Day 13: Make Your House a Home - With Houseplants!

Hi Guys! Lately I have been looking into different affordable ways to kinda dress up my home, and to create some more finished looking spaces. Being that I can't paint or put anything on the walls, I decided to try getting some plants! We don't have a very long summer where I am, and I think bringing green into the house will really cheer me up during the winter months.

I was planning on getting some plants for my house in the hopefully near future, and have spent quite a bit of time looking up which house plants are hard to kill good for plant beginners and there are actually quite a few to choose from! One that I was really interested in was a Peace Lily. I think they are quite popular house plants, and maybe aren't super original? I was really drawn to them because they are so pretty, and they are also really low maintenance! They just need a shady spot, and to be watered once a week. Sounds easy enough to me!

While I meant to wait for a little while to get a plant, only because I wasn't in a huge rush, sometimes things just don't work out that way! I happened to be in the grocery store last night, and they happened to have a stand of all kinds of lovely houseplants for very reasonable prices. Needless to say I spent FAR too long considering each and every single plant, but I ended up coming home with two that I'm really happy with!

So this is my Peace Lily, which is keeping my little Owl Oil Burner company. I think the Peace Lily really completes this space as my little owl was looking pretty lonely on that end table all on it's own. 

Owl Closeup!!

And then this is the other plant that I bought. It's a little Calla Lily! I'm really excited about it and, even though it wasn't listed on the easy to keep plant lists I found, hope that I'll be able to keep it alive for a long time. And it's pink! I always think of Calla Lilies as being white, so I'm really excited to see this one come into full bloom. 

After getting these plants I was super excited to go out and buy several other plants to put all around my home, but I think I'm just going to start with these as my green thumb is barely even in training. I still need to get new planters for them, and will likely find myself moving them around to see how I like them in different rooms of my home, but I am just excited to have them! Who would have thought that spending $11 on two plants would be so exciting?

Day 9: Finish What You Start

I'm starting to realize that, even if you start a project for fun, if you don't finish it and you kinda just leave it for a really long time? It still nags at the back of your mind, same as if it were for work, or anything else. I guess when I start projects for fun I sort of expect them to take a really really long time, so I end up leaving them unfinished for a while, until I have a huge chunk of time to work on them.

One project that I started recently was that I decided to make new throw pillows for my couches. When my husband and I got married and moved into our new house we didn't really have a lot of furniture so most of what we have was given to us by family members who no longer needed those pieces anymore. I really like all of the furniture we have been given, which is pretty lucky, but I don't really feel like I had a big part in designing what my living room especially looks like at all. Making the throw pillows was kind of a way to put my own touch on the living room, and it also sounded like a really fun DIY!

My couches are like an eggplant/plum purple colour, so I tried to find a good colour to go with that, and I really liked like a light yellow or goldenrod kind of colour. I went down to the fabric store and found this amazing fabric on sale! I think this pattern is called "Queen Anne's Lace" and I just love it!

I decided to give up on finding a 'big chunk of time' for making the pillows, and just sort of worked on them today whenever I had more than 10 minutes. I got most of the pieces cut out and pinned for all of the pillows and now I'm just going to sew them together in the morning! I'm really excited to get them on the couches.

I got one of the pillows finished and I couldn't help but put it on the couch to see how it looked. The two pillows on the left are the ones that came with the couches, and then I switched out the ones on the right for the new pillow. I really like how it looks! It was a pretty inexpensive way to kind of update the look of the couches.

I'm really surprised too at how much I was able to get done today just by working here and there when I had a minute, like, while I waited for supper to finish baking and such. I think I'm going to try to remember that I generally have more time than I think.