It’s true.  I love yarn.  I love painting stuff.  I love making things pretty (oh how I love making things pretty!)  And, most of all, I love (love!) scrapbook paper.

You know that aisle in Michaels with all the pretty, perfectly stacked piles of colourful papers?  I get lost in that aisle for hours and hours.  HOURS.  Combining different patterns.  Swooning over prints.  Marvelling over all of the potential for serious prettiness.  Yep.  It’s really rather silly considering I’m in no way a scrapbooker (since, honestly, I’m far too lazy for what appears to be a very finicky and fussy – albeit lovely! – hobby) and since (as previously noted) I’m not particularly crafty.

During my most recent trip to Michaels I picked up no fewer than fourteen (yup – fourteen) (see?  I’m obsessed…) sheets of gorgeous paper.  Did I have any particular plan for all these beautiful papers?  Nope.  I just really liked them.  I also bought a few super inexpensive (they were three whole bucks each, I think) ready-to-paint (or ready-to-leave-in-their-lovely-unpainted-state, in my case) picture frames.  And then I came home and started looking at the fireplace mantel in my dining room.

(Aside: I find it important to clarify that this particular faux fireplace mantel is located in my dining room, since we have no fewer than three faux fireplaces in this house.  The previous home owners were indeed faux fireplace fanatics.)

And then the wheels started turning.  And then I realized that the sheets of lovely coordinating scrapbook paper, and those unpainted frames might look sorta rustic-ish-ly cute on my dining room fireplace mantel.

And so began the rearranging.  (Does anyone else get a little OCD when it comes to fireplace mantel decorating?)  And the fussing.  And the tweaking.

And here is what I finally came up with…

It’s not done yet.  It needs something… more.  Perhaps a few miniature pumpkins in honour of fall.  Or some Christmassy bobbles and doodads (but not for a few weeks – I adore Christmas, but it’s a little too early for that at the moment, even for me!)  For now, and until I get around to adding additional adornments to the mantel, those lovely papers are making me happy.

That all said, there will be more faux fireplace fussing to follow, I’m sure.  And definitely more frivolous scrapbook paper purchases made in the not-at-all distant future.  (I just can’t get enough!)  (It’s weird, I know.)

-a lovely basket I found on sale (regularly $44, all mine for $22!)

-a pretty metallic picture frame picked out of the clearance pile for $4 (happy squeal!)

-a sheet of lovely scrapbook paper that was neither on sale nor on clearance (but it’s pretty and, at $0.99, it still felt like a ginormous bargain)

…and my ball of yarn (of course!)  Quite the hodge-podge-y group of items eh?  But, oh… I had plans.  All of this Michaels-bounty (minus the yarn) went toward updating my little living room and faux fireplace.

And, that all said, here’s the result of lots of rearranging and tweaking and pondering and tweaking some more…

Tada!  OK.  So it’s not necessarily a hallelujah moment, but I think it looks better.  :)  Here’s what I did…

First…

I summoned my inner DIY-er and created the world’s easiest art for inside my new (really really inexpensive!) metallic frame (which, btw, reminds me a lot of the fancy gold frames my grandmother used to have scattered around her house) (which, of course, makes me love this frame even more.)  The instructions?

-cut a 4×6″ rectangle (to match the size of the frame) from a sheet of basic white printer paper

-fold it in half and cut a heart into it (a la grade one Valentine’s Day art project)

-put said piece of paper (minus cutout heart) in the frame (letting the brown cardboard backing that came with the frame peek through the cutout)

…and poof!  Instant 30 second art.

Super cute, eh?  And, almost as important, super easy!

That all said, I can’t really take any credit for this project.  I first saw this idea here on House Pretty’s lovely blog.  My method is a little different, but the overall end result is pretty similar.  And I don’t want to be a big bad awesome easy art project idea thief!  So, House Pretty, I’m totally tipping my hat to you on this one.  :)

And then…

My second easiest-ever DIY art project?  Adding that lovely $0.99 scrapbook paper to a frame for an instant print.  No fancy instructions required, just add scrapbook paper to frame, put frame in a frame-worthy spot, and admire.  Done!

