As I was starting my living room makeover I found some milk glass lamps at Pottery Barn that I really wanted, but again, did not want to pay the price tag. I got it in my head that I needed to make some of my own. I really wasn't sure how to do it and so I started with some trial and error experiments.
A while ago I saw a bird rack from West Elm that I fell in love with, sadly I was not in love with the price (even if I wanted to buy it now, I coudn't, since it is no longer available). Then the ol' diy mentallity kicked in and I decided to make my own version of the rack.
What a whirlwind weekend! Haha, say that ten times fast.
Now that the hustle and bustle of Thanksgiving is over I can finally take time to share what I did for my Thanksgiving table. As I said in my sneak peek post I didn't use traditional colors, but put in a few fallish items to help it fit the season.
Blue and yellow were the color of choice this year. The color inspiration came from my grandmothers china that I got to use for the first time. It became my jumping off point.
With that, I headed to the store with my blue and yellow colors in mind. This is what I came up with.
Let me just start by saying, I absolutely love how these curtains came out! I used burlap for my fabric, which ended up working out tremendously, seeing as I needed 11 YARDS and it's a cheap fabric, especially if you have a coupon. I had never used burlap before so it was a little bit of a learning curve on how to work with it.
VERY important: you do not want to cut burlap on what you think is square! To get a straigth line with burlap you actually pull a string out from the weaving. When you cut burlap on a square you may think you are cutting straight, but you aren't.
As I was putting my Halloween decorations away I figured a few them would still work for Thanksgiving/Fall decoration. So I took them and started decorating my table. I didn't have a whole lot of time (about 45 minutes left on baby nap time) so I needed to be quick. I looked around the house and grabbed whatever I could find that looked fall-ish. I also looked around my craft room and snagged a few things from there too. This is what I ended coming up with.
I got the inspiration for this idea when I saw a picture of another large wood sign browsing Houzz.com. My inspiration photo can be found here. When we framed our basement, we ripped out some old storage shelving, and the green planks used to make this sign were part of the shelving we removed. I really liked the color and the naturally distressed look.
It's done, it's done! The family room is finally finished being decorated (for now at least, lol). There may be a few things that will change in the future but for now I love it just the way it is. See what it originally looked like here. There are a few things which are my particular favorites that I'll mention during the post. So without any further adieu...the REVEAL!!
While I was visiting family the last couple of days, my sister had been looking for black candles. She had been unsuccessful in her endeavors so I suggested she do blood drip candles, inspired by Martha Stewart. However she was more interested in classy Halloween decor instead of ghouly. So her search continued. The next day when the search still produced no results she surprised me by buying some white candles and a red one to do blood candles!
I have never had a family picture wall and thought it was high time to do one. We have two adorable kids and I figured they needed a spot to shine. There are about a million different ways to display your photos and about a trillion different frame styles to choose from. I happen to like things clean (and cheap!) so Ikea was my new best friend when it came to getting frames. Every single frame on the wall is from Ikea. As much as I like clean, I don't like everything to be matchy matchy, so I bought three different styles of frames all in white.
I've decided than I'm titling my display: Escape of the Baby Tarantulas! It's too bad you can't see it in person. I can't seem to quite capture the horrificness of it all. For less than $10 we created ourselves a mini horrorscape.