Hey Y’all!  Hope your weekend was great – mine was wonderfully family-filled and I am sad to see it go.

I thought I’d start the week off by sharing my mood board for the craft studio.  After a floor plan, this is my next major step in planning out a space.  It may seem a little silly, or even tedious, but it is a really easy way to make sure that your colors and key pieces are heading in the direction you want.  Sometimes I will shoot pictures of the walls and do a full Photoshop rendering (I did with the master bedroom – to be featured at a later date), but that is not always necessary.  Especially if the room you are doing happens to be a disaster zone and shooting pictures of blank walls is pretty much a pipe dream.

I think of mood boards as an ultra-focused pinterest board – a place where you put all your ideas together so you can look at them as a whole and make sure they all work together.  In fact, if you don’t want to muck around with photoshop, you can do just that – make a pinterest board just for your room, and pin away!  The only catch is that it helps to be very selective in your pins if you take this approach.  For example, if you were doing a bedroom, only pin one bed.  Make sure that bed is one you a) love and b) can actually find (or at least get close) and put in the space.  Pinning 8 beds doesn’t really help – it is better to pin one bed, one dresser, one wall color, etc. so you can see the room at a glance as close to its final form as possible.

That being said, I generally stick to Photoshop, because it is familiar to me and because I can make the background my wall color and/or rug.  Doing this really helps me make sure every accessory and piece of furniture works with those two anchoring factors, which helps assure me that the final product will be harmonious.

For the craft studio, I decided to go with a neutral light gray-blue on the walls.  Specifically, Valspar’s “Seashore Fog.”  I originally planned to paint the walls a deep navy, but have since moved that idea to the master bedroom.  Frankly, this makes more sense since the master is ginormous and the craft studio is the size of a shoebox.  Additionally, I am a big enough girl to admit that I chickened out – what can I say, I was nervous about defying the old rule of small space = light walls.  Sometimes (usually) taking a risk is worth it, but I think the light walls will really make the room feel bigger, and I will just use the navy in smaller doses.  I am still toying with doing a navy accent wall or ceiling…you’ll just have to wait for the reveal to see what I choose!

I also chose to go neutral for the rug in the studio – gray and ivory.  One, because it was on sale (and y’all know the Doctor and I love saving money), and two, because this way I can change the accent colors in the room without being bound by the flooring color.  I tend to get bored with things after a year or so, so rather than fight that I try to make sure the foundation (ie, bigger or more expensive pieces) of the room are something I know will work with a variety of colors and design styles.  The Doctor doesn’t mind me changing up the pillows or picture frames in a space every once in awhile, but if I tried to replace all the rugs and furniture in our house on an annual basis he might not be so happy!

Other things to consider placing on the board are major pieces of furniture (the dresser and the desk in this case), as well as a few accents to represent the entirety of you planned color scheme.  Note that I said “a few” – it is super rare that I will put everything that is ultimately going in the room on the mood board.  It is just too visually confusing!  Imagine if your favorite restaurant put all the ingredients and recipes under every item on the menu – it would be too much to slog through.  In my experience, the mood board works best as a tool if you limit it to major, key pieces of information.  Of course, you don’t have to be as narrow-minded focused as me –  anything that evokes the feel you are going for is a candidate to be added.  I know some bloggers who add song lyrics or fashion spreads to their home decor mood boards – it’s all up to you and what will help you envision the space.  I am pretty literal and focused when it comes to mine, so I tend to stick to the actual things going in the room.

In this space I knew I wanted navy and gray with gold elements and one additional color for “pop.”  I considered yellow, green, aqua, and red, but ultimately settled on pink.  I love the preppy, feminine feel that navy, gold, and pink create when used together, and the reality is the Doctor would be less than thrilled if I tried to put pink as a major player in the main parts of the house.  Since this is my office, and the spousal veto exception applies, I decided to dive headfirst into preppy, girly, and glam.  Of course, I will be sure to throw in some warm wood as well to keep it in balance with the rest of the house, and I will try to avoid glitter overload.

So here it is…

…my mood board for the craft studio – feel free to let me know what you think by commenting below!

Till next time,

Sarah

So the other night I was talking about this little blog with my husband, and he indicated that he would prefer to be known as “the doctor” rather than the somewhat less impressive “mister.”  I told him I was happy to do so provided he would let me design an emoji/avatar featuring him peeking out from behind the Tardis that I can use on the blog. #yesiamserious #itshallbedone  (Also, for all those who know what I am talking about, bonus points for you!)

So this is just a little heads up to tell y’all that the doctor and the mister are indeed one and the same amazing man I married 🙂

As promised, here is a closer look at the focal wall in the entryway.  I knew I wanted something unique – something to add energy as soon as you walked in the door.  The Mister suggested painting it crimson. Frankly, I wasn’t at all surprised by his suggestion, since crimson is his favorite color.  If he had it his way, our whole house would be decorated in crimson, gray, and white as an homage to our favorite college football team, but I digress.

