Supernatural Botanicals

Super easy decor straight from the produce department.  Fill clear jars or bowls, or in this case, a candle holder, and fill them with colorful fruits (as shown, Granny Smith apples and oranges).  Huge wow factor, easy to do, inexpensive, and healthy.

Do you obsess over your home’s design?  Are you constantly looking to books and magazines for great interior design ideas?  Is your DVR full of HGTV design shows?  Then you’ll love Design Sponge.   Design Sponge is one of the most popular design blogs in cyberspace, and has a celeb readership (Nate Berkus reads it regularly).   Design Sponge is packed full of great ideas to transform your home into your sanctuary.  Jump over and check out the blog here.

It’s always a surprise to see how overlooked our makeup vanities are.  Women spend an exorbitant amount of time and money on makeup purchases, so their makeup vanities should have equal exceptional value.  Creating a beautiful and functional vanity to your home will not only make your home more beautiful, it will make you more beautiful!  A functional, well-lit, well-organized vanity will naturally provide a better end result…beautiful makeup application.   One of our former makeup vanity blog posts continually elicits comments and inquiries on where to purchase them.  The following makeup vanities can be found at Pottery Barn Teen, www.PBTeen.com.

Have every intention to decorate your entire home for Fall, only to get half way thought the season and realize it’s too late to start?  Start thinking about your Fall decor now.  Give yourself a couple of weeks ahead of time to prepare.  Start looking through magazines and at your neighbors decor, and translate those ideas to your own decor.  Look for great ideas for decorating pumpkins (www.MarthaStewart.com always has great ideas every year, and so does www.WomansDay.com).   The secret to any seasonal decor is to start early…and tis the season.  Get crackin! 

Steal This Look:  Talk about “yes” of monumental proportions, this outdoor design is amazing.  Vibrant oranges bounce off of the mellow chocolate of the bricks, and the furniture is perfection in scale and color.  Achieve this look with pillows in various shades of orange, a great piece of outdoor art with oranges, yellows and reds, and table decor, picking up shades of your pillows.  So gorgeous.  So easy to achieve, too.  Try it.

Add instant oooohh- factor to your room with fresh flowers.  It’s much easier and much less expensive than you might think…you just have to know how to do it right.

Carnations are widely available (local florist, grocery stores, etc.) and are relatively inexpensive.  The key to carnations is to group them together tightly in a small vase.  This will produce a huge, snowball-type cluster bouquet.  You should keep the carnations all one color…it’s much prettier and expensive-looking this way.  An all white group of carnations is gorgeous and works in every room of any color.  Carnations come in almost every color, so color coordinate with your room’s color.

Keep them on your nightstand, your desk at work, your kitchen island, everywhere.  They lightly scent the air with a light, fresh scent and look gorg.  And now you know how to do carnations right.

Want your holiday table to look like you hired a celeb party planner?  Steal this idea… cranberry ice!  It’s super-simple to make, and looks gorgeous in an ice bucket, or under a heaping load of shrimp cocktail.

Simply fill a cake pan (silicone is the easiest) with a couple handfuls of cranberries.  Next, fill with water just enough to cover the cranberries.  Freeze.  When the ice is solid, crack the ice into large pieces (bang on countertop) and place the ice shards over a bottle of wine or champagne in a bucket, or on a large tray and load it down with cocktail shrimp and sauce.  Add a few sprigs of greenery (use some pieces from the back of your Christmas tree if you have a live tree) to set the look off.

Simple + gorgeous.  Love that!

With the surge of catalogs and Christmas cards we all receive in December, be mindful to recycle.  Be especially cognizant of your landfill contributions this month by recycling all magazines and catalogs, recycling envelopes from the Christmas cards, and ultimately recycling the cards after Christmas.  If the card is especially beautiful, buy a great frame, put the card in it,  and put it on a bookshelf, desk, or entry table.  That’s recycling too, you know.  Have a Green Christmas this year!

Love her or hate her (and I think we mostly love her), Martha Stewart has left her mark on all of us in one way or another.  Miss Martha turns 69 today. 

When you think about the “queen of lifestyle and living”, Martha Stewart is the first name that comes to mind.  Always.  We have all learned how to throw better parties, cook better meals, and certainly decorate our houses in more interesting ways thanks to Martha. 

She has taught us to be perfectionists (which strangely is looked upon as a negative in society) and we are better off for it. 

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvQccAuTRlQ

“If you touch it every day, it should be beautiful—from your cabinet knobs to your mail tray. My toothbrush holder is a heavy cut-glass tumbler that I got for a couple of bucks at a flea market. It’s lovely, and it feels special to me.”  …Nate Berkus on how to make your house a home.