Author: Scraps

Review | Superfood Kitchen by Julie Morris

Nibbles

superfoodkitchen

It’s hard to read any food or nutrition book, magazine, or website without some reference to the latest and greatest “superfood.” Not all mentions of them are good, there is plenty of skepticism about the veracity of these powerhouse foods–the acai, the goji, the chia, the maca. Are they really all they’re cracked up to be?

Who knows.

Whether you cite ancient cultures that revere these new-to-us foods or the science behind them, I’m of the opinion that it never hurts to make dining choices that could improve our health and, maybe, prevent the need for as many pharmaceuticals as we take these days. (Though I’m also quick to add that I don’t think we should disregard doctor’s prescriptions for a “natural” remedy without so much as a by-your-leave; scientific research and implementation has it’s place.)

This is why I was more than happy to take a look at Julie Morris’ Superfood Kitchen and, of course, try out a few recipes in the process.

Morris,  a Los Angeles’ natural foods chef, has written an informative tome on the popular superfoods of today focusing on nutrient density and a plant-based diet. She candidly shares her personal experience, and a common one at that, of getting “hooked” on coffee and energy drinks and the fall-out from depending on those substances instead of food for energy. When she realized what was really going on with her body, she set out to understand other ways of supplying the needed energy, and superfoods became her new passion.

As an omnivore, I’m more than happy to eat a meat-free meal when the meal is interesting enough. We love rice and other grains in our house but, of course, now that I’m eating Low-FODMAP, I have to be careful what plant-based food I’m consuming. And since the folks on the hunt for FODMAPs are still working through a back-log of current foods to test, superfoods aren’t always known entities. This made deciding on recipes to try a little tougher, but there’s so much good information in the book it was a happy hunt. (And, as I learn more about my body’s tolerances and the substitutions that work best for me, I look forward to trying out more of her inventive recipes.)

Something we love to do is have breakfast for dinner. We probably do this a couple times a month, so her Goldenberry Pancakes (page 57) were quote enticing. The batter was not what you usually think of as a pancake batter–it was not pourable, it was more like a quick bread or drop-biscuit consistency. That said, they cooked up very well on our griddle and the orange flavor really worked with the goldenberries.

Goldenberry Pancakes, with photobombing bacon

Goldenberry Pancakes, with photo-bombing bacon

Granted, we served them in a very non-superfood way, with eggs and bacon on the side, but hey, you do what makes you happy, right?

Another recipe we tried and absolutely loved was the Sushi Salad Bowl (page 95). This is basically sushi for people who just don’t  have time or inclination to bother with rolling sushi but it is all kinds of tasty. She suggests adding some tofu or edamame for additional protein, but we’re not big fans of the former and the latter doesn’t sit well with a low-FODMAP diet, so I added a sliced, hard-boiled egg to the top of each instead. Same concept, it just worked better for us. Also, my sprouts were shot by the time I made this, so did not include them. I’m sure it would have been all the more delicious had they not gotten soggy.

the delectable Sushi Salad Bowl--if you make the rice ahead this is a very quick supper

the delectable Sushi Salad Bowl–if you make the rice ahead this is a very quick supper

At first, as I was putting this together, I was truly wondering if we were going to end up ordering take-out or making sandwiches to go with, as it wasn’t looking like very much at the beginning. But two ingredients made the difference: the avocado for creaminess and the sliced nori for texture and aroma–without those two this would have been a passable side-dish but not sushi. I will definitely be making this one again.

Another thing that might stop you from cooking a la the Superfood Kitchen way? The price. Because they are mostly imported goods, the distributors are few and the prices can sometimes be steep. I saw a bag of acai powder for over $20 in our local health foods store. Ouch! But if you go this route, you generally use very little of any given superfood in a single recipe (which keeps things in a bit more perspective). If you want to start cooking with more superfoods, supplement the easily available ones (pomegranates, quinoa, hemp and chia seeds, and green leafy vegetables) with some of the more specialty ingredients over time. When you spread out those specialty purchases, maybe a superfood kitchen isn’t quite such an improbably feat.

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I was provided a copy of Superfood Kitchen for purpose of review. All opinions expressed are my own.