Mister’s other suggestion was to do something with a damask print, since the rug in our dining room is a tone-on-tone gray damask, and it would help the spaces flow nicely without being too matchy.  Again, he suggested CRIMSON damask, but I told him that in the interest of keeping our house from looking like a bordello, we might want to try a more neutral color.

Ultimately, we decided to go with Martha Stewart’s “Seal” – the color we had used above the board and batten in the dining room.  It’s a lovely smokey gray with quite a brown cast.  It’s very warm and welcoming and it pairs nicely with the ever-present builder beige the previous owner painted in EVERY room of the house (It’s like the orthopedic shoe of paint colors – incredibly practical, and incredibly boring).  “Seal” has been discontinued, but in my experience the paint formulas are still in the Home Depot computers, so you can likely have it mixed up in Glidden paint.

My next step was to find a damask print that was fairly simple, since I would be free-handing it onto the wall (I totally cheated on this – more on that in a moment).  Onward, to google images!  Now, I’m going to be totally honest here – I can be a bit, um, particular when it comes to symmetry and balance.  While I don’t mind asymmetry, it has to be perfectly counterweighted or it drives me nuts.  So, I decided to mock the entryway up in photoshop with the different damasks so I could see which one I liked best.  This was the victor:

I printed off  the damask pattern on my laser printer, and I was ready to go.  But Sarah, you may ask, how in the world was printing off the pattern on a tiny piece of paper going to help you get it blown up and on the wall?  Well, here’s the cheating part I mentioned earlier – I used an opaque projector.  We’ve all seen the old-school projectors our teachers used in grade school (and if you haven’t don’t tell me because you’ll just make me feel old, lol).  But those are clunky and hard to find, and they require a transparancy.  An opaque projector can project anything onto a surface – even 3D objects.  This is the one I used, which I snagged with a 40% off coupon at Michael’s.

I know, it’s spendy, but I can see myself using it for a bunch of projects, so I deemed it an investment piece and moved along 😉

First hurdle – lighting.  Because the projector uses a light to throw the image on the wall, it is best if the room is actually pretty dark to start with – it makes the contrast on the projection easier to see, especially if you are pushing the magnification limits like I was.  I happen to have several very large windows that all shine on the entry, and there was so much ambient light that I couldn’t see squat.  The practical solution would have been to wait until it was dark outside rather than doing this at ten in the morning, but I am impatient.  So instead I drew all the drapes shut, and covered the remaining windows with blankets and cardboard, like so:

I am sure my neighbors thought I was crazy – even I was reminded of the Law and Order episode where the killer covered his windows in foil to keep out alien mind-controlling beams.  Then again, my neighbors probably already think I am crazy, so no harm, no foul – sometimes you just have to let your crazy hang out, y’all.

Second hurdle – my damask needed to be HUGE.  We have typical 8 foot ceilings, and I wanted the damask to be cropped off at the edges, so it needed to be about 9.5 feet tall.  Because my damask was so large, I had to project it in pieces – the magnification power wasn’t high enough to do it all in one go.  I’m not going to lie, getting it all to match up wasn’t the easiest thing in the world, especially since I was McGuyver-ing balancing it on an assortment of boxes I had around the house to get it to the right height.  It was really difficult to make sure everything lined up and was level.  And when I say really difficult, I mean bring-chocolate-and-wine frustrating…

…poor Mister – he never knew what hit him when he walked in and observed that my painstakingly lined-up damask looked “a little crooked.”  The conversation went something like this:

Me: What do you think?  I have been working on it all day and I’m finally making some headway!
Mister: Looks great!  You know it’s a little off, right?
Me: *eyes begin to redden* What do you mean, “a little off?”
Mister: Well, you know, like a little cattywampus…it goes uphill a little.
Me: *insert freak out moment of epic meltdown proportions here*

In the end, after I put on my big-girl pants and stopped throwing a hissy-fit (just keeping it real, folks), we worked together to get it right.  I sketched the outline in pencil first, like this:

…and then I went back and filled in the outlines with my paint.  Ultimately, it was easy, I promise – like a giant coloring book page.  A few words of advice:

1) make little x’s in the areas you want to fill in (you can see mine in the picture above).  It seems silly when you are doing it, but it really helps ensure you don’t make any mistakes later on.

2) outline with a bristle brush, and then fill in with a foam brush.  I didn’t do this at first, and there were several areas that looked patchy so I had to redo them – goody.

Here is a series of pictures to show you the progression – I highly suggest working from the top down, and taping off your edges if you are worried about getting crisp lines where it meets other walls and/or the ceiling and floor (I didn’t, but I am a rebel like that).

 Despite my meltdown in the middle, it turned out really well, and it brings such personality to the entry.  The best part was that I already had the paint, so it was basically free!  Woo!

Till next time,

Sarah