The paper I used doesn’t even really fit my frame, if you want to get all technical about it.  The paper is 12×12″ I think (or whatever standard scrapbook paper size is) and the frame is matted for an 11×14″.  But it still works. Truth be told, I kinda want to wallpaper my entire house with this scrapbook paper.  So springy!  So happy!  I’m hoping to find other places around the house where I can use this pretty paper shortly (which, in turn, means another trip to Michaels – yay!)  I love it just that much.

As does Jacob.  Lesson learned: never try to take pictures of things on the floor.  When you do, this happens…

Yup.  Jacob agreed that this scrapbook paper was the prettiest he had ever seen (and, as a result, he felt he should roll around on it.)

I’m hardly a scrapbooking aficionado, but I’m guessing that cats don’t make very good scrapbookers.

And last (but definitely not least) (in fact, the opposite of least… most?)…

The basket is my absolute favourite addition to the room.  I’ve been searching for a basket to fill the fireplace void for a while now, but baskets are crazy expensive (and I’m rather frugal.)  Which is why I did a little happy dance in the middle of Michaels when I realized that all of their baskets were marked 50% off.  Woo!  And I’m pretty sure I practically skipped out of the store.  (I tend to do that when I find a good deal.  People look at me funny, but I don’t care.  Cocked eyebrows can’t compare with the joy of finding a bargain.)

Doesn’t it look cozy all filled with blankets?  Yep!  I’m ridiculously pleased with my find.  :)

In conclusion…

So there!  Those were my Michaels-inspired updates!  I made a couple of non-Michaels-related improvements too, like the framed black and white pic of me and my girlfriends from back in our university years (that I found while rummaging through our second bedroom last weekend) (we look so young… sigh!)  And I did a bit (um, a lot) of rearranging too.

All in all, the room is coming.  Slowly but surely.  I figure by the time we decide to sell the house I’ll get it right.  I still need something on the wall to the left of my pretty little faux fireplace (besides the cats’ beloved scratch post, of course) but that’s a whole different story (that I’ve already obsessed a bit about HERE) for a whole different day.

Until then, I’ll likely continue rearranging things weekly-ish and posting regular fireplace-mantel updates.

Excited?  Me too.  :)

But I’m thinking it’s nearly time to face this fear and address the empty wall space around my fireplace.  A space that drives me a little bonkers.  And now that the Christmas tree is down (it finally – FINALLY! – came down last weekend) it’s especially obvious that there’s a big gaping hole in my living room loveliness.

Yep.  I’m ready to tackle the vacant (and rather sad-looking) space around old not-at-all smokey.

The corner to the left of the (faux) fireplace is particularly lonely looking.  Even Sweetie exclaimed (once the tree was all packed away and the merriness banished to the attic for the next eleven months): “You’re going to put something else there, aren’t you?”

And if Sweetie (aka Mr “Oh…  What’s that?  You say you painted the kitchen fuchsia?  I didn’t notice…”) recognizes that something isn’t quite right, something obviously must not be right.

My dilemma?  What to decorate the void with.  Given my fear of putting stuff on walls, I’ve been doing a lot of research on empty corner filling (since I’m a tad OCD and indecisive and generally nervous about any sort of wall-marring commitment.)  A quick discussion with the lovely folk over at Pinterest (they’re exceedingly helpful over there, btw!) left me with the following suggestions…

Wall-filling strategy #1: Framed… somethings.  For the record, I’m in love with this room (holy moly that’s some gorgeous tealness!) from Emily Henderson…

But what, exactly, would I put in the frames?  Prints?  Art?  Pictures of the cats?  And should I go with white frames?  Dark wood frames?  Metallic?  Sigh.

Or I could fill the space with plates perhaps (aka “Wall-filling strategy #2.”)  Just look (look!!!) at this stunning wall of pretty plates from Larissa over at mmmcrafts…

Lovely eh?  I adore this idea.  Although my supply of decorative plates is a little low at the moment.  And planning out which-plate-goes-where seems like the sort of thing that could drive an already somewhat strange girl completely batty.

