Southern Bloggers Conference Recap

Wow...I think I've finally recovered enough from this last weekend...not sure if my house is fully recovered yet from me being gone, but it's getting there.  For 14 weeks, a wonderful group of women...Barb from The Everyday Home, Shirley from Housepitality Designs, Amy from Atta Girl Says, Suzy from Worthing Court, Cindy from Living on the Bliss, and myself had been planning the first ever Southern Bloggers Conference here in Raleigh, NC for this past weekend.  Here's a brief recap of the weekend...

Houndstooth Coffee Table

One of the quickest and easiest ways to add a graphic punch to outdated furniture or walls is to use a stencil.  With so many great stencils out there, the possibilities are endless.  When I picked up this outdated and tired coffee table (sorry, no before picture), it was just begging for a new look. You've probably seen this style of coffee table around with it's shiny, cherry factory finish...it's a perfect size table to experiment with some stenciling.

Luckett's Green Milk Paint Cabinet

I've been dying to try Miss Mustard Seed's Milk Paint in Luckett's Green.  I seem to stick to safer, muted colors and even though I love green, my stand-by paint colors are usually some shade of blue.  Nailing just the right shade of green is pretty challenging, but Marian came up with just the perfect hue...a bright, spring green or Luckett's Green inspired by the Old Luckett's Store in VA.

When I picked this cabinet up, it immediately reminded me of a 40's-50's style kitchen hutch and thought it would be fun to try out the new color with.  The cabinet was definitely dreary before (sorry for the bad phone pic)...

Craft Room - Office Reveal

I feel like a very lucky girl... You see, I haven't always had an entire room, filled with my favorite things, to escape to and create.  It's been quite the opposite for the last 5-6 years of my creative journey!  I used to dream of a space like this...

...A place to store all my jewelry-makings, paint and paper supplies, decorating books and publications, favorite vintage finds, but I honestly never thought I'd ever have "my own room".

I started off long ago with a can of paint, paintbrush, and a piece of furniture and a desire to decorate my first  small home for as thrifty as I could.  It slowly grew into a small business to keep me busy after leaving my career to stay home with my little ones.  I would sell out of shops and set up booths at local vintage/antique shows, all the while I was working late nights and a few nap times from my tiny dining table and the three-foot section between my bed and the wall!  A family of five in a 1,900 sq ft. home with a creative, inventory-based business wasn't always easy.  There were many times before big shows that my house looked like a store itself!

Classic Cottage Sideboard

It's been a while since I've painted a distressed white piece of furniture... When I first started painting furniture 5-6 years ago, I painted most pieces white or off-white and distressed them.  While not everything was painted this way, I started veering away to experiment and try new "looks". I'll go through phases of paint...like black furniture, a favorite paint color, etc.    

I usually have a vision in my head of what I want a piece of furniture to look like before I start painting and I didn't plan on painting this sideboard white, but I knew that I wanted to distress it and/or use dark wax or glaze to bring out all the details.  I started off mixing some custom colors with my paints and tried them out on some areas and just didn't like anything!

My Fall Mantels of 2012

Alright, I'm a little crazy...at least my family probably thinks so when they watch me shuffle decor around the house and changing things out here and there.  You see... I have a lot of "props", or home decor accessories, that I've accumulated over the years of antiquing and vintage shopping and selling at shows and shops.  Thank goodness for some big china hutches and a house with quite a bit of storage.  It's nice to be able to "shop" around the house for things to put new vignettes together, which is what I did for my fall mantels this year.

The first mantel I put together is one my favorite styles...mixing soothing neutrals with silver accents adds a little bit sophistication to the normal fall color palette...

Inside Spoonflower - Custom Fabric Printing

Have you ever searched high and low for that perfect fabric only to come up short?  You have this picture in your head of the fabric or a design that you love, but just can't find what you want...