere to keep all your possessions, and leave space for your future belongings, is still an ongoing challenge in any home. To solve any shortage of storage and space, a combination of functional and decorative shelving is an attractive solution.
More on Choosing Shelving Effectively For Your Home Decor
If there’s one food that embodies Christmas to perfection, it’s gingerbread. Bake it, and your entire house smells like a holiday. Nibble it, and you’re transported to Christmas past. But what elevates gingerbread above a mere seasonal treat is its decorative quality. Turn it into ornaments and gifts, and every tree or tabletop it touches seems joyous. Even its monkish hue, which may not look very festive, is a warm and amiable backdrop for whimsical shapes and fanciful icing in any color you like.
The gingerbread cookie was the favorite Christmas treat of early-American children. It became popular because it was inexpensive to make and resilient enough to withstand the vagaries of wood- and coal-fired ovens. Gingerbread enthusiasts, however, like to point out that gingerbread became beloved for its taste—that inimitable combination of molasses, ginger, cinnamon, and nutmeg—and for the fun it provides.
More on Christmas Decorating With Gingerbread
What could be more glorious than a holiday table laden with fruit? Fruit is nature’s bounty and an eloquent symbol of its richness. The Dutch and Flemish masters immortalized fruit, as well as flowers, in their prettiest still lifes. But it was the French, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who refined fruit centerpieces into soaring pyramids of glistening cherries and grapes; elaborate epergnes whose branches were filled with strawberries, figs, and miniature apples; or a single golden pineapple served up on a pedestal.
The French built centerpieces in a variety of vessels, mixing real fruit, flowers, and leaves with ceramic fruit. Sometimes the fruit was meant to be eaten, and other times not, since some of the techniques to make a pyramid stable, like drizzling warm caramel over the arrangement or pouring water over it so it would ice, made the display purely decorative. But then a fruit centerpiece was designed less to be tasted than to dazzle and to amuse.
More on How to Decorate with Fruits
It never fails, every time you need to wrap a gift you find yourself sprawled out on the kitchen floor with gift wrap, bows, tape, and scissors spread out all over the place. Your legs start to cramp, the tape sticks to the gift wrap, and the scissors keep disappearing under a pile of bows. What to do?! Why not turn that unused guest room into a gift wrapping center that will make wrapping gifts both fun and functional?
Making your own gift wrapping center is easy and doesn’t have to take up a whole lot of space. If you don’t want to dedicate an entire room to your gift wrapping center, try placing some of these organizational elements inside the closet or hide them behind a curtain that you can pull shut when you’re not wrapping gifts.
More on Turning an Unused Guest Room into a Gift Wrapping Center
Black and White Family Photography: Creating an Awesome Wall Montage
Displaying your family photos in black and white can be a great way to highlight your special moments. Converting your color photos to black and white is simple and affordable and arranging them into a montage is an effective way to create an attractive visual statement.
Choose photos that will tell a story when grouped together, perhaps of family trips you’ve taken or a collection of special events. Once you’ve decided on the photos, you’ll need to convert them to black and whites. If your pictures are in digital format, you can use a program like Photoshop to instantly convert your color photos to black and white without damaging the original photos. You can convert those old photos from your albums by scanning them and printing them out onto photo paper. You can also edit these photos in Photoshop if you like. If you’re not computer savvy, go to your local photo shop or kiosk and have a professional convert your digital photographs for very little cost.
More on Black and White Family Wall Montage
Filed under DIY Projects by admin
Weekend DIY Series: Transform Your Laundry Room from Washed Out to Crisp and Clean
Let’s face it, you probably spend a lot of time in your laundry room doing the wash, but spend little time thinking about its decorating style. For a room that most of us spend so much time in, it’s usually one of the most ignored rooms when it comes to interior design and decorating. Perhaps it’s because the time spent in the laundry room is boring, mundane, and uninspired. So, why not transform it into a crisp, clean, fun place to be and add some excitement to your daily chores?!
The first thing you can do to spruce up your drab laundry room is to add a little color. Stay away from really dark shades because they can make small rooms feel even smaller and the reflection of these darker colors onto your clothes can actually make them look dingy and more difficult to see stains. Instead, choose bright and airy colors, like a sunny yellow, soothing light blue, girly pink or grassy green. Bringing in a sense of the outdoors will make you feel like you’re hanging clothes on the clothesline in the breezy summer wind, just like grandmother used to do!
More on DIY Laundry Room Decorating
The Lo-Down on Hanging Art Attractively & Effectively
Puzzled about how to hang your pictures, paintings and other wall art objects for maximum impact and attractiveness in your home? Take heart. While choices in styles and types of art vary widely, the “rules” for hanging them are few and sensible. If you know the rules for hanging art at the right height and in the correct manner, your home can look like a chic art gallery and have a definitive interior decorator feel with very little effort! Here are a few tips to help you hang your art correctly:
The eyes have it: Hang art at eye level for best visibility and greatest impact. Whose eye level, you ask? Yours, of course. While you will undoubtedly entertain guests who are taller or shorter than you, you will be spending more time in your rooms than they will, so hang art where your eyes can most easily take it in. If you happen to be a particularly short or tall person and you choose to hang your art for the enjoyment of others, use a height of 5′6″ as your guide – being the average height to cater to. In private homes, “eye level” is generally considered to be judged from a seated position; in public halls and reception areas where people stand more than they sit, “eye level” is assessed while standing.
More on How to Hang Artwork
Understanding Scale When Purchasing Artwork and Accessories for Your Home
Although your unique personal preferences may want to take precedence over basic logic, understanding scale is essential when you select artwork and accessories for your home. Choosing accents that fit properly into a room without getting lost or overwhelming the eye can be trickier than it seems.
Here are a few points to consider when choosing the ideal artwork and accessories to enhance your living space:
What is the shape of the area where you will be adding artwork or accessories?
More on Proper Size for Artwork & Accessories