Touching the Past

DIY Vintage Brooch Bouquet - Tutorial Part 4

I have finally finished my niece’s brooch bouquet. The last step was the bouquet handle. I wanted to use a vintage handkerchief and my mother fortunately had one from my grandmother that was bordered in lace and glass beads. It was perfect for the handle. I went ahead and finished taping my bouquet handle. I put some more green tape around it in order to try to make it similar in size the whole way down the handle and then I wrapped white tape around that. The reason I wanted to finish with white tape is because my hankie is cream colored and I didn’t want the green tape showing through. I assembled everything I would need – the bouquet, the hankie, some fusible interfacing, and red velvet buttons (which will tie in with other velvet pieces that will be used as part of the wedding decor). I folded down my hankie at the top, bec...

Monday, December 7, 2015

Christmas decorating is about . . . pillows

Well, not really. But changing all, or even some, of the pillows throughout your house for Christmas can make it feel more festive. I use a lot of pillows throughout my house the whole year long. They just add so much to the overall decor, I think. And, I know I'm not the only one by a long shot. If you've watched any shows on HGTV, you know what I mean. If you search for pillows on Etsy, the results are overwhelming. But, the pillow habit can be expensive. And, I have a small house so have limited storage space. While I would love to have a whole room devoted to storing pillows, that will never happen. So, I've come up with several ways to change pillows without taking up much space, all without spending too much money. In my bedroom, I don't change out all the pillows, just a couple. The two pillows in...

Thursday, October 22, 2015

Adding an accent wall

All the walls in my house are a taupe color, and I left them that way when I moved in because I figured I could use furniture and accessories to add color. I love color but I also love to change up things every now and then, so I didn't want to be locked into a color choice that I might regret later. However, the more I looked at the wall where my couch is located, the more I thought it begged to be an accent wall. I have a lot of greens and blues in my house, but I decided using one of those colors as an accent would be too much. Eventually, I chose Spiced Cider - SW7702 - from the Sherwin Williams HGTV Home collection. This is the couch and wall before I painted. You can see how the couch almost blends into the wall. Adding the accent wall really makes the couch, pillows and accessories pop. ...

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Adding Unique Borders to Your Images

You may have noticed that I have a gold border around most of the images on my blog. I choose gold as a border because it is one of the colors I'm using to give my blog a cohesive look. In this post, I want to show you how you can add your own unique borders to your images. You can do as I have done and apply the same border to all or most of your images, or you can apply a border to a particular image. I'm not an expert on CSS and HTML coding. In fact, I know very little about it. But there are lots of great tutorials out there which can help you know what code to use and where to put it in your template. I use Blogger as my platform, so I specifically search for tutorials related to it when I'm trying to find out how to do something. It's easy enough to add a border that's a color around your images. The code for that is: ...