Saturday, March 9, 2013

inspiration: nightstand styling contest

My favorite Design Star winner, HGTV host, and all around beautiful person, Emily Henderson, has posted a design challenge/contest for her blog readers. The contest is to "style" their nightstands and possibly win a pair of Serena and Lily nightstands. Oooohh! Aaahhh! Well, the one thing she perhaps did not take into account is that if you want to win some nightstands you probably are in need of some nightstands. So what do you "style" in order to win? Hmmmm?
The back of my toilet is very well styled. Lovely art, a candle, owl shaped room deodorizer, etc. How come no one ever asks to see picture of that? Well, instead of getting sad, mad, depressed and giving up, I got creative. I borrowed a side table from the living room, a free off craigslist beauty. Thank you very much. Of course now that I've had a moment to think about it using that or something similar is probably what Emily had in mind all along. To stretch our creativity and see what we could put together to prove we really want those nightstands!! You're so clever Emily, how silly of me to doubt you. I am slime.
See my lovely before and afters below. As I said before I am in deep, deep, need of some nightstands and currently my husbands side of the bed, which I styled here, has just a floor lamp and a bunch of junk dumped on the floor. So for the "before" shot I've posted a pic. of my side of the bed which uses a lovely rolling file cabinet that a friend gave us. Which I will use until I can afford something else because, when we returned from our trip something was better than nothing. Right? Sort of. After doing this I was fairly tempted to keep the "after" arrangement but, then where would my wine glass go whilst I'm sitting on the sofa enjoying another episode of "Secrets of a Stylist" on HGTV?

Thursday, March 7, 2013

sunday morning inspiration: the new artisans

The New Artisans: Handmade Designs for Contemporary Living, written and compiled by Australian blogger Oliver Dupon for Thames & Hudson.
I know I am a little behind the times on this review since this book came out in 2011 but I picked it up in the library for the second time and wanted to share how wonderful it is. Every page is filled with such interesting people and their beautiful art. If you are an artist or just always dreamed of being one check out this book! It is an inspiration for the return of truly artisan made goods.
(image:Amazon)