Printing Terms for the Bride-to-Be, Part III

Third Time Wife, Wedding Planning

Designing for Commercial Printing

The vocabulary lesson is over, now it’s time to figure out how to get the best possible results from whichever printer you choose for your wedding stationery. Maybe you’re going with a local commercial shop, the nearest FedEx/Kinko’s, or maybe you’re getting ready to upload your files to one of the many online print-on-demand services out there. Regardless of who you choose to print your stuff, there’s one rule that is universal:

Garbage In = Garbage Out

If you give your printer 72dpi clipart you yanked off the web (or payed the minimum on a stock image site for the smallest file size), it’s going to look like pixelated crap when it comes off that press and there’s nothing anyone can do to fix it. If you don’t allow for a bleed in your design, you’re going to either end up with a white border around your image or some of the printed area cut off–and that might include the words if you’re not careful! And if you give them files of the wrong color mode, the colors you so carefully picked on your computer monitor are very likely to look very, very different.

To avoid those unfortunate situations (and a whole host of others like them), here’s some tips on setting up your files correctly for commercial printing.

Just to give you an idea of how close you can cut it--any more than one insert, though, and you'd need to make your invitation smaller.

Just to give you an idea of how close you can cut it–any more than one insert, though, and you’d need to make your invitation smaller.

1. Start with your envelope and work your way backwards from there.

While it’s true you can make your own envelopes, it’s a lot easier to buy them and they come in so many wonderful colors these days it’s a shame to let all of that go to waste. That said, they only make envelopes in certain sizes, and if your invitation, save the date, or RSVP is slightly too big for the target envelope, you’re going to have to buy the next size up. This can mean anything from your card swimming in an over-sized envelope to paying more postage than you need to.

So, if your printed piece needs an envelope, make sure you find out the size of the envelope available in your color and design around that. A single insert needs to be at least an eighth of an inch smaller than the envelope (though 1/4 inch is better–it’ll certainly make it easier to stuff, later), and the more pieces you want to include the smaller the overall size needs to be to for the envelope accommodate the thickness.

Another thing worth thinking about: If you have any intention of lining your envelopes, do yourself a favor and look for A-style envelopes as they feature a rectangular flap instead of the pointed flap of the Baronial-style envelopes. That flap style means a lot less in the way of fiddly cuts.

CMYK (left) vs RGB (right)

CMYK (left) vs RGB (right)

2. If it’s color, it needs to be CMYK.

Anything you see on a screen or monitor is in RGB and uses light to adjust the colors blended from the red, green, and blue values present. This visible light spectrum is amazing and can give you over 16 million distinct color variations. Gorgeous, right? And most of the time your home printer prints those exact same colors, even if you have separate tanks for each of the 4 colors (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black).

Commercial presses, on the other hand, work in CMYK, and CMYK is limited to a measly 1 million colors, give or take, and that’s where problems set in. There’s no fool-proof method (though there are plenty of strategies) to convert an RGB file to print in CMYK and retain the same brilliance of color you see on your RGB monitor. Yes, it’s frustrating, but them’s the breaks. [Now, I will say, some online printers prefer RGB because of the equipment they use. It’s easier to convert from CMYK to RGB, though, so I still stand by designing in CMYK to give you the best possible options.]

In a program (like Photoshop, for instance) that supports CMYK, it’s as simple as choosing your Image > Mode > CMYK when you begin your document. Unfortunately, the more consumer-level a product is (meant for home use and not professional), the less likely CMYK will be an option and so the file you create may not work as well. Many places can use them, but you’re not likely to get a color match.

The good news is that (if you’re a quick study), you can download a 30-day trial of almost any Adobe product (like Photoshop or Illustrator), and you can also use their Cloud subscription service to “rent” the use of a program for a number of months. $20 or so a month isn’t so bad compared to the $600 each program usually runs (or the $2000 the full Suite costs). You can also use open-source programs like GIMP or InkScape and get most, if not all, of the same functionality.

One other thing that makes colors hinky: monitors. Just because what you see on your screen looks right, doesn’t mean your screen is showing you the truth. Every time we adjust our monitor’s brightness, contrast, etc. we are increasing the chance that what we see is not what we’ll get. If exact colors are crucial to your wedding vision, look into calibrating your monitor. There are programs and devices that will do this for a fee, of course, but you can also use simple tests and the controls on your monitor or laptop to do it yourself, like this Monitor Calibration page from epaperpress.

Just an example why resolution matters.

Just an example why resolution matters.