I could scatter some pretty ceiling medallions across my wall.  I’ve admired Dave and Joi’s medallion-adorned wall for a long long while now…

Love love love their living room!

Or I could embrace the emptiness…  This room, from my all-time most favourite designer ever Samantha Pynn (hi Sam!  You rock!), makes me think that my living room void isn’t really a void afterall.  Perhaps I just need to add a lovely lamp (oooh!  And a chandelier!)…

I’m not sure.  What I AM sure of is that something needs to happen.  To spice things up a little.  You know, shake it to the right (if you know that you feel fine.)

(And yep.  I just quoted Spice Girls.  Random?  Yes.  Scary?  Agreed.)

Anyhow, this debate obviously isn’t over.  I’ll be taping templates of some sort to my walls shortly, I’m sure.  And then the inevitable (and ongoing) template rearranging will begin.  And likely more Pinterest-ing too.

Being an indecisive commitment-phobe is a lot of work.

But yes!  Those are my quasi plans to date.  Hopefully the next time I chat about my living room walls there will be stuff strategically mounted on them.

Or, if nothing else, print/medallion/tapestry-sized paper templates.

Even my newly acquired little driftwood star got Christmassied up a wee bit…

Yup.  We’re all getting in the spirit around here.  (Pictures of cats wearing tiny little reindeer antlers to follow shortly, of course.)

I’ve now lived with my DIY kitchen art attempt for a week now, and I’m still not loving it.  At all.  :(  I’ve decided that it’s the blue “inner-matting” (I should seriously coin that term, eh?) that’s throwing everything off.  Yep – the blue is making me… well, blue.

So I delved deep into my scrapbook paper pile once again, and pulled out a sheet of lovely Christmassy red paper.  And squealed just a little.  Because that’s what I do.  (Kinda freaks the cats out a bit, but it keeps them on their toes.)

And after a few minutes of cut and paste (I’m president of the International Society of Cutters and Pasters, btw), I had this…

Which looks like this on my wall…

Which makes me a very happy girl.  :)

So am I done with this project now?  Probably.  I mean, I could be really rather persnickety and say that the red is a little more tomato-ey than I’d prefer (which, really, is quite true.)  But it’s BETTER.  Much better.  And I have a gazillion other fun projects I’m just itching to start.  (Do you see that as foreshadowing?  Let’s call that foreshadowing.  :)

Happy one month (less a day!) till Christmas!  Hooray!  Bring on the merry!

I just bought another one.  Shhhh…  Don’t tell…  And it’s LOVELY!  Apparently made by some star-adoring artiste from carefully selected pieces of driftwood found alongside some remote white sandy beach (true story!), it’s natural and organic looking and I practically skipped out of Homesense with it in my arms.  (And yep, people looked at me like I’m a certified crazy lady.)  (But I’m kind of used to that.)

I’m not sure if it’s meant to be a Christmassy star, but even if it is I’m pretty sure it’ll be a permanent fixture on my walls somewhere.  Afterall, there are stars in the sky year-round.  So stars belong on my walls year-round too, non?  And, for the non-holiday season months, we can call it my beach-chic star (is beach-chic an actual design style?  Let’s assume it is, k?)  Either way, it makes me happy.

For now, I think the wooden star will likely replace the green star above our two tullsta chairs (yep, that’s right – I’m swapping one star for another.)  And then that green star will likely head on into the dining room (where we haven’t yet put anything on the walls.)  (Ack, I know.)  I think.

Or perhaps it will assume the place of honour above the faux fireplace…

Hmmm…  Yep.  I foresee a bit of wall-adornment jenga taking place over the next couple of days.

But, yes!  Star (not so) light, star (not particularly) bright, (not at all) the first star I see tonight, welcome to my happy little 1940s house.  You’re pretty darn swell.  :)

I love her.  She’s classy (there’s french writing on that print – doesn’t that automatically make her sophisticated?), and, well, she’s hanging out with several cats (which makes her pretty darn cool in my books.)  It’s perfect.  :)

But…  I’ve been feeling the need to switch things up a bit lately.  While I love my crazy French cat lady, I’ve been feeling the need for more colour.  More oooomph, if you will.  A little cheer and a lot of joy perhaps.  So, with Christmas coming (and the gazillion free printables floating around Pinterest) I decided to make the switch.  For the holidays at least.  And then I’ll revisit my “art above the stove” dilemma again in January.  (Stay tuned for another post on that in about 40 days.)

