Tag Archives: home decor

Brika Lovelies

The items from my first Brika order arrived this week! (Remember that Joss and Main meets Etsy site I told you about last week?)

These two prints are by Satchel & Sage (you can find their Etsy shop here). I loved the colors in the feather print. The other print is part of their Artifact series and is titled “The Writer.” So of course, I needed it. And the prices were very reasonable. I love reasonably-priced art!

The other item I purchased is this hand block printed scarf by Maelu Designs. Maelu’s shop/art has a pretty cool story; she uses sustainable textiles and hand-prints each item. You can read more on her website. It’s just as lovely in person!

Have you discovered Brika yet? Have you ordered any awesome curated handmade goods yet?

*I solemnly swear I am in no way affiliated with this site, nor was I paid to write this post. The opinions above are my own, about an awesome site/brand/product/artist that I want to share with you*

Cheers to Art, No. 2

My friend, Katie, and I spend a lovely Saturday morning this past weekend sipping mimosas and painting up a pair of shoes at Cheers to Art.

This was my second visit to Cheers to Art and it was just as fun as the first. Maybe more so, because I love mimosas!

But drinking and painting can result in wonky looking shoes, even when you’ve traced a shoe stencil onto your canvas.

But everything turns out great in the end!

If you’re in the Cincinnati area, check out Cheers to Art in Madeira and Downtown/OTR!

Spring Forward?

Is it really the end of March? If so, could someone please tell the weather patterns to start cooperating with the normal average temperatures and behaviors for this time of the year? I don’t know how much more of this dreary, snowy, rainy stuff I can take. It literally took everything in me to muster my bee-hind off the sofa yesterday, change out of my flannel pjs into sweats (yea, you read that right), and attempt to put together some springy/Eastery vignettes around the house. Who can get motivated for Easter decor when there’s two inches of snow on the ground? At this point, I firmly believe that it will be 35-degrees with grey, cloudy skies for the rest of 2013. Blah.

Anywho, here are a few signs of Spring that I sprinkled around our house…

diy’d washi-tape eggs / framed felt egg / vase via my March UmbaBox

My grandma made the eggs in the foreground – she even personalized one for me <3

Hopefully these little signs of Spring inside will encourage more signs outside. Hopefully.

How To: Create a Gallery Wall

Finally! After months and months and months and… you get the picture (ha! pun intended), we finally have a gallery wall in our family room. I thought the hardest part would be arranging the frames, but the hardest part turned out to be selecting what would go up on the wall! And dealing with a certain unruly zebra pencil sketch whose dimensions didn’t want to cooperate with the frames I’d purchased.

Let me give you a breakdown of how to hang it – I found this method to be SUPER helpful, and I would definitely use it again.

Start by tracing your frames onto paper. I’ve seen all kinds of things on Pinterest, like craft paper or newspaper. I started this after Christmas (yes, I realize that was nearly 3 months ago… I am notoriously/embarrassingly slow at completely projects), so I grabbed a pile of used wrapping paper that was, errm, still is, waiting to be recycled.

If possible, employ a frame-tracing helper. An 8-lb puppy is excellent for this task, until she starts shredding all of the paper all over the floor…

Once you’ve got all your templates traced and cut, arrange them on your wall with tape. It was awesome how easy it was to rearrange the layout until I was happy with it. And great to see a “true-to-life” size layout instead of just doing sketches on the backs of junk mail envelopes. I had also arranged the frames & pictures on the floor, but seeing the arrangement up on the wall made it a little easier to evaluate what went next to what, how close/far apart should they be, etc.

From here, you can mark where you want the nails to go, or nail directly through the paper templates. Then get to the good part… hanging!

If you’re curious, here are some details on what I chose to hang. From top left: hummingbird photo by EZ Pudewa (of Creature Comforts fame), which I purchased from her Society6 shop / watercolor tree print by Angie Vandenbogaard / culinary postcard / zebra pencil sketch from my dad’s aunt / leftover suzani fabric from my placemat project.

I like that we still have room to add onto the gallery, especially on the sides, or upward to the ceiling. I don’t feel like it’s quite “finished” yet, but at least it’s a nice little collection to start from!

Have you hung a gallery wall? Have you tried the template method? Or did another tip work really well?

PS – all of the frames came from Michaels. They offer quite a few options in a Gallery collection, and you can even find/buy templates to follow if you don’t want to create one yourself. They weren’t too pricey, but I made sure to stock up when they were on sale, or take my 40%-off coupons with me. Another reason why it took a while to put this together 😉

Valentine’s Day Mantel

I held out on the “winter” decor as long as I could, but it’s time to transition our fireplace mantel to Valentine’s Day!

I kept a few of my favorite things from my Christmas/winter scheme, like the mercury glass pillars and the natural elements/twigs (spruced up with a few sprigs of red); then added the awesome red mercury glass Target clearance items, a blown-glass flower, and some red-and-black books for height and color. I also brought Edgar back into the mix. I mean, elephants are a symbol of love and affection, right? No? Oh well. Call it a new tradition, then.

Full Disclosure: I fully intended to add a lovey phrase to the red wrapping paper background inside the frame. But the stars, err Cupid?, were against me. I had a phrase all picked out and typed up. I played with font sizes until I got them big enough to show up. And then things started to fall apart – when I tried to print them, the pages were all out of whack, thus splitting one letter onto two pages. When I finally got that sorted out, our printer was out of ink. Or rather, out of black ink. And would only print in blue. Bah! Call me lazy, accuse me of not being a finisher. I don’t care. I’m fine with the hit of red as it is. And who knows, maybe I’ll find renewed energy, and a black ink cartridge, over the weekend!

Are you a finisher or an un-finisher?