Featured!

Update: My stencilled curtains in the master bedroom were featured on Craftberry Bush, Crafty Scrappy Happy and Design, Dining & Diapers today!! I'm feeling the love this week - it's awesome!!

aaaaaand...

My stencilled (stenciled? that will bother me forever) curtains were featured yesterday on Liz Marie Blog as one of her link up favourites, how awesome is that?! Check out the feature here.

Just so you know, you can spell stencilled with one "l" or two ;) Clearly, the ambiguity is making me nuts.

xo,
Andrea

ps. making a little trip to Target for a certain little rug this weekend... (it better be in stock or heads will roll I will be sad). 

Crazy News...

So, I left you hanging about my crazy news (right? You are totally dying to hear the crazy news I teased you about in my last post? You have been refreshing my blog every hour to see if it's up yet?? I thought so.). Well, it's not that crazy. But a little crazy.

I'm so bored of our living/dining area. BOOM.

What?? Not crazy news worthy??

You might change your mind when I tell you what I think I'm going to do.... I'm going all neutral. ALL NEUTRAL. No colours anymore. Well, maybe a little... but not much. But anything but neutral-beige boring, I promise.

If there's one thing I've learned about myself, it's how quickly I grow bored of my surroundings at home. Not because they aren't awesome, but we spend a LOT of time on this floor of our house. We live in a small space, and we spend most of our waking hours in our living/dining area. This shouldn't be shocking if you know me, because I change things in our house all the time. At least I know myself well enough to ensure that the big things (wall colours, big furniture, draperies, etc) are always neutral. If I keep the big things neutral, it's easy to make changes with simple things like pillows, throws and art (diy/inexpensive art of course).

So, here's what I'm thinking... I still like the blues & greens (just not in our living area), so I'm going to transplant them to our guest bedroom which has never really gotten much love. In fact, all it ever gets are leftovers from the rest of the house. Which is not changing I guess, ha. Both Kris and I are over the water canvasses that have been over the couch for 4 years. Hard to believe I let them live there that long, I know... but they were awful to hang. So that's really the only reason they are still there. I still like the rug, but find it really busy in combination with the glass coffee tables. Those are the only 2 major objects that will be affected - the rest is just pillows, accents and things that I can spray paint or move.

My plan is to get this rug:

 I would LOVE one of these West Elm rugs (OBSESSED):

West Elm Souk Rug (find it here)

West Elm Kasbah Rug (find it here)

but both are WAY out of our budget. So Target rug it is.

I'm thinking about a big gallery wall over the couch. I think I have enough frames to fill the whole wall so it's just a matter of deciding what to put in them (thinking some black & white photos and prints with the odd colour hit). For the rest of the scheme, I would like to do some graphic black and white throw pillows, maybe some light gray... bits of gold - possibly some coral or mint hits? Whatever colour I include, it will be fairly minimal, just a few surprises here and there. I started pinning images like crazy - check out my redesign pinboard here... here's a little peek. I was pinning like crazy so now I need to go back and find the right sources because some of them are duds.

I loved this pillow but it was mucho expensivo and now sold out:

The other thought I had was to remove the glass tops from our coffee tables and replace it with some rustic (really rustic) planks of wood. There's nothing wrong with the glass, but I think the wood would add some warmth and character. Kinda like...

Source: Union Wood Co

Source: Unsure? Let me know if you know it!

Source: Stylizimo

Source: DecorPad

Now all this being said, it will be a slow transition in order to make it manageable financially. So it could take awhile! We do have some giftcards that we hope to use, so hopefully that makes it a bit easier. So what do you think? Boring, or potential?

xo,
Andrea

ps... in case you haven't heard, Google Reader is disappearing. You can follow me here on Bloglovin'.

Stencilled Curtains | Part Two

Carrying on from my last post on our stencilled curtains for the living and dining rooms... here are the details on our master bedroom curtains.

I used the large Herringbone stencil. Word to the wise, I would say this is a more advanced stencil because of all of the straight lines. Mine have quite a few goofs or paint bleeds. I'm okay with it - especially since they were the 5th and 6th panels I did. I was so done. The imperfections just add character, right?! I used gold metallic paint on these panels - it's actually a mix of 2 different gold acrylic craft paints plus fabric medium and watered down a bit. I stuck with a foam roller and went to it.

See those little goofs I mentioned? Good thing no one stares at curtains up close. I hope. 

I wish the photos showed the colour better - they look gold in person (even a bit glittery), but the photos make it look like mustard-poop. And the colour is completely yellowed and whack because my iphone really didn't want to balance the bright windows. Sorry. I really do need to get on getting a card reader for our macbook.

Our bedroom has lower ceilings and a smaller window, so I hung the rods higher (and wider) in there and hemmed the panels with Heat n' Bond.

Notice the extreme slope to our bed?! Mmmhmm. Fun little side effect of hubby's acid reflux. By fun, I mean not fun. I feel like I climb a mountain all night long or wake up at the bottom of the bed. 

This photo is just so that you can oooooh and ahhhh over my new vase. It's kind of awesome. I was super excited to be able to get peonies this weekend, but so disappointed as all but 2 (out of 10) of them completely wilted and died within 2 days. Anyone have any tips to keep cut peonies alive longer?? At the price I paid, it'll be awhile before I do that again.

For the details on the process, check out the Part One post here. Now for the nitty gritty honesty? I am kind of regretting going with gold paint, and wishing I had done a pale gray. It's a bit much for me (I like my light & bright neutrals) and somewhat clownish. Like a circus tent. Here's to hoping that I get used to them and find them a little less offensive after all that work.

