Pinch Pleat Curtains

I am so excited to show you the amazing progress that we've made in our library/living room this weekend. Seriously, it's looking so different now!

On Friday evening, after some amazing sushi, my mom and dad came over to bring the curtains that my mom sewed for the room.  I ordered this P. Kaufmann fabric from LS Fabrics in Atlanta.  I chose this fabric as the inspiration for the room, so it was pretty important that we get the curtains right. I love the pattern, linen fabric, and the color palette.

We chose to do pinch pleats because they're so pretty and go well with the theme of the room.  My mom sewed  the panels and used pleat hooks to form the pinch pleats.  These pleat hooks are so cool, they make the process of actually forming the pleats go so much faster. Plus, they can really help you to get a professional look.  You use pleater tape on the top of the back of your panels and insert pleat hooks to create the triple pinch pleat. There's a great explanation of this technique here. This is kind of what the back of the headers of our panels look like, except we have a fabric lining:

Pleated drapes with pleat tape.  source: prudentbaby.com

I purchased silver curtain rods with faux-mercury glass finials for the curtains.  I got matching silver rings for each pin in the back of the curtains to hang on. We also chose to make the panels full length and go from floor to almost the ceiling. I love how this makes our ceilings feel tall and the windows feel bigger than they are. In the end, I love the look of our new curtains and I'm so happy that my mom was able to help me and them look so beautiful!! Check them out in the room:

 

Those pictures were all taken at night, here's what they look like in the daytime. The room is really bright and airy, so relaxing!

So, what do you think? I love them and I think they're really going to bring the room together.

Come back tomorrow for a reveal of my built-in bookshelf project!! We are so excited about showing off our weekend project. It's a big one, can't wait!

Vintage Book Bundles

While we were shopping in Charleston, we found an amazing French antique store on King Street.  I loved almost everything in this shop, but it was outrageously expensive... rightfully so, because everything was really, really old and direct from France.  I fell in love with some book bundles that they had on display at the front of their store.  When I asked about them and how much they cost, the owners told me that the ones I liked weren't for sale but there were similar ones that were $250+ for a bundle of 2-3 books.  At that point, I decided that was crazy and just decided to browse around for inspiration not to buy anything.

When I got home from Charleston, I started looking online for similar book bundles and found some cute things on Etsy and a few on eBay.  But, it's really hard to tell what they look like in person from the pictures. So, I thought that I might be able to recreate something similar myself.  Yesterday, I went to Goodwill to look to see if they had any books that I could use for our new bookshelves in the library/sitting room.

I wound up buying 14 hardcover books and 10 paperback books, all very random in subject material... things I probably won't read, but will look pretty on the shelves. I chose most of these books based on the color of their spine or the condition of the paperback books.

I grouped the hardcover books into stacks that will go on the shelves eventually and then I got to working on turning the paperback books into bundles.  I removed the thick paper covers and paper over the spines to reveal the main part of the book.  I tore out a couple of pages so that the first page was one that I thought looked pretty.  Then, I stacked 3-4 books together and tied them with twine to create my bundle.

I'm pretty excited that I was able to create each bundle with 3-4 $0.75 books, what a bargain! This is especially cheap compared to some of the options on Etsy, these discontinued Pottery barn book bundles which were $40.

We're starting our bookcase project this weekend and I'm getting really excited about filling the shelves. These books and book bundles will look great with the other accessories that I've collected for the shelves. Here's a sneak peak at some of the items I've got so far.

Weekend in Charleston

King St in Charleston

We took off Friday to spend a long weekend in Charleston, SC. My family was there for spring break, so we met them there on Thursday night and then spent Saturday and early Sunday exploring downtown Charleston.

 Here are some pictures from our trip:

BLT with fried green tomatoes at Poogan's Porch on Friday for lunch

Jennifer and Beth at dinner on Friday night

On Saturday morning, we spent the day walking around downtown Charleston. It was a really pretty day :)

We ate lunch at Magnolias and it was delicious! We had an appetizer of wonderful pimento cheese on their homemade flat bread. For lunch I had a shellfish(shrimp, scallops and lobster) in a cream sauce over grits. Kevin had a spicy shrimp and sausage dish.

Magnolias in Charleston

After lunch, we walked more around the city and had a lot of fun exploring.  I really enjoyed taking pictures of the cute scenery.

Saturday night we ate at 39 Rue de Jean, a French restaurant. We found a french pastry shop that sold macarons while walking to dinner, so that was fun! For dinner, I had duck and Kevin had braised rabbit. It was a fun night!

Sunday morning, we ate brunch at Hominy Grill before leaving to head home. We both ate shrimp and grits... a fabulous last meal in Charleston!

We were excited to get home to see Darcy though :)

After picking Darcy up from the kennel/groomer

p.s. A big happy birthday to Kevin!! It's his 25th birthday today :) 

Mirrored Pedestal Table

These days, I'm always looking for pieces for our library/living room.  I'm still searching for the arm chairs that I'll put in front of the window and some more accent pieces.  

Well, on Sunday, I made my (nearly) semiweekly trip to HomeGoods to browse for accessories for our wall of bookshelves. We're going to have 3 bookcases with at least 6 shelves each, that's a lot of space to fill... we need a lot of stuff to put there. I was walking around looking at small decor items and I walked down the accent table aisle and saw this:

Yes!!! It's exactly what I've been envisioning in my head and it popped up in HomeGoods!  I love the distressed champagne finish on the wood and the mirrored pieces are really pretty!  The proportions are just right, I think any chairs that I get will go really nicely with this table!

When I got home, I positioned it in the library with two of the upholstered chairs from our dining room as the arm chair placeholders. I bought a faux-mercury glass lamp at HomeGoods a couple weeks ago, and I think it goes really nicely with the table. I haven't decided if that will stay on this table or go another one in the room. Either way, I'm loving how pieces brighten up the room. 

So, that's my most recent fabulous HomeGoods find! 

Do you love HomeGoods? What have you scored there recently?

Coordinating Fabrics

I'm still here! Sorry for the lack of posts recently, I'm blogging as we go with our living room updates.  We have actually made some progress in the room, but there's not much to show yet ;)

Right now, I'm working on trying to identify which fabrics I'll use as accents in the room. If you remember, the main fabric, for the curtains is P. Kauffman Leaf Cloud:

  

I received the fabric for the curtains and my mom is currently helping me make them into curtain panels. Hopefully we'll have them up in a couple weeks :) However, I was interested in how the fabric would look on the entire roll, so I held it up for a quick picture before we started the curtains. 

One thing, isn't it crazy how the wall color changes with different things in the picture. Here, it sort of looks like a light green, but it really doesn't in most other light. This was a night and taken with my phone so it's a little off. However, I think that is one of the great things about neutral paint colors, I love how they go with everything and are really pleasing to the eye when done right. 

I'd like to incorporate some bold fabrics in the room for pillows and other accents.  Finally selecting fabrics is actually turning out to be quite difficult.  I want to the accents to be bright and fun in a mixture of patterns. I think bright green will be nice with the original fabric. Here are some of the fabrics that I'm found which might look nice with the P. Kauffman fabric. It's hard to tell the actual colors and scale from these examples, but I'm looking for a mix of fun geometric prints, textures and colors that will coordinate with the curtain fabric.

                                         

I'm still on the hunt for the perfect fabrics, so it might not even end up using any of these... we'll see!

What do you think? Which are your favorite combinations?