Improvements

I've been working a few facelift projects around the house lately. Nothing major, just little things that brighten the room a bit.

Three years ago I made these throw pillows. This blue pattern was never my favorite to begin with, but was made worse by a mistake. We learned the hard way that if you wipe spit up and other child goo off this shade of blue fabric with a baby wipe, the dye comes off, too and you end up with pink. How blue turns into pink, I have no idea, but that is not a kool-aid stain on that there pilla.


So I decided that I should make a couple new shams. They were inspired by this sham at West Elm, but using fabric I already had. Depending on your perspective, my fabric choice was either very good or very bad. Either it's very tacky that I used the scraps of outdoor fabric I had recently reupholstered by outdoor furniture in, or it's genius that my front room is coordinated with my back yard!
Either way, the couch looks much improved. So then I decided to clear off this table. It's right by my front door, and while I love looking at all the pictures of family and friends, it had gotten decidedly busy.

So now it looks like this.

Now for the best one. As long as we've been in our house, the wall by the front door has bothered me. I have a beautiful picture of Christ that I love, but I also have had an ugly alarm box that is not connected and throws off the balance of the whole wall. I finally took a hint from another blog, which I would credit but I can't remember, on how to hide ugly thermostats on walls. I took a before picture with my camera, but can't seem to locate it anywhere. I took a new one today of the halfway finished project. Bracken took the good camera to work today, so I had to resort to using Chloe's new VTech kidzoom camera. That accounts for the low quality of the pictures. Really, it's not just my poor photography skills.

I even put a little frame on it just to prove my point.
Here's the alarm box with a pirate hat, which still didn't make it cute.
So, as you may have noticed, I added a little shelf (a shelf that came to me free from my brother's new house, plus a couple coats of paint) under the alarm box. Then I added a picture and some candles and voila! A lovely decorative moment, and no more ugly alarm box. Now if only I could move the airconditioner intake vent.

And now for the final improvement. You see these big and beautiful muffins (Seriously, that's the name of the recipe, plus some of my own streusel topping)? Well they are history. As in I ate all of them. Okay, I didn't actually, but I AM going to be seriously limiting my consumption of them. In preparation for my baby brother's upcoming nuptials in August, Bracken and I are embarking on a weight loss/fitness journey/competition. We are both in desperate need of this improvement, though I must say, when Bracken weighed in this morning, my first thought was, Wow, for the first, and probably only, time in our marriage, my husband actually outweighs me by about 20 pounds! I might be a little sad to lose that glimpse of feeling like a small, dainty woman. But hey, hopefully I will be smaller and daintier for real soon. However, I will still have tree trunks for legs. It just goes with the territory.