Summer: The Time of Weddings and Fresh Decor

Summer is here friends. With it brings light and airy decor, beach trips and weddings. If you're lucky, it brings the later two things simultaneously (or all three!).

We spent the second week of June in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina enjoying a week at the beach that began with a wedding of two dear friends.



Wedding was on the lawn between the pool and ocean. Not a bad view in the house!


After I got back home I really missed the beach and beautiful house where the beachy decor was right out of the pages of Pottery Barn. So I did something about it and created a beachy tablescape in the dining room. It makes me happy.



That house was easy inspiration. But every now and then I may have 'writer's decorator's  block' and can not find the inspiration to come up with something creative. That's when I look to inspiration boards like the one below from Shutterfly. It revels in all things summer: light and airy decor, pops of summery color like green, fresh flowers, sweet iced tea (on a hot day, nothing beats it!) and of course weddings!! It makes me want to have a dinner party or relax with good friends and a movie on our sectional couch.

L to R: table setting, wall art, living room, ice tea, snowdrops, kitchen design

The other thing this inspiration board reminds me of is that sometimes photo decorating can get stale. How old are some of your photos that are still hanging about? How many great pictures do you have stashed somewhere that could make an appearance to freshen up your frames. I'm also addicted to making photo books. I make them for every trip. It's like scrapbooking but easier. Another trend that I'm loving is the wrapped canvas pictures. Very nice idea for wedding portraits or family pictures!  Shutterfly offers those too AND they are very affordable and if you're a member they always send you emails of the specials they're running.



I'm on vacation again for the week of July 4th (and shocker - offline!) where I'm sure to take a lot of pictures, just like every year. That means it will be time to work on a vacation photo book. I also think if I get a really good picture, it may have to become a wrapped canvas masterpiece to add to the summer decor!

Happy Fourth of July {early}!!



PS -- Google Reader is going away July 1 and you can see what I'm doing here. I hope you'll bring me along to whatever reader you decide works best for you!

Cleaning House (In the Computer Way) by July 1st!

I know. I know. It's been way long since I've done a post. There are several projects that I completed over the winter but haven't taken 'after' pictures of. It's on the agenda for the weekend. There have been a couple of posts that I've written but couldn't get the pictures done in time (i.e. YHL and BowerPower's last Pinterest Challenge) or a Mood Board Monday that I used to ALWAYS do that I just couldn't get done before vacation.

But today I realize that time is ticking away before Google Reader shuts its doors. That makes me sad. I've had to figure out what else to use. I read numerous articles on the geekster sites and narrowed down to a top 6.

 At home I'll use Feedly on my iPad, but I like to stalk my blog favs at work and so I have to chose a platform that is not blocked by our fire wall or that is compatible with the version of Explorer we're still using here. That eliminates The Old Reader and Bloglovin, and leaves me with NetVibes. Jury is still out on that one as it doesn't appear to provide you with an easy way to transfer your subscriptions. {Update: once you use takeout and then change your subscriptions.xml to subscriptions.opml, you can easily upload your entire list of blogs to NetVibes. It just took some time at home without a work firewall to get it all set up.}

I've heard from my regular bloggers that Bloglovin is where a lot of them are heading. Interestingly enough, it was not listed in any of the articles I read. AND, it's a blocked site at work so I'll be over at NetVibes on my own it looks like!!

Since it's become quite the project and I'm slow at work, I am going the extra step in eliminating some of the blogs I follow. That is a quite the task. I've gone from over 80 blogs I read every day (or when they do a post) to now 54.

Some of them got moved to my favorites folder. Some I may have just followed for a good post but have since lost interest and others in my subscriptions have quit blogging.

In the long run, I hope a new reader for the iPad will allow me to keep up with my blog reading on weekends and vacations. And the shorter list could even make me more productive at work. Imagine that! OR, most likely, it will simply afford me the opportunity to discover more blogs.