Spring Cleaning and Gettin' My Craft On!

I hope everyone had a blessed Easter and enjoyed the day!

For me, it's officially springtime now and while doing some spring cleaning and rearranging, I've also been working on a few little projects. Since I've horribly neglected my blog and my wonderful blogging friends lately, I thought I'd share...

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As I mentioned in my previous post, I love blue and have decided to incorporate more if it in our home. I also love red with my blue, so there's more of that too. We have a red kitchen and a red dining room so I've added touches of red here and there in the other rooms to bring it out more. I love the all white/cream color scheme that I had before but I was ready for a little color shake up!

So... I made some pillows in blue, trimmed with red pom pom fringe and I made some in red toile. I'm all about French decor so I had to include my all time favorite - toile!

and...speaking of toile, I kind of went all out with it! I made some lampshades and I made some curtains - do you detect a theme here?

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I wish I had remembered to take before photos of these lamps. They were nasty old things that had been banished to the basement storage about a year ago. When I decided on this family room re-do, I thought they would be perfect painted white with new lampshades!
I took two standard white lampshades(which I already had) and made little skirts for them from fabric. I added a flirty little ruffle to the bottom edge and some elastic to the top. The elastic made it much easier to fit the fabric to the top of the lampshade.

Then for the curtains...

I made "dummy panels" because it was much cheaper that way! I wanted to simply "dress" the windows more than I wanted to cover them. So, I purchased the yardage that I needed and then opened up the fabric and cut it on the fold. This results in panels that are only as wide as the fabric bolt, but they serve the intended purpose of dressing up the windows and saved me the cost of 6 extra yards of fabric! Instead of having to buy four pieces of fabric that were each 3 yards long, I only had to buy 2 because I cut each 3 yard piece in half and got double the fabric out of it!

Okay, pillows sewn, lamps painted, shades made, curtains hung...certainly not all in one day, I might add...now I needed some fun end tables! I had this one pictured above in our bathroom. I moved it downstairs to use as an end table. It's actually an old night stand that I had found at a flea market a couple of years ago and painted.

For the other side of the love seat, I had this old night stand stored in the garage. I found it last fall at a yard sale and it was the ugliest shade of brown you ever saw - totally 70's style! I painted it white and antiqued it though, and now it's MUCH better!

There you have it...family room re-do on the cheap. I just reused things that were alreay in the house. That's my kind of makeover.

Okay, I think that's enough for one day! I have some bar stools that I'm going to make little toppers for, but I'll save that for another post.

I think I'll go and eat a Cadbury Creme Egg! I have this terrible weakness for Easter candy and there is an Easter basket sitting on the counter here just begging for me to get into it...

Enjoy the day!

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God Bless,

Kathleen