Decorating with Hand-Made Items

I envy people who are talented enough to decorate their homes and get it right the first time. I always feel like I have to grow into my space. It takes me a long time to get everything just the way I want it.

At the risk of sounding like a total nut-job, I have to let the house speak to me.

We’ve lived in this house for a while now and I feel like I can see the decorating gaps more clearly. I’ve already moved pieces of furniture from room to room, because they can better serve our family somewhere else. I still have empty spaces.  There’s a furniture list, buried somewhere in my head, to shop from during yard sale season.

We don’t have book shelves. Our linens are in a tote in the basement, and aside from the dining room table, there are no surfaces for serving bowls or drinks in the dining room. Those are the basics. We could always talk area rugs and blank walls and an empty wrap-around porch, but let’s not get carried away. I have to save something for year two.

For now, I’m focusing my efforts on what I do have, and not on the gaps.

Last week I went into a bit of a decorator’s frenzy. If my belly was just two cheeseburgers thicker, people would think I was nesting. It was a surge of hormones disguising itself as energy. I am here to tell you that when my hormones rage, I take full advantage of them, because the crash is coming, and I will soon transform into a sofa-slug.

So, I got to work.

I had this pile of fabric my daughter once fell in and out of love with faster than Elizabeth Taylor could fall in and out of love with her husbands.

I didn’t really like this fabric, but decided dining room curtains would look infinitely better than dusty mini-blinds. As I was sewing up these curtains, my son came into the room and asked why I was making those curtains.

“For the dining room.” I said.

“But they don’t match anything in the entire house.”

Was this kid just born into this family yesterday?

Matchy-matchy is played out. Mix-n-match is where it’s at!

I don’t worry about things matching. I simply wonder if they’ll “go”, and I can guarantee if I take the time and effort to lug my sewing machine out and refill the bobbin three times, these curtains are going to “go”.

Once the curtains were hung, the walls looked really dull.

I often wonder if I will ever be one of those women who go to places like Home Goods and IKEA and just fill a cart or two and then decorate my house. I’m not going to figure that out anytime soon, because my bank account is empty, and the nearest Home Goods or IKEA is probably about three hours away.

That’s why I have to get creative, a scary thing for my husband.

I remembered the Nester (an amazing home decorator) recently showing off a wall-hanging she made from a mop head. I loved her creation; however, I knew I needed something with a little color, because my dining room walls are dull. And if there’s one thing I can’t live with, it’s dullness. My apologies to all of you who prefer subtle earth tones. My husband wishes I liked earth tones, but it’s just not my jam. Our differences make the world go around, so it’s all good.

I pulled out some colorful yarn and decided to be inspired by the Nester, but to make something a little more minimalistic, but with color.

A Colorful Minimalist…I just now had that thought for the very first time. Can I call myself a colorful minimalist?

Anyhow, I pulled the car over to the side of the road and made my daughter hop out and rescue the “perfect” stick for this project. She didn’t even question me. Clearly there’s a lesson in here for my son, but I’ll skip it for now.

It seems I’m quite smitten with sticks lately, because I wrapped a bunch of them in yarn. I absolutely love the way they look just leaning up against a (formerly) dull wall, but these are going to be planted in a pot of concrete and used on my porch this spring.

These yarn projects are great for kids too, because they are so simple. My only tip (just in case one of you falls for sticks the way I did) is to wash and dry your sticks first, a task I never thought I would happily do, but alas, sometimes life gives you lemons and sometimes it gives you dirty sticks. Wrap them all in yarn.

Well, maybe not the lemons.

Are you working on any projects for your home?  I’d love to hear about them in the comments. If you want a tutorial for the any of these projects, let me know in the comments.