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Living Room
All Things Home

living room pillows | welting vs. gimp

In case you missed it, Kriste and I are heading to Wisconsin tomorrow!  We’re going to be in Milwaukee and Sun Prairie, on Friday and Saturday respectively, to teach workshops, demos and just hang out with blog readers, milk paint lovers and friends-we’ve-yet-to-meet.  You can find all of the details of our trip HERE. Between the long weekend and our trip, though, we’ve been trying to squeeze in some productivity.  I have a big photo shoot in my house coming up, which is a good excuse to get some finishing touches done.  Those are the things that linger on my to-do list and end up getting bumped when more exiting or pressing projects come around. This week, we’ve been finishing up the upholstered chairs in my living and dining rooms and making pillows.  Most of them are still in process, but we did get the living room pillows, for the bergere

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May 28, 2015 24 Comments
All Things Home

swapping chairs

Sooo…I’ve been know to rearrange, trade and swap furniture in my house.  I’ve always done that, but it’s so much more tempting (and easier) when I have a steady stream of awesome furniture coming into my possession as I’m getting ready for an upcoming antique market.  Sometimes I need to love a piece for a while before I send it off into the world.  There are other times when I trip across something I’ve been looking for and I know right away that it’s coming to my house. That was the case with these chairs… I have been looking for end chairs for my dining room for a while…over a year, I think.  The current end chairs are almost exactly like the side chairs and it looked a little “one-note.”  I felt like some really great end chairs would add a lot more interest to the space.  It’s the kind of

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April 12, 2015 46 Comments
Living Room

ottoman slipcover tutorial

My blog was eerily quiet for a couple of days until I realized there was an error with the comments plugin!  Well, it’s back up a running, so you can talk to me again. Before the Chapel Market, I made a slipcover for an ottoman I found at a second-hand shop and promised a tutorial.  The pictures were soon buried and I forgot all about it!  I was digging through the depths of my Lightroom library and was reminded of my promise.  So, here we go! For this project, I used a couple of vintage textiles I’d been saving in my stash for just the right project.  One was a piece of an old blue & white quilt with amazing stitching and the other was about a yard of antique cream homespun linen.  The quilt piece wasn’t large enough to cover the top of the ottoman, so I needed to use pieces

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December 15, 2014 23 Comments
Decorating

Christmas decorating | the living room

I’ve been sharing the Christmas decorations in my house room by room over the past few days.  In case you missed it, here is the master bedroom and family room decked out for the holidays.   And now, in the tour, we come to the living room.   As with the other rooms I’ve already shared, I used mostly fresh greenery with a few wintry/festive touches. (And I finally made a scrunchy linen cord cover for my plug-in chandelier.) I have a live blue spruce in an antique bucket on the coffee table and some mixed greenery tucked in the chandelier. The pom-pom garland is from Anthropologie and I just let it swag over an antique screen door.  I love how it looks like a garland of snowballs, so it will transition beyond Christmas to be winter decor. I made a loose wreath for my my milk-painted rocking horse. The primitive hutch

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December 5, 2014 25 Comments
Dining Room

tips for sanding floors

This is my second time refinishing floors and I learned a lot through my errors the first go-around.   Since scooting around on diaper boxes to wipe up excess stain (you can read about those antics HERE), I have learned a lot about finishing wood and have done a lot of reading on sanding and finishing floors specifically.  There are so many ways to approach it…everything from sanding an entire room with a palm sander (yes, some people do that), to spending hours getting each piece of wood back to the way it looked the day it was milled.  Our approach?  We wanted the floors to look nice, but weren’t concerned with perfection.  There are already tack marks from carpeting, large holes from old radiators and gas pipes, gouges, scratches, knots, chips and dents, so I didn’t freak out at sanding marks or inconstancies in the wood.   So, take

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November 25, 2014 23 Comments
Living Room

a slip turned into a slip

I found a pretty antique petticoat a few months ago at an antique store and decided it would make a pretty pillow cover.  I would turn a slip into a pillow slip!  Two, actually. Since the ruffle was only on one side, I made it like a slip-on pillow case instead of a traditional decorative bolster cover.  It worked out perfectly, since the ruffle hangs over the sofa and it’s tailored on the back side. It always pains me a little to cut up antique linens, but the detail on this piece was too pretty to not use. You can see a peek of the pillow form under the pillow case, but it’s white, so it’s not distracting.  I might make a simple muslin cover for it at some point, but maybe not.  I’ve even thought about putting blue and white ticking on the end that shows as a fun little detail.

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November 12, 2014 17 Comments
Decorating

a chandelier, watering live evergreens & blue checks

The living room is in the front of our house, which faces south.  Most of the day, the room gets beautiful light..streaming through the dining room and front windows in the morning and in long, golden beams through the west-facing windows in the afternoon.  At night, though, this room is dark.  That is because it has no overhead lighting.  The house was built in the 1940’s and having lots of junction boxes and outlets was just not the thing to do.  I’ve wanted to add pot (recessed) lights and junction boxes for light fixtures to the old part of the house for years, but with plasterboard ceilings and no easy access the ceilings, it would be a major, messy project.  I think lighting is so important for a room, but lines have to be drawn somewhere when you’re fixing up a home that you’re not planning to live in for very

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November 11, 2014 21 Comments
Decorating

a girl can change her mind (and often does)

Soooo…the curtain saga continues.  I’ve confessed that rugs are my nemesis, but now that I’ve switched to sisal and jute blends, I’ve made peace with rugs.  It seems like curtains might be my new nemesis.  I think the struggle I have with curtains is that it’s not a design choice that’s easily (or inexpensively) changed.  In a room with one window…okay, it’s not that big of a deal.  But my family room and living/dining room have four windows each, which means eight full length panels are needed.  That’s at least 25 yards of fabric, plus the lining and a whole lot of time at the sewing machine. I’ve known for a white that I wanted to replace the curtains in the living/dining room, but the reasons above prevented me from doing anything.  I still love that fabric, but I’m ready for a change and I’ve learned a lot about making

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November 10, 2014 43 Comments

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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