VACATION MEMORY BOARD

A great way to accessorize a room is to layer art. This Vacation Memory Board, made of painted wood, is placed behind a leather chair next to a framed print hanging on a wall. The plant is on a stand giving many levels and layers to the area.

You can have a Memory Board made for your space! Look on the Art For Sale page of this website for more information.

BASEBALL FAMILY ROOM

This family room and attached bathroom needed a little wall treatment to make the sepia-tone art work stand out. We gave the brown walls a worn-glove look and some texture with a little sand in the paint and in the bathroom mimicked the creamy baseball colors with swirls of cloudy paint in grey, brown and white. The glass topped triangular table has a hand-painted canvas on it of the Phillies stadium.

Benjamin Moore Paint Event

On Sunday afternoon at Benjamin Moore Paints in Exton, I showed sample boards of different painting techniques using their fabulous paints.

PEONY PINK DAHLIA A beautiful "Peony" dahlia was painted on a "Gentle Violet" backgrouund. I call it my faux stencil since I freehanded it from looking at a stencil I saw on www.cuttingedgestencils.com. Since my drywall board was only 5' x 5' and I wasn't doing another flower, I didn't use a stencil, however, if I was going to do a wall with it, I would definitely use a stencil to be consistent. More importantly though, is that I painted this flower with 4 coats of paint to get the color sharp and opaque. Most stencils are more translucent and soft around the edges. Artist brushes are needed when you use this technique to get clean lines.

STARDUST SILVER METALLIC On a background painted with Benjamin Moore's "Stardust" paint color, I stencilled on some metallic damask images. They shimmer in the light and have typical stencil shading instead of the bold printed look of the dahlia in the first image.

BEIGE CHEVRON STRIPES Very trendy these days is the chevron stripe. You'll find it in fabric and rugs and on walls. It's dynamic and eye catching and so bold! You'd never want to do this on all the walls of a room, but on an accent wall, especially one that has dimension to it – jutting in or out for instance – it's spectacular!

DENIM AND STRIE EFFECT IN BLUE These glazing techniques are surprisingly simple to do. The denim sample is on the left of the ribbon and the strie is on the right side. First you basecoat your wall with a light shade of color. You mix 1 part paint to 4 parts glaze for the second coat of paint. This is the coat that you drag a chambray brush through to give it the stripes. For the strie you simply drag once from top to bottom and then move on to your next section. For the denim, you wait for the vertical lines of glaze to dry, then brush on some more of the same glaze horizontally and drag your chambray brush through it. Try to make your drag a one time stroke because you could pull off base color if you work the paint too much.

Family Room with Built-In Entertainment Shelves

After revamping our kitchen, we moved on to the attached family room.

Hubby wanted a big TV on the wall (how novel) and I really, really, really wanted to get rid of the black metal open shelving on which we had our stereo and all it's wired glory!

I designed a built-in unit to complement the kitchen renovation. The shelves are made of walnut wood and the cabinet is white painted wood.

The cabinet doors were hand carved as I gave a photo of what I wanted for the crafter to imitate.

I'm going to slowly transition the colors to blues instead of red but for now the red sofa and plaid ottoman will have to do until we refinish the mountain home basement...it's so nice to always have a project on the horizon ; )

I chose chocolate paint for the walls to cozy up the room. I knew that the white paneling and cabinets would brighten things up but I didn't want it too bright. And, since there is so much walnut in the two rooms it helps to make them gel. The kitchen wall color was painted on one wall in the living room for this reason as well.

We bought a new walnut pedestal kitchen table to make it easier to slide into the bench seating and for it's color. I'm thinking I'll paint the chairs blue one day this summer. Honestly, redecorating never ends.

Travertine Master Bath

Our 15 year-old master bath was in need of a renovation so we got rid of the builder-basic, white, square tile and installed creamy brown travertine tile on the floor, baseboards, tub surround and step. Adding a tub step was important to me since every time I stepped out I would inevitably bang my leg on the edge trying to make the big step out! I also knew it would give the tub more importance in the room.

The tub became the focal point, so the windows behind it deserved special attention. I found a curtain photo online that inspired me to convert my existing gauze window scarves into panels. My mom gave me tons of doilies to sew onto the bottoms just like in the photo I found. I dyed the whole thing brown.

I hung walnut brown rods to match the new floorboard of walnut that was installed where you enter the room and the new walnut ledge near the mirrors.

Brown and grey are natural colors and work in harmony. Years ago I had already started making a brown and silver-grey transition in the room when the medicine cabinet mirror was replaced with two framed mirrors that had brown undertones to the silver aged relief on the frames. And, the light above them was installed to complement the swirls in the relief pattern and to bring some brown into the room.

Metal framed shower doors were replaced with seamless glass. The travertine tile in the shower floor flowed from the bath floor so that the two areas didn't compete. Grey and white marble tiles finished the top of the shower area to match the existing sink marble and to tie the two areas together. To make the transition from travertine to marble in the shower, I found an existing pattern that included grey, brown and white and put two rows of it on the shower walls.