Emerald Green

Emerald green has emerged as Pantone's Color of the Year for 2013.  Our love for this color is evident: a few months ago, we painted a vintage table emerald green for Julie's living room, and we posted about adding this emerald green banana leaf pillow to her living room, as well.

We think emerald green is bright and sophisticated, but definitely prefer it as an accent (large doses of this color run the risk of creating a heavy look and feel):

Want to infuse a little bit of this color into your own home decor?  Here are some ideas to get you started:

We love this raw wood Ikea dresser.  We'd paint it using Emerald Isle from Benjamin Moore.

Throw this malachite pillow from Society Social on an accent chair for a nice pop of emerald green:

Three of these pendant lights would look great over an island in a modern, black and white kitchen:

We love the look of overdyed rugs, and think this version would work well in a bedroom (RugsUSA is currently having a 50% off sale...get it while you can!):

So...do you think emerald green was the right choice for Color of the Year? Would you use it in your own home? 

Julie's Living Room: Repurposing a Framed Canvas

Julie has been on the hunt for some large, statement art for her living room to hang above her couch.  While we've found some pieces that we love for this space, they've all been really expensive due to their size.  Not wanting to spend a ton of money, we've been putting this room off since Julie moved in over a year ago.

While browsing our local thrift store the other day, we found two framed canvases-- we loved the frames (a pretty gold), the size (43" x 35"), and the price...only $30 for the pair! Even though the actual art in the frames made us cringe, we knew we could repurpose them.

We decided to use one above her new couch in the living room and the other for her master bedroom.  For the piece in the living room, Julie convinced Sarah to paint something for her.  For anyone interested in painting over an old canvas, Gesso will be your saving grace. Gesso is basically like primer in the art world...it gets your canvas ready for any acrylic paint, and makes it so that your new paint will hold to canvas, regardless of what was on it before.

Once the Gesso dried, we taped off the sides of the canvas with painter's tape in order to protect the frame from any drips.  A short time later, our canvas looked like this:

A huge piece of framed art for only $15! We absolutely love how it looks in the room-- we feel like it ties the look of the living room all together, and love that the color of the grass in the painting pulls in some of the chartreuse color from the upholstery on an accent chair in the room.

For the second canvas, we're thinking of taking inspiration from this project shared by Jenny.  Because the piece will go in Julie's master bedroom, we think we might blow up a photo from her wedding and mount it inside the frame.  Considering the size of the frame, we don't want the photo to have Julie and Clay's faces front and center, so we'd like to use a picture like the one below, which features the church they were married in (shameless plug for our amazing wedding photographer, Krystal Muellenberg).  Once the piece is enlarged and printed on blueprint paper, it will be black and white:

We haven't committed to this project just yet, because we're thinking that a big piece of art would also look great in Julie's teeny-tiny second bedroom.  What do you think-- paint over canvas #2 and put it in the second bedroom or enlarge a photo for the master bedroom?

Julie's Bedroom: Vintage Tulip Lamps

Sorry for the silence lately-- we've got some exciting stuff going on that we can't wait to share with you in the next few months.

One of our all-time favorite rooms is the master bedroom of Melissa Warner Rothblum, an interior designer with Massucco Warner Miller Interior Design:

We love the charcoal, ivory, taupe, and melon color scheme and that the room has a lot of texture.  It doesn't seem fussy, either. Also...those Draper chests are insane.  Ever since we saw this room, Julie has been on the hunt for similar vintage gilt tulip lamps.  Here's a closer picture of the lamps:

We've been searching high and low for them.  We've found some Tole lamps on eBay that were beautiful, but they were expensive and needed rewiring, so we ended up passing on them.  We had all but given up on finding anything even close to these, when Sarah stumbled upon these beauties at HomeGoods:

They're not tulips, but they're similar enough and were only $40.  We're thrilled with how they look on Julie's bedside tables.  Eventually, we'll swap out the shades for pure white since the current shades clash with Julie's basketweave headboard.

Happy Monday, everyone! Wishing you a wonderful week.

Julie's Kitchen: Art in the Kitchen

Since we spent a lot of time in the kitchen over the holidays (eating, not cooking), we've been thinking more about design elements that make kitchens really special. One thing that sticks out to us in all of our favorite kitchens is art:

Because we're renters and can't update our kitchens in the ways we'd like to, art is something that both of us have used to infuse a little bit of design into pretty basic apartment kitchens.  We picked up this piece, which is in Julie's kitchen, at a thrift store in Chicago.  We love the scale of it, and that the black and white of the cow balances out the warmth of Julie's cabinets.

It reminds us a little bit of one of our favorite prints from Jayson Home, which we think would look great in any kitchen:

We love that art can tone down the sterility of a kitchen and that it can also really balance out the color temperature of a room.  If you've got a stark, white kitchen, we'd suggest bringing in art with warmer tones, like in this piece:

And if you have a warm-toned kitchen, we'd steer towards something a little cooler, like this:

Regardless of what you choose, we think bringing art into unexpected rooms, like the kitchen, is yet another way to bring a little more of yourself into your home.  Happy Monday!

Happy New Year!

We hope everyone had a restful holiday.  We spent the holiday with our families, and had the chance to unwind and get some quality time with the people we love most.  We're excited to kick off 2013 and are looking forward to all that this year has in store.

Are you big into resolutions? We like to keep our resolutions short and sweet (so that we can actually do them) but we're still working on our lists for this year.  If you're late like us, hopefully these pretties will help you get inspired.

 Thank you for all the support you've shown us in 2012!