It didn’t take me long to find this…

…courtesy of the lovely ladies over at Eighteen25.

And it didn’t take me long to decide that it’s perfect for my little kitchen. :)

The only problem?  Our printer, being a non-fancy-pants little machine, prints 8.5×11″ pages.  It’s not a high-end printer by any means, and it maxes out at a standard papersize.  Downsizing the original 16×20″ print to fit my tinier paper wasn’t a huge problem.  However the matting in my frame was for my lovely 11×14″ cat lady.

My “use whatcha got” solution?  Leftover scraps of scrapbook paper from other random past project.

Yup.  I pieced together what I’ll call an “inner-matting” (technical term) using some sparkly blue scrapbook paper pieces I had leftover from some other random DIY project.  For the record, I’m not a scrapbooker.  But I love scrapbooking stuff.  Paper and punches and pretty things…  It all makes me swoon, just a bit.

And, when I was done my little project (I excelled at cut-and-paste as a toddler, btw), I was left with this…

Insert semi-frowny face HERE.  The big reveal was most definitely a colon-S sorta moment.  :S  I’m undecided.  It needs… something more.  Like some red ribbon or some doodads or something like that (maybe there is in fact a little closet scrapbooker buried somewhere deep inside of me afterall.)  Or perhaps it’s the blue paper that’s throwing me off.  While I love the blue with the print, it’s just not playing nice with the gray on my walls.

So let’s consider this a 4 out of 10 for now, k?  To be revisited again shortly.  I have some deep red scrapbook paper kicking around somewhere in my scrapbook paper basket (yes, I have a designated container for pretty papers…  don’t tell…) that I’m guessing will likely be the solution to all my kitchen print woes.  Yep, there may indeed be a second “inner-matting” cut and paste project extraordinaire coming to a kitchen island near me.

Are you excited?  Me too.  :)

To be continued…

I worked and I toiled for weeks and weeks and I’m happy to say that everything was perfect and I was absolutely ecstatic with the final outcome.  And (also important) Tiff’s shower was a success!  Unfortunately, what did I NOT do?  I did not take ANY pictures of the final product.  At all.  Oops.  I know.  Insert a dramatic and sad muted-trombone “wop-wop” here.  Silly blogger.  Nad and I were so busy day-of making sure that everything looked perfect, and ensuring that guests were eating/drinking/mingling/being merry, that it never once dawned on me to take pictures of any of it.  And, sadly, despite all of the ooohs and aaahs that rewarded our decorating efforts, none of our guests took pictures of the decor either.   Not one.  Which, I suppose, I can’t really fault anyone for.  The shower was for Tiff, afterall, and not at all about the decorations.  (But I still really wish someone – ANYONE – would have captured just a tiny little bit of our lovingly planned-out and assembled decor.)

Suffice it to say: it was LOVELY.  And I was proud.  And Tiff was happy.  So mission accomplished. :)

But despite that I don’t have actual images of the actual decor to show you, I wanted to pass along some of the free baby shower printables that I found while planning.  These were all a huge hit at our baby shower, so I’m hoping that other shower planners might find these handy-dandy as well.  :)

INVITATIONS

We could have purchased those fill-in-the-blank invitations that you can pick up at any party store or Walmart or, well, pretty much anywhere.  That would have been the simple route.  And, well, that would be very unlike me.  I wanted to do a custom baby shower invitation, of course (which also required quite a lot more work, but the end result was very worth it, I think.)  We didn’t have a big baby shower budget to purchase custom printed invitations, but, after a bit of an extensive search via my good friends at Google, I found these adorable customizable (including the colours!) umbrella invitations, courtesy of On to Baby…

Obviously the actual invitations themselves had a LOT more detail (and included important pieces of information like, um, names and dates and addresses and such.)  But c’est cute, non?  We were thrilled.  And an evening spent with my printer and my beloved paper cutter later and – poof – we had invitations ready to go.  :)

