Thursday 24 July 2014

Dining Room Mood Board

Hello

Today I'm going to share with you another mood board I created. This one is for the dining room. We are currently halfway through decorating this room and it is coming together really nicely. This design centred around the gorgeous birdcage wallpaper which is from Next (currently still in stock along with some wall decals in slightly different colours) priced at £15 per roll. This paper has a white background, with blue, green, brown and cream birdcages. The outlines of the cages are silver and all the of them have a pearlised finish which catches the light beautifully. My only criticism of this paper is that is stains easily. Lucy has shaken water off after a walk and it has marked the paper (humph!).


If you have seen my furniture customisation post you will know that we chose the duck egg blue colour to pick out the woodwork and have painted the non-papered walls white. It looks very fresh and clean :) 



I really want to have the furniture half painted like the photo above, but instead of cream use the duck egg blue. We have decided to get some kind of wood flooring because of the pets with a couple of  green rugs to make it softer under foot. The ones pictured are, surprise surprise, from Next, as is everything else in the picture. I have already bought the books which have secret storage and they tie in well with the wallpaper. In terms of accessories I will get things in either the white, blue or green that is on the wallpaper. I'm also planning a piece of wall art with pictures of the pets in ornate silver frames, possible with some cutout birdcages from the wallpaper intermingled between them.

Once we have finished this room I will upload some photos of the finished look and you can see how closely I followed the mood board!

TTFN!

Monday 7 July 2014

How to Make A Victorian Silhouette

Hello

Today I am going to talk you through how to make your own Victorian silhouette using a photo and some black paper. I decided to make one for each member of our household because I thought it would be cute and would be fitting for our Victorian house.



To make your own silhouettes you will need photos taken side on (in profile), black paper, white paper, glue, photo frames of your choice (mine were from here) and scissors or a craft knife.


The first step is to cut your backing paper to size. The easiest way to do this is by taking out the piece of paper that comes with the frame and cutting around that.


Next you need to make sure your photos will fit into the frame. The way to do this is to use photo editing software. Create a blank canvas and put in the measurements of the aperture of the frame, then import your photo and resize it to fit in this space. On photoshop elements go to file>new>blank file. This bring up a window that allows you to put in some dimensions. Change the measurement from pixels to either inches, centimetres or millimetres (which ever is easiest for you) and put in the dimensions of your frame. Then click ok. Open a new window with the chosen photo then click and drag it into the blank file. Use the free transform tool  (image>transform>free transform) to resize the photo. Then print it.


Stick the photo onto some black paper using paper adhesive e.g. Pritt Stick


Carefully cut the photo (that is now stuck to black paper) out using either scissors or a craft knife.


Put the white paper you cut out earlier into the frame (minus the protective glass that come with the frame). You can then make sure the black head you have cut out is perfectly positioned within the frame. Glue the back of the head and stick it into position. Then take the silhouette out and replace the glass.

Silhouette complete!