3. Less is not more when it comes to DPI: resolution matters.

The way CMYK printing works is by laying down four layers of teeny tiny dot patterns (generally) only visible under something resembling a jeweler’s loupe to determine the strength of each color. They work in percentages and the dots can be very spread out or very close together–the closer together (and therefore smaller) the dots, the crisper the images. Potentially. These dots are measure per inch, hence dpi = dots-per-inch.

300 dpi is about the smallest you ever want to submit to a printer. The downside is that these files can be rather big, especially the more layers and details within each file, but 300 dpi is the happy medium in the struggle between file size and image quality. Occasionally, for the very large items (like banners and large signs), a printer may request a lower dpi, but that’s the only exception I’ve come across.

And just because you set up your file to be 300dpi doesn’t mean you can slap a 72dpi (the usual resolution for web images–smaller files means quicker loading times) image in there, drag to the right size and come out the same. My little illustration above shows why that’s not such a hot idea!

That said, most digital cameras save photos at 180dpi. DO NOT go in and change the resolution without good reason (and never muck around with your original file, while we’re on the subject)! Those 180dpi files are also around 2765 x 2074 pixels—unless you’re wanting to blow them up to billboard size (and who knows, maybe not even then), that’s plenty of pixels to work with.

There's just something more polished about images that bleed, especially "random" patterns.

There’s just something more polished about images that bleed, especially “random” patterns.

4. Set up your bleeds correctly.

This is one of those things that really separated the novices from the in-the-know. If you’re using an online printer, chances are they’ve got templates you can download for the various products that show the different areas of the file you submit. The live area is the safe zone for all your important details and images, the cut line lies just outside and shows where the images will be cut off at–it’s usually 1/8″ to 1/4″ outside of that safe area. Finally, the bleed line is 1/8″ all the way around your cut image.

So when you want to create a small card, for instance, that is 4.25″ x 5.5″, you would set your image size at 4.5″ x 5.75″–1/8″ is .125 and since you have to add it to both sides, you’d add .25 or a 1/4″ to each overall measurement. See, that’s not so tough! Then you’d want to set up guides (horizontally at 0.125 and 5.625; vertically at 0.125 and 4.325 for this example) to show where your finished image will stop. Anything you want to extend “off the page” needs to go all the way out to the true margins of the image, while all of your text needs to stay well within your guides.

You also want to make sure you turn off those guides before you save the file for submission, just in case. Normally they wouldn’t print, but we certainly don’t want to take any unnecessary chances, right?

5. All PDFs are not created equal.

Finally, it’s important that the type of file you submit be the right one. PDFs are probably the most common and most universally accepted, but they do come in different flavors. Most pdf files are intended for transmission by email or web download, so they’re lean and stripped down and not meant for more than maybe printing on your home computer.

By contrast, the type of pdf you need to submit to a printer is a Print Ready pdf and it’s got a few more bells and whistles. For one thing, any fonts you used in creating your document need to be embedded to prevent any issues when the printer opens them up. If the fonts are not embedded and printer doesn’t have those fonts himself, the computer will pick a font it thinks might match but it’s just a computer and isn’t going to always make the best decisions. And the more automated the process, the less likely it is that someone will notice before it gets to you. (Though this is also a reason to request a proof, even if there’s a slight upcharge or time delay–better safe than sorry).

A print-ready pdf also retains the highest quality of the document you created, so will have a larger file-size than one intended for web distribution. To insure the maximum compatibility between systems, ask if your printer has a .joboptions file available. This document gets placed in a particular folder of your system and will be available as an option when you export your pdf, preventing many mistakes along the way.

When you’ve created a program or other multi-page document, it’s best to export these as multi-page pdfs, in the order they would be read. To do this you’ll need a desktop publishing program like Adobe’s InDesign or the open source Scribus to do it natively, or a copy of Acrobat (this is different from the free Reader that you need just to open the files) to string your separately-created pages together. Single-sided items like cards or invitations are fine to save as individual images.

If pdf isn’t accepted by your printer or an option in your system, a .tiff file is better than a .jpg. If a .jpg is all you can manage, make it the highest quality you can and don’t keep resaving it as each time you’ll lose some image quality in the process. PNG or GIF files are not good options for print-ready files.

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There. Those are my tips to diy-designing your wedding papers to get the best possible results. They represent the questions we have to answer most often at work or items we most have to explain to new customers and designers. Armed with this you’ll have one more tool in your arsenal, should you choose the diy route for your wedding stationery. It may not make the design process any simpler, but at least now you stand less chance of a nasty surprise when you open that box!