DECOR

I made tissue paper pom poms, of course.  Tissue pom poms are my thing.  You could even, perhaps, call me the Pom Queen.  (Ha.  Get it?  Pom Queen?  Prom Queen?)  (Groan…  I know.  K.)  I made LOTS of them.  In blue, bright green, and white.  They were gorgeous, and a lot of time and love went into making each little fluffy ball of loveliness.  We hung them behind the main table in the room, and so many people commented on how lovely and pretty they were and how they made the room look super cheery.  I don’t have any pictures of those.  Of course.  But trust me when I say they were gorgeous.  :)

What I CAN show you, however, is a free BOY subway art printable I used to add a little extra decoration to the main table in the room (printable courtesy of Simple Crafter):

I printed this on card stock and framed it in an expensive HomeSense frame and placed it next to the fun diaper cake we put together (as you may have guessed, I don’t have any pictures of our diaper cake either.)  It was just a little something extra and fun, and not at all necessary, but it was cute.  (And it now sits next to the change table in Tiff’s little blue nursery.)

FAVOURS

Favours are one of those seemingly unnecessary extras, and Nad and I debated quite a bit over whether to do favours for the shower guests.  I am a big fan of the non-trinket favour, so I was pretty adamant that if we did do shower favours, they needed to be either usable or consumable (and not just some random item that would eventually be thrown away.)  Rachael Ray came to the rescue with a free printable and customizable chocolate bar wrapper…

Coincidentally, Walmart had Cadbury Caramilk bars on sale for $0.60 each around this time, so we were able to do favours for our group of about 20 guests for about twelve bucks (well, plus taxes.)  And (most importantly) people loved them.  :)

So there!  Those are a few of the free printables that made our darling Tiff’s shower pretty and special.  If I can’t share the photos, I can at least share the printables!

And, well, to put things into perspective: pictures may be worth a thousand words, but a happy friend with a beautiful baby boy (he’s now about two months old and he’s absolutely gorgeous) is worth way, way more.  :)

Yep.  GPS certainly makes life easier, but given the choice (and, well, a co-pilot to drive while I hold the map and navigate) I’ll take a map any day.  :)

So, then, is it any wonder that I yearn for maps on my walls?  Maps are nostalgic.  They remind me of gradeschool and the smell of classrooms and erasers.  They remind me of roadtrips – we had a well-worn map of Ontario in the car at all times growing up (there were two sides to that map: the Southwestern Ontario side, and the “everything else up there” side that never ever got referenced during our trips.)  They remind me of the pride in being able to identify the places we’d travelled to, and the excitement of planning out new journeys.

GPS?  You rock.  But maps?  Maps are the bomb.

(Do people still say “the bomb”?)  (Meh.  I’m sticking with that.  Anyway…)

Where would I put said map?  On what has affectionately become known as my “star wall” (aka the wall where I randomly and temporarily hung a green star, for lack of anything else to put there at the time.)  (Um, like, a year ago.)  The same wall where I’ve also pondered adding a gallery wall in the past.  But a map?  Hanging one large map would be so much easier than coordinating multiple images in multiple frames (and don’t even get me started on the challenge of keeping everything aligned and straight…  All that nitpickyness could indeed become a wee bit much for perfectionist moi.)

Here’s the picture that originally got my map-loving-ness all in a frenzy (courtesy of the amazing folk over at Restored Style):

Lovely eh?!  The map is so well coordinated and blends in so well with everything else that it’s no longer a map – it’s art.

And don’t even get me started on all the mappage available online!  Here are a couple I’m considering (both from etsy, of course)…

This one from Here & There Shop is super simple, and super duper cute.

I imagine our map would have a little dotted line connecting the village of Ailsa Craig (where Sweetie and I got married in a pretty little white chapel) to France and England (where we honeymooned.)  :)

Or this one (from English Muffin Shop) is fun and cheery…

…I think it’s meant for a child’s room, but I absolutely adore the colours.  It’d look rather nice in our living room, I think!

