Well, 2012 is off to a rapid start!  I had one nice day where I stayed in my pajamas until noon, reading blogs over a cup of coffee that I nursed for so long I had to keep going back to the kitchen to warm it back up.  I am trying to curb my jealousy of everyone who had a whole week of that flannel-wrapped down time.  Next year, I tell myself.  Next year, I am going to be the laziest, most decadent girl ever.  They will have to pry me off of the couch with a crow bar and tear the chocolate bonbons from my hands!  There will be no deadlines and no packing!

This year, I’ll be good and do my work and get ready for the move.

A man came to our apartment to tally up our things for the moving truck.  We have a date and a schedule now.  I put a calendar on the refrigerator which makes it feel very official.  (I’m old school like that.)  In a few days, we are going to fly up to Seattle and look for a place to live.  I am excited to have some time to explore our new home.  (And I think we’ll both be much more excited once we have a place for all of that furniture and boxes to land.)  We are planning to stay in a temporary apartment in Downtown Bellevue for awhile, and as much as I’m ready to get out of city-living, I look forward to being able to walk to restaurants, shopping, coffee shops, and the library while we get settled.

I dragged my poor husband to the after Christmas sales so I could buy some sweaters which brings my warm shirts tally up to 4.  That should do, right?  I don’t know anyone there yet, so no one will know that I’m going to wear the black sweater with the buttons on Mondays AND Fridays.  Well, either that or someone is going to have to take me back to the mall.  At least it’s close enough I can walk there, right?

Did you get to relax?  I want to hear about it.  I am living vicariously through my well-rested friends.  Especially warm ones who have sweaters.

Over the 3-day weekend, we finally purchased fabrics for our throw pillows.  I just double-checked my initial post, and yep, it has taken us 5 months to choose these fabrics.  I was not kidding when I said this would be one of those “slow-but-steady” projects.

Anyway, I’m excited to be able to share our plans (at last).  As a brief refresher – our sectional sofa is massive and bright-white, so we need a lot of pillows and nothing cream-based.  We had a really tough time finding home dec fabrics with white backgrounds.  Almost everything out there is off-white — and we have a lot of selection around here!

We fell in love with this Bull’s Eye pillow from West Elm (below) and were really close to buying it, but the background color is cream — not white.  We were afraid that it would end up looking dirty once we got it home and next to the sofa.  This has happened to us several times with blankets and other accessories, so we left the pillows at the store.

However, we came home inspired and decided to make something similar.  We gathered up some Silk Radiance fabric in several shades of blue and champagne for a machine-pieced version.  Now that we finally had a few fabrics chosen, we took these with us on our next few shopping trips.  At F&S Fabrics, we found this white/green geometric fabric in linen.  We also purchased some pale blue lame (the top fabric in the upper photo) that we are going to use for some tone on tone stripes.   In the store, it was so shiny it was almost wrong — but I think it actually provides the perfect amount of contrast.

It’s possible we still might need some soft, textural fabrics — but we are going to get started and see how it goes.  My husband suggested we make a pleated pillow from the darkest blue fabric to help ground everything.  There is so much white fabric on the sofa to break these up, that I think that really helps.

Anyway, it feels good to finally make some progress.  I’m hoping that I might actually get to start sewing these next weekend.  What about you?  Anything new in the works?

So I know some of you have been following along in our “Misadventures of Decorating the Apartment” and have probably heard me complain about how my husband wants to hang his animal portraits on the wall.  A few of you even betrayed me and said that his sheep picture was awesome and totally qualified as fine art.  Jerks… (I am just kidding.  I always appreciate your honesty — I just appreciate it more when you take my side.)

Anyway, I decided that he should be allowed to hang his picture if he wanted to, and I very generously allowed him one room of the house to decorate.  Now, before you accuse me of cruelty, let me point out that I only have one room of the house to decorate, too, so this isn’t totally unfair or anything.  It’s just that my room is my studio/office, and his room is a little smaller.  The bathroom.  Yep, the guest bathroom.  I figured that if he wanted to hang a drooling camel on the wall or maybe a warthog, I would just never use that room again.  Ever.

We picked up a poster-sized frame at Ikea a couple of weeks ago, and I waited while he thought it over.  You can’t really tell from the abysmal photo below, but this frame is large — the print inside is 19″ tall.  I thought he might pick the the sheep, but in the end he chose this incredible photo he took of an Indian-Crested Porcupine.  And you know what?  I love it.  It matches the brown towels.  It’s cute and weird and slightly abstract.  It’s an amazingly detailed photo and every time I walk in there I think to myself, “my husband is awesome.“  Who knew?!  Ok, so I did.

We’re working on a plan for the master bath next.  No animals though.  I don’t want to push our luck.

Thank you so much for all of the kind words about the picture frames in the living room.  You guys really are the best!  Today, I wanted to share another small decorating project.

While my husband was marking off the living room wall with masking tape and the laser level, I had to do something to keep myself occupied.  I finally took the plunge and removed all of the dust jackets on our books and started grouping them by color.  (You can see what our bookshelves looked like before here.)  I know that this idea is nothing new, and I worried for a minute that maybe the trend had passed and was no longer cool.  Then I thought “who am I trying to impress?!  Does it really matter as long as we both like it?”

So, I gave it a whirl.  Many of our college books are paperback, and while I’ve thinned the collection and donated a bunch, there are still some we just haven’t parted with yet.  I was worried that the color arrangement might be a bit Rainbow Brite for our tastes, but I think it ended up being more subtle than I thought.  We have lots of black, white, and grey books that tone things down.

I spent about an hour grouping and arranging everything by color and still need to make another pass to get it all right.  However, I am liking it so far.  I will show another picture once it’s all done.  Have you tried this or is it too matchy-matchy for you?  Do you also worry about the secret decorating police who will come and judge your room?

The title of this post says it all:  We have art on the wall in the living room!  There is a huge part of me that wants to shout this to random people passing by on the street and invite them in.  LOOK!  ART!  WALL!  US!  (Except of course for the obvious safety issues of inviting random pedestrians inside your home.)  Thank goodness for blogs, right?

So hanging up artwork is what happens when all of Los Angeles is trapped inside for a weekend.  Thank you, Carmageddon.

Remember this post a couple of months ago?  We’ve known we wanted to hang some of our photographs on the wall, but we just couldn’t decide on a layout.  Well, looks like I was over complicating things again.  Who needs fancy layouts?  We are symmetry people.  Eight large square frames in two neat and tidy rows did the trick.

It took us a long time to sort through thousands of photographs and narrow it down to eight, but it was worth it.  Each of the photos has a story to it.

I’m still in that state of post-decorating bliss where you find yourself entering and re-entering the room to admire whatever changes you made.  I have viewed this little spot from every imaginable angle — standing in the kitchen, in the entry way, in the reflection of a nearby mirror.  My husband has asked me to stop doing this because apparently it’s creepy.

Next up: the bookcase!  Isn’t amazing how one little change can set you on a roll….?