AlcoHOLidays | Maple Syrup Saturday | Maple Break

Sips
the Maple Break cocktail

the Maple Break cocktail

Consider this my apology to maple syrup.

Why would I need to apologize to maple syrup? Well, the truth of the matter is that I’ve never really been all that fond of it. So when I was going over my list of holidays this coming week–and there were plenty to choose from*–it would have been perfectly in character for  me to skip over Maple Syrup Saturday (March 23,2013) and move onto something more to my personal taste.

And yet choose it I did, because I’ve come to respect maple syrup, even if it’s still not my favorite flavor.

You see, back in November I had to give up my beloved honey and agave nectars as part of going Low-FODMAP. I haven’t stooped so low as to add it to my tea over granulated sugar, but when I came down with a horrible sore throat the other week I did consider it. Briefly.

No, I’ve come to appreciate maple sugar not just for it’s glucose to fructose ratio but for its ability to flavor soups and other savory fare that honey or agave would have otherwise done. When mixed with other ingredients its harsh, bitter edges are blunted, making it much more palatable than on its own. In fact, when I was contemplating today’s cocktail I was struck by how much maple syrup reminds me of coffee liqueur.

Between coffee and maple syrup on it’s own, I was definitely thinking in the realm of breakfast, so it wasn’t much of a stretch to throw a little orange in there, too!

Maple Break

1.5 oz Orange Juice
1 oz Cachaça
3/4 oz Maple Syrup
1/4 oz Cointreau

Combine all ingredients over ice in the bottom of a mixing glass. Shake until you’re nice and wide awake, then strain into a chilled cocktail glass of your choice. Garnish with a strip of orange zest or two.

I chose the Brazilian rum mostly to be different, but the subtlety of the spirit really does this particular cocktail justice. It’s sweet, as you would expect, but not overly strong. You do, however, get the essence of the maple syrup in both the nose and the finished flavor of the cocktail. I think this would be an amazing brunch cocktail to serve alongside the usual Mimosa and Bloody Mary.

Throughout New England, now that it’s spring as the sap has begun to rise, maples will be tapped for the rich, sweet syrup that so many love. I may not consider myself in the ‘love’ column just yet, but with a cocktail like this I’m getting there.

Cheers!

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*Coming up this week, just to name a few, are Passover (3/25-4/2), the Hindu New Year (3/22), and Greek Independence Day (3/25).

Printing Terms for the Bride-to-Be, Part II

Third Time Wife, Wedding Planning

Paper, Inks and Bleeds

Last time we talked about what is a page and how many of them you have. In this second part we’ll talk about paper basics, all the pretty colors, and why your printer might ask if your image bleeds. (It’s not as gross as it sounds, I promise.)

Look at all the pretty colors!

Look at all the pretty colors!

Paper

Let’s go back and talk a little more about paper (aka stock), okay? Paper comes in different weights, finishes, and sometimes different colors (beside the standard white and ivory/natural), though as mills react to the tighter economy, a lot of the variation is going away–especially colors. Standard copy paper is described as 20lb or 50lb offset. The slightly heavier paper you might use for a resume or other stationery is usually a 24lb or 28lb writing and often has a texture to it, like linen or laid. Offset (when describing paper*) means that it’s otherwise uncoated, writing sheets are also uncoated.

Text stocks have a significant amount of bend in them, going up to 100lb, though 70lb and 80lb are the most common. Cover stocks, on the other hand, are what you’d call card stock and also come in various weights and also in points (10pt, 12 pt, 14pt, etc.). Both text and cover paper can be uncoated or coated. Coated stocks can either be glossy or dull/matte. What the coating does is it prevents the ink from seeping so far into the paper and dulling out the color.

Paper weights are determined by how heavy a stack of 500 sheets of a certain size (it’s different for text and cover) from the mill would weigh. So the higher the number, the heavier or thicker the sheet of paper.
Points speak to a specific sheet thickness, measured in how many thousandths of an inch a sheet is thick.

Your project might use one stock throughout if you’re dealing with your invitation suite, but if you have a program or other booklet, you might want a heavier or colored stock for the cover and a lighter stock for the insides.

For a program that is all the same paper throughout, you’d request a quote for an “8-page self-cover” (or however many pages it is), but if you want that heavier stock for the cover, then it would be a “4-page plus cover“, with the understanding that a wrap-around cover will always be 4 pages. They’ll know what you mean.