I might also scour our local antique shops for an actual vintage map (since a map seems like something that an antique store would have, no?)  Really, I’m sure there are a gazillion (give or take a few, of course) different shops (both online and onstreet) where I could find a lovely little map for our living room.  And we could, in fact, simply frame an actual map (which would be the obvious and simple approach!)  (And there are some rather pretty maps out there.)  Yes, the problem may not be where to find myself a lovely map, but instead, which one to hang.  :)

In the meantime, the truth is pretty obvious.  While GPS may indeed make my life a bit easier, a map will likely look way better on my wall.  :)

And what would that be?  I think I need a gallery wall.  Actually, I know I need a gallery wall.  You see, there’s a big empty wall (temporarily being quasi-under-filled by a rather random green star) that’s begging me for frames.  Just look…

Or, more precisely…

(For the record, I’m not sure why the walls look positively peachy in that second picture.  That’s a little odd…  I promise – they’re most definitely a lovely shade of Edgecomb Gray griege.)

I didn’t notice the abysmal blankness so much when the living room was in its previous configuration.  But now that it’s all (awesomely!) rearranged, you see that wall from the couch (where we most often sit in the living room) and the walls are seriously starting to plead with me for substance.  And, never one to say no to a wall, I’ll obviously oblige.

Sadly, I’m not one of those people who can ingeniously lay out frames of several sizes/shapes and – poof! – have the whole shebang look brilliant once up on the wall.  Truth be told, this sort of approach kinda stresses me out (although it looks lovely when other people do it!)  (Yet another example of things I love in other people’s homes!  LOL.)  Nope.  I crave simplicity, a) because I’m too lazy to be bothered with anything more complex than straight lines and identical sizes and b) I have a plan in my head, and it looks just like this (via the good chaps at decorpad)…

Please note the chairs (oh!  Look.  I have the same Ikea Ektorp Tullsta white slipcovered chairs.)  Please notice the configuration (side table between the two chairs?  Why, yes.  I have that too!)  And do you see that wall colour? (Benjamin Moore Revere Pewter, you say?  Golly, my walls are the next shade lighter on that same paint card.  What a coincidence!)  Yep.  This may as well be in my living room.  (Minus the pink tulips.  I’d actually really love some pink tulips please.)  Yes, if there was ever a sign that a gallery wall was meant to be in my little living room, I think this would be a big neon flashing florescent yellow one.  (This also might be a sign that I should paint my little green side table too.)  (I’ll add that to the list.)

For this project, I’ll obviously need a trip to Ikea (yay!)  From what I’ve read so far (and, yes, gallery-wall research is super important) the Ribba frames work particularly well for gallery walls.

And then, the big question?  What to include in those frames.  The obvious answer would be pictures of the cats.  Of course.  :)  And cats may indeed end up in a few of the frames.  Cats, and perhaps a few pictures from our wedding – it makes me a wee bit sad that we haven’t put up any pictures from our wedding yet.  (Um, almost four years later…)

So yep!  That’s the next project in queue.  To officially begin whenever we make it to Ikea next.  Which could be a ways off still (although I’m always looking for an Ikea-excuse!)  Regardless, it’s good to plan ahead, no?  “Glorious gallery wall”, you are officially on my to do list. :)

(And little green sidetable?  Consider yourself due for a paint job shortly too.  Blame decorpad for that one.  :)

Hearts for the laundry room I heart :)

How perfectly laundry-room-ish eh?  Can’t wait to put this on the wall (once the shelves are up and stuff – my replacement washer is coming today I think [yay!], so hopefully shelves will go up next week!)  Purchased from etsy-seller honeytree (did I mention I’m an etsy addict?) just a few days ago (click here for more of her work!)  shipping was crazy super fast, and it was packaged sooo nicely.  This is what I was greeted with when I opened the envelope…

I love pretty packaging :)

So simple, but so cute.  I almost didn’t want to tear into that little kraft-paper-tape heart (but I did.)  :)  Now I just have to find the perfect laundry-room-art frame for my pretty little print!

(Aside: I never thought I’d get so excited about my laundry room.  I think this might mean that I’m officially grown up.  Or just weird.)

Happy Friday!  :)