Procrastination Friday

Yay for cool design stuff we've been looking at this week!

Good stuff to do with all the fabric scraps you have laying around - I know this was helpful for me!

http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/chicago/fabric-textiles/10-easy-ways-to-put-your-fabric-stash-to-use-090781

I'm in love with the dark color of this room. Although, for practical use, you really need to have those high ceilings, or it'd feel like you were living in a cave. It's so dramatic, like a darker version of the periwinkle color I loved when I was little. The little island of warm cognac leather looks so inviting against the dark background.

Lately, we've also had a mild obsession with chandeliers. We bought an excellent one on craigslist, like a vintage George Nelson Bubble Lamp, but much cheaper. I don't love that it's not the pure white of the originals (ours is a cream color), but for a difference of 1200 bucks, I can deal. We removed the contractor special in our apartment's dining room and replaced it with our find. We can hardly wait until we have a house of our own with more than one good spot for fun, hanging lighting. We've been eyeing this one (at DWR), but can't quite justify the price tag. $1200...not sure whose Reach that's Within...not ours.

Mark also sent me a link to this sweet car on Wednesday, the new Mercedes electric, gull-wing sports car. Whoa. I might pass out from too much awesome. The original from 1955, and the new version, set to be available in 2010.

Painting Experimentation

Our new apartment, while being larger, also ended up feeling more desolate because of the large, generic apartment-white painted rooms. So, in an effort to make our big, white space feel like home, we did a little painting. We've done three rooms so far, with plans to eventually do a couple more, including our bedroom. The only problem is that we'll have to prime over all our hard work when we move out. We had thought about wallpaper (too expensive and messy), textured wall tiles (again, expensive), stenciling (not really on a large enough scale) and finally decided to try painting a pattern. The first is one Mark found online that I was able to reproduce using a large, tagboard stencil that I created. This one took about 6 hours to do, using two colors of paint and realizing about 1/4 of the way in that tagboard doesn't hold up well with wet paint.

The guest bedroom, which our moms are using while staying with us for now and will eventually be Dane's room, was done with a couple widths of painter's tape. We based the design on one used by a decorative painter that is a contributor to ApartmentTherapy's ColorTherapy section. It turned out okay, but if I had to do it over, I'd probably use the wider-width tape on all the portions of the pattern. 

Patterned Wall Painting

In our new apartment, Mark and I decided to paint since we knew we'd be here a while. It makes a place feel so much more like home when the walls aren't stark, apartment-building white. In the living room, we duplicated a pattern we saw on a design blog that Mark follows. It was done using a tagboard template I created and took WAY longer than I thought it would at first. The fact that the tagboard started to warp after the first pattern sure didn't help. But with some creative taping and a very cute extra set of hands from Mark, we were able to finish it.

For Dane's room, I want to use the lighter of the blues from the living room, and use painter's tape to create a geometric pattern. But I want to do something more exciting than the typical stripe. I found this on ApartmentTherapyNY, and thought it would be decently easy to reproduce. For the sake of time, I think I'm going to limit the more complicated swath to a smaller stripe around the top 1/3 of the room. The tape I chose is also about 2 inches, versus this thinner tape. I was toying with the idea of doing a 1/8 turn, making the grid square instead of diamond, or maybe trying to use both thinner and wider tape. Not sure yet how it's going to work. I'll put the results up when I'm done. All of this to say that I need projects! My fear of feeling purposeless in this new phase of life is motivating my creativity like you wouldn't believe. I hand-pitted 2 lbs of cherries today while the babe was sleeping. There has to be an easier way...note to self: buy cherry pitter...

Curtains

For the Daner's room, I need to make a set of curtains so it remains dark in the morning, since we're now facing the sun. His bedding is Zoo by DwellStudio for Target. What do you think? Other ideas? THese are just a couple of fun fabrics I found today - not necessarily all for his room, but good stuff nonetheless.

Starting at the beginning...again

As you can see from all the previous blog posts, this isn't something I've been very good at. I'm starting a new chapter of life, being at home to be with our babe, and one of my goals is to rediscover some of the things that used to make me tick. I'm going to work on adding some of the stuff I'm working on and inspired by to this blog, more to keep track of it for myself than anything. I just spent about 30 minutes trying to remember how/where I saw an awesome handmade wallpaper lamp online. Never did find it, but it just goes to show that I need to WRITE STUFF DOWN if I want to keep track of it. I hope you add your thoughts and inspirations as well.