Inks

If you’re going for elegant, all you might need is just some crisp black ink on a piece of white or ivory cover to get the job done. If, however, you want color(s), things get a little more specific. You’ve got two ways to approach color: spot colors or full-color process. Spot color uses specific colors as defined by the Pantone Matching System (or PMS; yes, really). If you are trying to match a specific item (like the ribbon on your dress or the color of your beloved’s eyes), PMS is the way to go. Keep in mind, though, that black is a color, too, so if you’ve got a red and black design, you’ve got a 2-color job.

By that same token, with the exception of specialized processes, white is generally not considered a color for ink purposes. In a print job, the white areas are left blank and the color of the paper shows through. If the paper you’ve chosen isn’t stark white, not only will your white spaces be something else, but the colors you’ve chosen will deepen as well.

Full-color/4-color process means CMYK printing , and it’s what you’ll want if you’re printing anything including color photographs or lots of different colors. Instead of mixing a specific color of ink at the beginning, the paper goes through 4 sets of printing plates, each laying down different strengths of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black to build the final project. In the big digital copiers at your local office supply or copy shop it’s the same process, only they use toner instead of ink.

When you call up your local printer (or fill out an online request for quote), you’ll need to know how to describe the color options you want. Now, if you’re talking about your black and red invitation with printing on only 1 side you’d describe it as “2 over zero” or write it “2/0”, which tells the printer that you’ve got two colors printing on one side and nothing on the back. That 4-color process job, on the other hand, would be “4/0” (or “4/4” if both sides printed).

With more involved jobs–again, thinking back to your program–it becomes a case of the highest common denominator. You might have a full color photograph or graphic on 1 page of your 8-page self-covering program, but the whole thing counts as 4/4 unless you are absolutely, positively sure they are going to run it as a single 8-page signature. This can be something to discuss with the printer you choose, to see if there’s a way to work it so that you save some money, but in the case of digital copiers, sometimes that means putting it through 2 different machines and you really wouldn’t save anything. Still, it never hurts to ask.

If that same sample program has a separate cover, like we discussed above, and only the cover is in color, then you would describe the job in parts. A cover with color printing on the front with nothing on the inside cover (front or back) and the “text” simply black and white would be:

a 4-page program, 1/1, plus 4/0 cover

A couple more color tips:

  • If it’s a spot color you’re after and you don’t already know the PMS number, bring something in that they can match or find someone with a Pantone guide to help you out (you cannot always go by what you see on the screen, and I’ll explain why in part 3).
  • In commercial printing it is possible to combine the two and run jobs that go through the 4-color process and then print a spot color on top of all of that, but that’s more than most people generally need.

Does It Bleed?

Sounds kinda gruesome, right?

Bleed just means that the image extends to the very edge of the paper. Or, really, that it goes off the edge of the paper.

Unlike your home printer, there is no “borderless printing” option on printing presses. They need something to hold onto on at least 1 of the edges (aka gripper). Furthermore, most of these presses run big sheets, so your invitation might be printed 4-, 6-, or 8-up to maximize the available space. Many of the online printers do gang runs (combining similar jobs into one print run), spreading out the running and maintenance costs that come with just turning on the press each time.

So you’ve got several items up on a single sheet and then they get cut down to size.

Now, these cutters are incredibly precise, but even still, it’s just not practical to print an image to size and then make sure you cut riiiiight along the edge so there’s no white border around your printed item. Instead, they’re smart and print bigger than the finished size and cut into the printed edges to avoid any borders.

Which is also why you need to know if your image bleeds, so you can set up your files to make that possible–which leads us right into Part 3 where we’ll discuss the ins and outs of setting up your files for commercial printing.

*Offset has a couple of other meanings in the print world. If something is offset from another something, it just means it’s not lining up perfectly–copiers will do this when printing multiple sets so you can easily separate the one set from another without counting individual pages. Also, if the ink hasn’t completely dried on a sheet and it’s placed on another (with or without any sort of additional pressure being applied), transfer can happen from one sheet to the other and this is called offsetting, too. It’s generally a bad thing, but it can happen on humid days or with printed pieces that have a lot of ink coverage, so jobs in those conditions sometimes take longer to avoid just that problem.

37 Home Decor | Bedroom on the Orient Express

64 Arts

Have you ever seen something that makes you stop in your tracks as your eyes widen and you lean in to get a closer look, utterly captivated?

