Easy Bedroom Pillows

Once you start sewing, it's easier to keep making things while you have everything already out. That's why, after I made these pillows for our family room, I decided to make a few more for our bedroom. I followed the same amazingly easy pillow pattern from Teal and Lime. Seriously. Easy.

I used the same blue dot fabric from our family room to make two square pillows. And one is in the same fabric that I used to recover the hope chest -- and the last one is just a place mat (yes, for a table), cut open and stuffed to make a pillow, then sewed back up again.

I think they turned out pretty great. My husband finds them to be a little annoying when making the bed. :) But they do add a nice accent to our bedroom, which is slowly coming together into something I love.

Have you completed any sewing projects lately? I would love to see...

Hope Chest Makeover

When I graduated from college, my parents gave me a beautiful hope chest. I loved it. It has been in our bedroom since then, for more than 15 years, and has worked wonderfully.

In our new house, however, hubby and I have decided to finally decorate our bedroom. With that, we want to get an actual headboard (we've never had one) and update everything to look like a cohesive space - something about being grown-ups now and we should maybe have a master bedroom that looks nice.

The first project - updating the hope chest.

This was a one-day project, very easy and quick. I used two coats of chalk paint (Paloma by Annie Sloan) to paint the chest - no sanding required. Love the color. After the paint dried, I waxed the entire thing with a finishing wax from Minwax. I spray-painted the hardware with oil-rubbed bronze (my favorite). And I stapled on the new fabric to the top with hubby's heavy-duty staple gun.

Such a beautiful transformation - it makes me happy every time I walk in my bedroom.

More projects to come...Sharing at The Power of Paint Party at Domestically Speaking. :)

May 2012 Crafty Round-Up

I've been doing monthly round-ups for 2012, based on the class Kate Nelson taught at Big Picture Classes. I thought it would be fun to do a craft project round-up too, here on this blog. You can see the one I did for our family blog here.

For projects around the house, I made drop-cloth curtains to replace the vertical blinds in the dining room.

Byron put in a new bathroom faucet in the powder room. Love how it completes the room after the makeover it got earlier this year.

I painted the front door inside and out. What a difference. Love it even though this paint job made me cry at least 3 times (that's not an exaggeration - I'm terrible at painting).

I'm really proud of myself for staining the deck all by myself. When we moved in last year, I knew the deck was going to need to be tackled at some point. It had been neglected for a few years by the look of it, and was pretty sorry and grey. I kind of got a wild hair one day and thought I should just stain it before I chickened out. It was not easy, but I'm super happy it's done. It's now a nice dark brown.

And best of all, We had the master bedroom, bathroom, and closet painted. Here's how the bedroom looked when we moved in:

Crazy, right? What is up with those black stripes? It's so very-1995, even though this house was built in 2005. And those black stripes are textured with some kind of plaster, so I was kinda thinking it would be impossible to paint over them. And then, we had a very plain white bathroom (don't even get me started on the very weird tub-in-the-floor):

 The thought of painting these rooms by myself was daunting to say the least - especially since, as I mentioned before, I have cried at much lesser paint jobs. Instead, we splurged and hired an awesome painter. He was able to paint all three spaces in 2 days. It looks AH-MAZ-ING.

 

Bye-bye black stripes...so much better. I am so happy every time I walk into our bedroom now. The bedroom color is Proper Gray from Sherwin-Williams. And the bathroom is Respite, also from Sherwin-Williams.

 

So nice and bright and lovely. Both rooms still need lots of sprucing up, but it's so wonderful to have the painting all finished. I keep hoping I'll run into Matt Muenster while I'm shopping at Lowe's some weekend and end up with a bathroom makeover. Sigh.

Mmmmm....Matt....

That's it for home decor - that's quite a lot for a month, even if 1 of those projects I hired out.

For scrapbooking in May, I created 7 scrapbook layouts this month - 5 paper...

 

 ...and 2 digital...

That first layout was from a tutorial at Jessica Sprague's Photoshop Friday. Love those weekly lessons!

And finally, I started playing around with Lightroom print templates and created one to share with you all via download. I hope you enjoy it - and I'm hoping to make more soon.

That's it for May - a busy month. June is already underway, and I know I'll have more projects to share soon.