master bath restyle #1: hooks! lovely hooks!

Spring has officially sprung here in the Pacific Northwest...the rhododendrons and hellebores are blooming and the cherry trees are beginning to wake up as well.  So naturally I started itching to do some refresh and wake up projects in my own home.

who's with me? you're feeling it too, right?

I began this year's journey in the master bathroom with a super simple inexpensive project: replace the towel bars with hooks. Before I frighten you with the before picture, here's the lovely after shot.

[after: lovely hooks]

Ok get ready for the before. My apologies for the dark photo, our bath is on the east side of the house and there's a forest behind us, so tons of natural light kind of eludes this room. Especially in March!

[before: less than lovely messy bars]

So these horizontal racks have always bugged me. [A]: you can see there isn't even enough room for 3 towels without them overlapping, and [2]: unless you hang them just right it simply looks messy. also, I'm convinced that they don't dry properly when they're folded in half like that.

Behold the genius of hooks! They're a gorgeous dark bronze with copper tips and edges [look closely at the round part and you can see the copper! yum]. Unfortunately my Home Depot didn't carry the bronze finish in the store so I had to order them but they were well worth the wait.

[after: lovely hooks]

I purchased a wide piece of MDF from  Home Depot and painted it to match our existing moulding. After cutting it down to 51 inches to fit the space, we screwed it to the wall. Normally we would've nailed it so as to have only small nail holes to fill, but we were lucky in that there were wall studs behind 4 out of 5 of the places that we wanted to hang the hooks. So we used long drywall screws behind 4 of the hooks, sunk them in and just placed the hooks over top. Joy!

now we have 5 places to hang towels, washcloths, and PJs [ahem, hear that dear? you no longer have an excuse to toss your PJs on the floor when you get in the shower!]

materials:

white MDF moulding: $8

hooks: $4.97 each [Liberty Contempo Pilltop Bronze and Copper]

paint: Kelly-Moore Dura Poxy+  untinted semi-gloss [teeny tiny amount used from our existing quart sized touch up can; less than $1]

drywall screws [less than $1; scrounged from the garage]

sweat equity: minimal

I keep finding excuses to go into the bathroom and marvel at these lovelies.
So what are you all itching to work on this Spring? I've only got a million more little things on my list...

lovely, easy velvet pumpkins.

are you as obsessed with velvet pumpkins as I am? well, it's very easy [and inexpensive!] to make your own...bonus is that you get to pick your very favorite colors and make any size you want.

step #1: choose your material.
I purchased crushed polyester velvet. I prefer it over silk velvet because no silkworms have to die to make it, and it's about 1/4 of the price. shazam!
I chose a deep olive, silvery-blue [double yum, my fave], creamy champagne, a deep dark chocolate, and rich burnt orange.

step #2: root around your house to find something round that approximates the size you want. 
remember that your finished pumpkin will be about 1/2 the size of the fabric circle that you cut, because you're going to gather up the ends and sew them at the top, effectively halving it's size.

the biggest circle in my house is a plastic bowl that's about 11.5 inches across so I used that, placing it on the back side of my fabric and tracing around it.
but I wanted my fabric circle to be a bit bigger so when I actually cut the fabric, I used my traced circle as a guide and cut an inch or so outside the tracing, making my final cut circle about 14 inches.

step #3: sew a really easy running stitch.
hand sew a running stitch all the way around your fabric, leaving long tails at each end so that you can tie it off.  I inexplicably have a lot of embroidery floss [why in the world? I don't embroider] so I used that to do my stitches. it's strong and I need to get rid of it.

your stitches definitely don't have to be perfect, believe me mine weren't!
the smaller and closer your stitches are to each other, the more pleats your pumpkin will have.

step #4: fill.

place a good amount of beans in the bottom, enough to weight the pumpkin and give it balance on it's bottom.
cram polyester fiberfill in, filling it all the way.
remember those ends we left nice and long? grab those puppies and tie a really tight knot. if you're like me and you don't have 3 hands, enlist some help to tie that final knot because the stuffing's going to be pushing back at you! cheeky stuffing.
trim off the excess ends of the string.

step #5: hot glue the stem on top.

for me, this was the hardest part, not because it's difficult to actually accomplish, but because I forgot to save my pumpkin stems from last year. duh.
so I cut some stems off this year's pumpkins. remember later on when you're composting your pumpkins: cut those stems off and hoard them!

don't be shy with the hot glue...really load it all over the base of the stem.
once you've got your stem all nice and gluey, press it down hard on the top of the pumpkin, holding for about a minute.

once again, here they are in all their glory! each of these took me less than 15 minutes.
and they look so lovely all piled on the dining room table.

a little bit farmhouse glam, a little bit classic.

when Fall rolls around, my mind turns to Christmas. even though my family lives 1000 miles away [thus they are never at my home for the holidays!] I still spend hours sitting and dreaming about how I plan to decorate my home for the season.

[this centerpiece I made should've been my first clue...]

yesterday I was in HomeGoods [yum] and they had the store totally Christmas-ed out; it was so lovely. and that got me thinking.
about a different look this Christmas.
then I came to a dead stop because I couldn't decide just *what* that look should be!

fast forward to today and I'm browsing the HomeGoods website and I took their Stylescope quiz. lo and behold it was spot on: I'm a little bit Farmhouse Glam and a little bit Classic.
browsing pics of my decorations from years past does indeed point in this direction, so I just need to expand on it a bit:

[oh yea a little rustic, a little shimmer-shimmer]

[oh yea more a little rustic, a little shimmer-shimmer]

[ahem, are you sensing a pattern here?]

HomeGoods even has a wonderful Farmhouse Glam Pinterest board...I couldn't click Follow fast enough.
so I think I've got my cues for decorating this Christmas :-)