That’s how I felt when I saw this picture :

Photographer: Hotze Eisma, from a Travel & Leisure article (I think)

Photographer: Hotze Eisma, for a Travel & Leisure article (I think)

Isn’t it delicious?!

For quite a while I’ve been “over” the current color scheme of our bedroom. It’s a watered-down version of what I dreamed up in my last apartment, kind of a Moroccan boudoir sort of vibe with deep reds and plush drapes, only when we moved in together I never got up the gumption to hang up the sheers over the boring off-white walls or even hang any pictures. And in the meantime the comforter that I searched high and low for is showing its age–the room desperately needs a makeover.

I’ll even show you what I mean.

The Before

The Before

Technically there’s nothing wrong with the room, it’s perfectly functional (if a bit snug), and we’re the only ones that see it and most of the time we’re asleep. So why the big deal?

I like having a pretty space to sleep in. A nicely-decorated room is relaxing to me.

So a course has been set, based on my inspiration photo and a few more I’ve found and added to the Pinterest board I created for the project. Thankfully the classic cars of the Orient Express are Art Deco (one of my favorite eras already) and inspiration abounds from that era and its subsequent revivals. And, of course, we’re still renting at the moment, so the walls will need to stay their current hue (I just hate painting only to repaint back to drab in the future), so I was searching for rooms that had the wonderful details that I loved but with pale walls instead of dark wood.

I love Pinterest for visual research, don't you?

I love Pinterest for visual research, don’t you?

I was able to create my color scheme using my original inspiration photo and the CoffeeShop Instant Color Bar action for Photoshop.

Our new color palette!

Our new color palette!

Of course, budget is worth a mention. Namely, my current utter lack of one what with the wedding coming up in a shade over 7 months and the economy not exactly doing our industry any favors. But, hey, that’s where I luck out, too–I’ve got some diy plans that just might make this makeover possible without too much difficulty or expense.

First of all, linens can make a dramatic change in a room. Take a look at the above photo and notice that the linens are pretty simple: solid linens and a striped blanket. The patterned section below is actually the sofa seat if I’m not mistaken, but I love the pattern as a box-spring cover idea, and can search out some fabric to accomplish the same task. And since we’re heading into Florida’s warmer season (we only get 2, you know–chilly and hot-as-blazes), a nice blanket will be quite enough and give me plenty of time to find something heavier by late-Fall. By that same token, I’ll be on the look-out for some curtain panels to replace the red ones currently closing off our closets; I can see more trips to HomeGoods in my future!

Thankfully, our bedside tables and lamps will work for this idea as is–just need to recover the lampshades in that divine dusty pink once I’ve got the rest of the linens sorted out. A quick search is telling me I’ll be more likely to find a blanket in a tan pattern (stripe or plaid) and be able to accent it with a pink throw more realistically than finding a blanket exactly like the one in the photo. I think I can work with that.

Now that’s the purchased portion, what was that about some DIY?

Todd’s dresser stand-in is high on my list. One of these days we’ll build or buy something more permanent, but until then I found my inspiration in this Stanhope Chest found on Joss & Main:

Stanhope Chest via Joss & Main

Stanhope Chest via Joss & Main

I have a hunch that some silver spray paint, nailhead trim, and faux leather strips can transform those Sterlite stacking drawers into something pretty spiffy and steamer trunk-inspired. The same applies to our current headboard. Under yet another curtain panel hides a rather country headboard but with a nice shape. I plan to trim off the posts at each end and cover the whole thing with faux-leather and nailhead trim. I’m still deciding if I’ll do the same to the foot board, though we could also remove it altogether (and remove my tendency to hang things on it in the process).

The window, I think, needs a pull-down shade to hide the horrible mini-blinds, and then maybe some sheer swags on either side–I may have enough canvas yardage in my fabric stash for the shade and the antique gold sheers I used on my apartment walls might work well for the swag; if so, that’s a few trips saved to the cutting table. I’ll be on the hunt for a trunk or bench that will afford some extra storage so I can finally empty those boxes hanging out in that space, currently. Add some artwork for the painfully bare walls (some panels painted and lacquered a la the inspiration board would be divine) and we’ve got ourselves a room worth dreaming in and about!

I’ll be sure to keep you posted as the room comes together.

Have you ever gotten the urge to redo a room? I’d love to see some before and after shots!
And do you have any tips for my room makeover?