Decorating and Making (trying to anyway!)

I'm still working on making our place more homey. The front room is coming along, finally! It was a complete mess a few weeks ago. Uh, see below, slobs!

But we tidied up to make room for a little sofa. I'm going to try to keep it neater in there, which is hard because it's the front room of our house, and not attached to any other rooms, so it's easy to dump stuff in there and forget about it, that is until it piles up and makes me wonder if I'm becoming a hoarder. Anyway, we did clean it up, and it's looking very nice! I found the "coffee table" thing at a charity shop in our neighborhood. Someone told me it's called a lobster-something-or-another. Do you know what it's called? I just thought it looked interesting and would make a nice table or foot stool. I wasn't totally sure about it in the front room as a coffee table, but then I was randomly flipping through an older issue of Anthology magazine and saw one just like it in the feature on Anh-Minh Le's house. It was quite a surprise when I saw it! It looks great in her place so I took another peek in the front room and decided it looked good in ours too. Kinda strange that I found ours in a charity shop in London and she's in California. 

We've also been giving some of our lighting a make-over. Lighting makes a huge difference, don't you think? Not just the type of light, as in the way the light looks when lamps are on, but the fixtures. Ours here were okay, simple track lighting in the kitchen, and some nice shades on some lights, but they didn't go with our things. So here's a bit of our lighting make over. 

The kitchen had track lighting over the island and nothing else, so our dining table across from it was always pretty dark. So we now have these really nice enamel lights from Urban Cottage Industries. They are connected by a grey threaded cable as we didn't want to make a new electrical hole (since we rent here), but I really like the way they are attached. My husband picked these out! Good job. As for the colorful paper lantern in the front room, I found that at a local gift shop. And then the white one above is in our hallway. It had a pretty fixture, but it wasn't working because it needs to be re-wired. I took it to 3 places to try to have it fixed but no luck, so we got an electrician to fix the cord and we bought the dome pendant light above at John Lewis. It's the Salima shade. I love it! I love it more in person than online. It's ceramic and quite heavy but so far it hasn't fallen! My next project is to get Eleanor's room looking nice. I made some bunting for her and have many inspiration images to work with. 

This one here (below) is one of my top inspiration images. More soon from her room. But I have lots of ideas, thanks to Pinterest! 

And I've been making things, or trying to anyway! I'm a very slow crafter and very envious of people who can knock out entire quilts and kitted dresses in a few days. Like Jaime here. Oh my goodness, how does she do it all?!! I'm going through a weird crafting panic phase where I want to learn to do so much and feel like I'm just slow as a snail at learning and that I take for flipping ever to make anything and that I'm getting old and time is slipping away!! BREATHE. It's ok. But it also bugs me that I'm only a beginner at everything. Ah, well, you have to start somewhere and the beginning is a very good place to start after all! So I was happy to have advanced a bit in knitting. I had only made a few basic scarves until a few weeks ago when I finished my first pair of baby booties! They were surprisingly easy (it was a surprise to me anyway). I'm using the book Knitty Gritty, which is a very good beginner book, I think. I'm often intimidated by beginner knitting books because they usually look pretty advanced to me, but this one really is step-by-step slow and good. 

I've also been sewing a few things here and there, like these scarf bibs for Eleanor blow. I found a basic scarf bib pattern online someplace (I can't remember where, you can Google it if you like). I made them from a variety of cute fabrics, including some Liberty fabrics I've had for a while. They are cute, but really not the most practical as I think most of the spit up goes up under her neck! I think for the next batch of bibs I won't do batting and just do an absorbant cotton on the backside. That way they won't be quite as thick. Still she looks very cute in these. 

My mom's in town right now and we've been having fun out and about and she's going to help me get our house a little more together. We've found some nice things for Eleanor's room and hopefully soon I'll have more photos to show from her room. I'm also doing some finishing touches on Lois's room so I will show that soon too!