At Home: the couch!

Well, as you may have guessed, the couch arrived months ago. I know it was pretty annoying of me to build up all that excitement around it and then not show you pictures right after it arrived. Well, I hope you agree it was worth the wait. Before I reveal her in all her glory, here's one more reminder of what the old couch looked like...

Hey, where'd you go? Oh there you are - hiding behind your computer chair. I know. I know. She was a monster. At the time, this over-sized sectional seemed like a good idea. We ordered it from a local furniture store about five years ago. Each piece was sold separately, so we were able to choose whatever configuration we wanted as well as fabric color. You may have noticed she's got TWO chaises. This is because my hubby, in all his kindness, was convinced we needed two in order to guarantee that all our guests were comfy when they came over. The one part of that equation he forgot to consider is that we don't have people over that often, so most of the couch never got used. Gotta love the guy for his thoughtfulness though. About a year ago, we started to realized how overwhelming this piece of furniture was becoming and decided it was time for a change. I mentioned in this post that we sold the sectional to a lovely couple, which made me so happy to know it went to a good home. After all, it was the most comfortable couch in the world and had served us well, even if it had been too big for the space.

Now it was time to start the hunt for a replacement...enter this beauty...

Isn't she fabulous in all her mid-century beauty? We couldn't be happier about our choice. What do you think? I'd love to hear your comments.

At Home: master bedroom update

One of the biggest hurdles I face when it comes to my work is a constant, sometimes crippling, quest for perfectionism. "I'll post pictures of my bedroom when it's finished and perfect." "Before I upload this new item, maybe I should change the name of my Etsy shop to something better." And the list goes on. I can't tell you how many times I've wasted months of my creative energy stuck in "perfect."

The other day it occurred to me, one of my favorite blogs, Young House Love, never waits to post updates of their home. In fact, that's what makes their blog so great. They take us along for the journey. And isn't the journey the whole point? So I'm going to start embracing the journey and try not to get caught up in making everything perfect before I share it with you.

To begin with, I'm going to share some photos of our bedroom. If you recall, it used to look like this:

Ouch! Some serious adjustments need to be made here! I had already painted the bedroom the purply grey (Behr Manhattan Mist) a while back. Well, mostly painted...check out the area above each window - stellar! It's actually hard to see from the photos, but trust me, it was left unpainted for about four and a half years and it looked terrible. I didn't want to spend more money on paint, so I decided to keep the bedroom the same color and just give it a second coat (or a first coat if we're talking about the area above the windows). It's amazing how a fresh, clean coat of paint can make a world of difference. I then repainted the window trim and baseboards with a fresh coat of white. Things were finally starting to look good around here!

Once I finished the painting, I needed to re-address the duvet cover dilemma. For months, I had been looking online and at Joann's for fabric to make a cover myself, but I just couldn't find anything I liked. And the fabric I did like wasn't even close to within my budget. I also started to realize I was making things harder then they needed to be, as usual. When was I really going to make the time to sew this duvet cover? I mean my sewing table is practically buried by fabric and clothing that needs repair. So I finally relented and bought a lovely cover from Ikea for about $50 (including two pillow shams).

With the duvet cover dilemma resolved, I turned my sights to curtains. Yes Mom, I said curtains. Yes, those things you've been trying to get me to hang throughout my house since the day we moved in. Needless-to-say, I'm not a huge fan of curtains, but I decided our bedroom could use some softening (something curtains would do nicely). The previous home owners had kindly left all the curtain rods with the house, because they assumed I was a normal person and hung curtains. Instead, I took most of them down and stored them in the attic. But I left the rods in the master bedroom because I liked them and had plans to use them one day.

However, there was one thing about those curtain rods I didn't like: their placement. From the year I spent working in the Decor department at Home Depot, I knew they needed to be hung several inches beyond the window trim, but these were hung directly on the trim and they looked terrible. It's been annoying me since day one. So I started measuring and drilling. I should mention that at this point in the story I've already told you I painted the trim around the windows, and I want to assure you I'm not a total idiot. I didn't paint AROUND the curtain rods. I took the rods down, spackled and painted. So in actuality, the rods are not hanging on the trim at this point in the story, but I wasn't talking about curtain rods and curtains three paragraphs back, so it didn't make sense to bring it up then. :)

Once I finished hanging the curtain rod brackets, I grabbed one of the old curtain rods and placed it over the window. At which point I realized it wasn't long enough to bridge the gap between both brackets! Crap! And I was doing so well, too! I should qualify the statement above. Technically, they ARE long enough, but as you'll see in the photo below, they dip down in the center because they're about a half an inch shy of completely separating. Trying to hang curtains on them would most certainly result in catastrophic failure. Not to be deterred, I decided to use the old finials (decorative ends of the curtain rod) but to replace the rod itself with a longer wooden dowel.

