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Decorating

All Things Home

styling tips | for retail

I’ve written several posts about styling over the years, but I’ve grown a lot and learned a lot along the way and it’s probably time for an update.  (I have also received a few comments and e-mails about it lately.)  Styling is a broad topic, so I’ll break this up into a series.  In my work, I do three kinds of styling – for photography, for the home, and for retail.  They all have similarities, but I approach each of them differently.  Let’s start with styling for retail… This is a “retail vignette” I put together using furniture and accessories that I brought to sell at Lucketts… As I’m pulling and arranging things, I’m aiming toward three main goals… styling for retail | tell a story Whether it’s a story of color, texture, a specific space, theme, season, geographic location, etc., I want to curate a group of items that relate to one

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All Things Home

styling the girl’s vintage bedroom

When I was a little kid, my favorite toy was my dollhouse.  I enjoyed living out the imaginary lives of the little people who resided there, but my favorite part was arranging and rearranging the furniture.  Even building “additions” with metal lebkuchen tins to make room for more furniture. I carried that into my teen years when I rearranged and restyled my room regularly.  You know.  Just for fun.  Like most typical teenagers. My furniture-scooting habits haven’t waned and have been well documented here on this blog. Now that I have a studio space, it’s like one big, open, life-sized dollhouse.  I can create vignettes, scenes, and even entire rooms (which I hope to do a lot more!) For the first time ever, we have a fully outfitted bed in the studio and I just couldn’t resist building an entire room around it. Here is a video showing how I

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a slice of life

tiny topiaries & “just our stuff”

Last year was a big year for me.  I finally decided to give gardening and indoor plants a real effort.  I was actually going to water, tend, prune, weed, and fertilize.  Guess what happened?  I didn’t kill everything! I only killed some things, but I learned a lot along the way. I was not excited about warmer temperatures, because the A/C is broken in my van, but I was looking forward to the greenhouses being full again!  When my mom and I were antique shopping on Friday, we popped into a couple of local nurseries.  I was looking specifically for topiaries, but only found a half-blackened rosemary topiary.  I did find some little plants that could be trimmed up and made into topiaries, so I thought I would give that a try. I trimmed them up and tied them with cotton string to some little sticks I found in the

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All Things Home

antique haul for the Lucketts Spring Market

One thing that I love about what I do and being “the boss” is that I can (most of the time) chose to do the kind of work that suits my mood on any particular day.  Last Friday, I was in a get-out-of-the-studio mood, so I decided to do some more shopping for the upcoming Lucketts Spring Market (May 20-22, 2016.) My mom and I set out for a newly opened store about 25 minutes away and hit another local shop on the way.  We ended up with a pretty nice haul! I have been wanting to do more videos lately, but keep putting it off.  It’s hard for me to take pictures of everything after these big shopping trips, so a video is an easy way to share it with you and I can also talk through my thought process for why I buy what I buy… My hair is in pretty

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All Things Home

decorating dilemma | joy’s family room

I got a text a few nights ago. “Hey there! OK, decorating question…we have a big two-story family room with plenty of natural light. Everything is brown now and I want to lighten it up with some greige paint. But I have oak trim that my husband won’t let me paint. Do you have a favorite greige color that would go with oak? Trying to think who in my life knows paint… Oh, right….I know a professional paint enthusiast!!!” This led to a lengthy virtual makeover through texts, pins and links.  I mean, how can I just pick a wall color and leave it at that?! This ended up being a perfect space for me to share as a decorating dilemma post. Here is the color palette and some ideas I put together for Joy’s space… Here is the family room as it is now… I love that there are

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All Things Home

updated tips for shopping craigslist

If you’ve read my blog for any amount of time, you’ve probably caught on that craigslist is one of my favorite places to shop for furniture.  I’m often asked about it, so I thought I would share some updated tips along with my craigslist strategy and how I sort through the trash and treasures. First of all, I know I’m in a “good area” for finding furniture and antiques.  I live in south central PA and it’s not a very transient area.  Families live here for generations.  They don’t move, they add on.  We’ve lived in our town for almost ten years and I still feel like we’re relatively new. This is also a rural area and an old one, which means lots of old houses and barns.  All of those things combined means that there are attics, basements, spare rooms, and outbuildings filled with old things that eventually end up in

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All Things Home

cleaning cart turned garden cart

Remember the cleaning cart turned kitchen cart?  I found a pair of industrial cleaning carts on craigslist for a great price, so I decided to purchase both and turn one into a kitchen cart and give the other one a makeover to use as a garden cart. In case you missed the details of the kitchen cart transformation, you can find them HERE. Well, this is just another take on how these multi-functional furniture pieces can be used.   (I have two of them.)  Many of you gave great suggestions…a craft cart, laundry cart, toy storage, etc.  There are lots of possibilities. In this post, I’m showing it as a garden cart… I’m imagining it on a covered porch or in a potting shed. On one side of the garden cart, I put a pair of rain boots, broom & dustpan, and a wire basket.  It would also be a

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All Things Home

decorating dilemma update | sarah’s fireside room

Do you remember Sarah’s fireplace room?  We talked about it originally back in August and then I gave you an update on her progress in December.  Last week, she checked in with me again to share their progress. Like most real, non-TV makeovers, Sarah is working on the makeover project-by-project, slowly over time, as life and budget allows.  In her e-mail to me, she shared this, “…sometimes I feel like everyone else is flying past us. We do everything ourselves and usually get our materials second hand. I read a couple of weeks ago that it took you seven years to get your kitchen the way it is and I got teary eyed. I understand that endurance.” It does sometime get tiring when a makeover is a marathon and you wish you could just beam yourself to the finished room…sit in it and have your tea and enjoy the glorious done-ness of

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I’m Marian, a painter, writer, and lover of all things creative. From art and antiques to home projects and everyday life, I share my journey in hopes of inspiring you to embrace your own creativity and make beauty in the spaces you live.

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