So that's it for my stencilled curtains - I totally agree with Sherry from YHL that curtains/drapery are like eyeliner for your windows. Don't you think?! Hope you are all enjoying your long weekend (if you get one) and this fantastic sunshine we've been so lucky to have all weekend. I'll be back later on this week with some crazy news. Well, I think it's crazy - you might not. You'll just have to wait and see. I'm not pregnant. Let's put the fire out on that right now. Don't worry, Mom ;)

xo,
Andrea

psssst... Cutting Edge Stencils has a 20% off sale on through till April 5th - so if this inspired you to get stencilling, now's the time to get your stencils using the code SPRING13. Happy Stencilling!

psssstpssssst... I am really in a quandary about the correct spelling for stencilled/stenciled. It's a bit late now, but apparently both are acceptable? I hate gray areas. Sorry if you like the one "l" version?!

Linking up to:
Happy Hour Party @ Craftberry Bush, Crafty Scrappy Happy & Design, Dining & Diapers

Stencilled Curtains | Part One

Lookie what I did last weekend!!

So, if you follow me on Instagram (@andrea5e), you might have seen that I posted about my aching hands! I spent last weekend stencilling some curtains for our windows - of course, I didn't stop at 2 panels - I did 6. Which is why my hand is aching, blistered and swollen!! Apparently, I really take out my aggression on paint rollers. Could be worse.

I have always put off curtains because there are never any ready-made curtains that I like. Or if do like them, they are too short for our tall windows. Anyway, I decided to work around that and make my own. Back in January, Cutting Edge Stencils had a 20% off sale, so I took the opportunity to order 2 stencils that I really liked but wasn't sure how I would use them (good idea, Andrea - buy stuff for no particular reason). I wanted to take advantage of the sale, so chose the Ikat Smarkand and the large Herringbone. After mulling it over for awhile, I decided to try my hand at stencilling curtains. I'm certainly not the first person to do it, and I liked the idea of custom curtains. I pondered stencilling a flat-weave rug but Ikea doesn't seem to have them anymore (or at least didn't when I went).

Like I mentioned previously, we have particularly large windows - the living room/dining room are 112" long, and only about 8-10" below our 9 foot ceilings. I knew this was going to be a challenge for curtain rods as this is much longer than the average. We went to Home Depot to price out electrical conduit... it would have been a great option. 3/4 inch conduit was $8.48 for 10 feet which would have been just long enough for each window. Add in that they needed to be primed and painted and required some kind of bracket - I am guessing it would have been about $20 per window which isn't bad. But a lot of work. I was up for it (aren't I always?!).

I really thought I remembered Ikea having some expandable curtain rods but couldn't find any online - we decided to go there for curtain panels anyways so thought we'd check it out. Whaddya know, I was right!! They had rods that were plenty long enough, and for only $6.99 - no painting required!! So, we picked up 3 Hugad curtain rods and 3 sets of panels. I really didn't like any of the finials, so for now we just have the caps. If I find finials I like, I may switch them out. But, I'm not opposed to the caps either as the drapes really kind of hide them away and keep the focus where I want it.

For panels, we bought the Ikea Ritva ($29.99 per pair). They were 57" wide and 98" long which was barely long enough for the living room and dining room. So, I had to make sure that the rods were pretty close to the window casings so the curtains wouldn't look like they were waiting for a floor to pour through. I also wanted to leave some clearance above the rods in case we get around to installing crown mouldings (it's on our long term wish list). You can see that we butted the brackets right up to the window casings downstairs - we knew we wouldn't actually close the curtains so this was a great way to hide them behind the panels. We also cut the centre bracket shorter so that it could be closer to the casing.

Kris hung up all the rods while I ironed and painted all of the panels. Which totally took the same amount of time.... riiiiiiight.  For the living room and dining room panels, I decided to use the Ikat stencil with some leftover wall paint. Yup. Regular old latex paint. We had a ton left from when I painted the fireplace wall (way back in 2009 when I moved in), so I used that. I added some fabric medium to it (well, actually Kris did as he was my paint mixer/pourer). We didn't add nearly as much as it said to - I didn't think I really needed to. They're just curtains. I wanted to make sure the stencil carried off of the panels so lined it up over the edge. The Ikat stencil was very forgiving and hard to mess up. I must say, it probably would have gone a lot quicker if you didn't care so much about inconsistencies - I am the last person who should ever do anything that may not be perfect. I agonized a little bit. I would say each panel took about 2 hours to paint. I started Saturday evening (clearly I don't have a life), and finished Sunday night after working on it most of the day.

Oh, and you know what is a fun surprise? Realizing that your drop cloth wasn't quite enough to protect your kitchen table when you clear everything away on Sunday night at 10pm. Ummmm....
Luckily, it scrubbed off with a little elbow grease. It's always an adventure with me ;)

So here's the final results! Dining Room:

Aaaaaaand the Living Room:

Check back early next week to see how the master bedroom curtains turned out! Hope you all have a happy Easter and enjoy some quality family time!

xo,
Andrea

oh, and ps.... unfortunately, with more blog traffic comes comment spam - so I've had to add word verification on to commenting. Sorry :( I hope you'll still take the time to comment because I love them!

Linking up to:
Happy Hour Party @ Craftberry Bush, Crafty Scrappy Happy & Design, Dining & Diapers
Inspire Me Please Linky Party @ Liz Marie Blog