Now you may be asking yourself, "Why doesn't she just move the brackets?" Well, I thought about that, but the thing is, even if the rods had fit width-wise, they still needed to be replaced with a solid rod (or dowel) because the rod itself was made out of two metal tubes, one smaller than the other. The connection where one half of the rod slips into the other larger half of the rod will show, and we can't have that! So I went to Lowe's (the horror! Remember I said I used to work at Home Depot?) and bought a couple dowels. When I got home I realized they were also too short. I have now done what I should have done from day one - MEASURED! Pesky math! Unfortunately, I haven't taken the time to buy longer dowels yet. For now, the old ones are just hanging there (by a thread) until I can replace them with my dowel version, so this is where we stand. I promise to update you all when I make more progress, but for now this is what the bedroom looks like:

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Product Details:
• duvet cover: Ikea
• framed print over bed: Henri Matisse. You can find it here.

New Content

Over the next few months, I'm going to be introducing some new features to the blog. The first feature, or "department," as I like to call it, will be called "At Home" and will feature all things relating to my home improvement projects. I look forward to sharing the process with you. I'll be posting the first installment tomorrow, so stay tuned!

Jill

A New Year's Resolution of Sorts

At one point in the life of this blog, I had a few followers. Some people even wrote comments and got excited about my promised projects and room redos. Alas, I have really let things slide here at FGD, and I fear anyone who was once interested has long since given up. Well, the year is fresh and new, and I've got a plan for this blog (for once!). So to all you wonderful people out there who have stopped by to see what was up, only to be left with a few terrible "before" shots of my house and no follow-up; I promise, "after" shots are coming! So please stay tuned.

Craft Day: Origami Wreath

My friend Brook and I have decided to start hosting a monthly get-together we're calling "Craft Day." Yesterday was our first go at it, and the results were inspiring, if I do say so myself. I thought it might be nice to do a feature on my blog about each craft, so today marks the first "Craft Day" post. My goal is to share a new craft every month with instructions and photos detailing the process. I hope to encourage all you crafty types (and not so crafty types too!) to get out your X-acto knives and rulers and start creating.

To start things off I've selected a very simple origami wreath. I found the instructions over at Domesticali. You can view them here. She does a fabulous job explaining how to put this wreath together, but I felt compelled to do my own tutorial as well.

You can use any decorative paper you like. I had this book of old fonts from college, and I thought it might make an interesting pattern so that's what I used. You can use paper varying in weight from very light (20 lb standard computer paper) to very heavy (100 lb cover paper). But we found a paper weight somewhere in between to be the best (roughly 40 lb). If you want to use a heavier paper, I would suggest making one of these wreaths with a light weight paper first, just to get the hang of it, and then work your way up to heavier papers. The lighter papers are easier to work with at first.

To start, cut 8 4cm x 8cm strips of paper.

Then fold each piece in half lengthwise (If your paper is one-sided, make sure the patterned side is on the outside)...

so you end up with something like this:

Then fold each piece in half width-wise, like this:

Now open up the piece and, with the open side of the original fold facing up, fold down the left side of the paper to create a triangle like this:

Now do the same thing to the right side so you end up with this:

Do the same thing to all eight pieces of paper. You should now have eight little strips of paper with corners folded down.

Take one folded piece and look closely at it. Notice how it almost has two little pockets. The top two layers of paper create the top pocket and the bottom two layers of paper create the bottom pocket.

You're going to insert the points of one of your little folded papers into these pockets. One point goes in the top pocket and the other point goes in the bottom pocket, like this:

Continue inserting each of your eight papers into the previous paper's pockets...

...until you've got all eight done. The final piece of folded paper will insert its points into the first piece you started with to create the finished wreath form.

That's it!

After I created a few wreaths in prep for craft day, I realized this little unassuming wreath had unlimited design possibilities. In the instructions above, I had you cut your strips of paper into 4cm x 8cm strips, but you could make almost any size by adjusting the measurements as long as you keep it 1 to 2. For example, to make a larger wreath I cut my paper to 4"x 8", wrapped it with 1" wide ribbon and ended up with this:

Then Brook made this gorgeous version with two different contrasting papers:

As you can see, the possibilities are endless: candle rings, ornaments, package decoration. You could string several together and create a garland. Don't think for a minute this is only good during the holidays. I used lots of colorful papers that would work any time of year. Brook even created one out of an old calendar I had with a drawing of lavender. Unfortunately, in all the excitement I forgot to photograph it. I hope you feel as inspired as we do about this project. We'd love to see what you create if you try this one yourself. Happy crafting.