A Little Bit of Sewing for the House.

The last couple of years have found me busily sewing for my business, and that resulted in a serious lack of creating for our home. No more! We were finally in a place where we could begin to paint our living space, and that really inspired me to make our home as much of a cozy nest as I could. It's very slow going with three kids, the business, and homeschooling, but we're getting there. A couple of weeks ago I dusted off my sewing machine and stitched up a couple of pillow covers and some new curtains for our bedroom! I did the work over the course of a couple of days. It didn't take long, but the impact seems huge to me. 

I had enough fabric left from the curtains to make a cover for one of our blah-brown couch pillows. Using a nice coordinating houndstooth fabric I covered another of the pillows. I think the pop of black and white is a nice contrast for my quilt (seen in the background)! There are two more throw pillows left uncovered at this point, but I think I may fancy them up for a reading nook I'm working on.

I also dig the mix and match patterns in the bedroom.

Black and white is a great neutral, and it's so easy to add some pattern into a space using them. I'm really looking to do some sort of DIY wooden headboard eventually. I'm hoping a rustic headboard will bring some masculinity to the space. In the meantime that floral garland is taking up some of the ginormous white space above our bed.

What home improvement or decorating projects are you working on?

On a Painting Spree.

After four plus years of living in this house, the contractor white paint that is on all of the walls can no longer be cleaned. Well, really, it hasn't looked clean in quite some time, I just can't stand it anymore. At any rate, we're finally at a place where we can paint it- so we are! It's a slow and arduous task to be sure, with three little ones running around, but we're determined to have the living room, dining room, and kitchen finished by the end of the summer. My husband just got a month long temp job that will certainly make this time-frame a stretch, but yay(!) for some work.

It didn't take me terribly long to settle on a color for the living room and dining room area. Although technically two rooms, the extra wide doorway between them makes the dining room truly feel like an extension of the living room. Both rooms are pretty small, so it was no question for me that we would paint them the same color so as not to make them feel even tinier. While browsing Pinterest for color inspiration, I realized that I really love neutral wall color in living rooms. I thought about going with a shade of white, but realized that I needed a bit more of a change, so I opted for Crown Point Sand, which is part of Benjamin Moore's Historical Colors collection. It creates a nice backdrop, has a definite greenish hue, and seems like it will compliment our cherry bookshelves and grandfather clock nicely.

The kitchen was a little bit more of a trial to choose a color for. I've always dreamed of having a yellow kitchen. You know, that perfect shade of cheery yellow? Well, it's not super easy to find. Yellow shades are tough! I'm not a professional, and I didn't want to spend a ton of money on purchasing paint samples. I also wanted to be sure that the color would flow coming off of the dining room, so I decided to stay within Benjamin Moore's Historical Colors collection. Hawthorne Yellow it is, since that's practically the only real yellow they've got! It is certainly a more dull yellow with undertones of red. I'm anxious to see the color on a whole wall. I think it will also enable me to keep the red accessories I've got going on in the kitchen already.

There is a ton of woodwork in our home. A ton. And since the bottom half of all of the kitchen walls are wainscoting, we wanted to choose a trim color that would work in all three rooms. And while it looks lovely, all that woodwork has to be sanded before it can be primed. The old plaster walls are soaking up the primer as well. That means lots of sanding, two coats of primer, and two coats of paint on everything. Blech. We've been painting for a couple of weeks now, and haven't even finished one room yet! But we'll get there.