New Stuff Around Our House!

So I was looking for a word to call this—homemaking? nesting?—but really it's just decorating the house. I love having our own space to design and make our own, and a combination of our new jobs/gift cards/discovering how to re-purpose things from thrift stores has made it financially feasible. The latest features of our home include:

A wreath for our door!

We took down most of the paper hearts (which we love and now keep a lot of them in our memory box) since, relative to a lot of our neighbors, we're not exactly newlyweds anymore. But we kept the "Mr. & Mrs. Tygan & Diana Shelton" one above our peephole and used an ivy garland my mom gave us to make a wreath, hung with a small command hook.

An expanded gallery wall!

I decided to take the leap and add some color. It's a lot easier when it's just black and white; it's a good starting step and is guaranteed to look classy. But I put a couple of our engagement photos (which we only had in color) in some frames from D.I., and it really added a lot. On the very left you can see the silhouettes I made of me and Tygan a few weeks a go. It was super easy; I just took some pictures of our profiles:

Then I brought them up on our computer, placed a white piece of printer paper on the screen, and traced the outline. Finally, I cut out the white silhouette, taped it to some black paper, and cut around that to end up with a black silhouette! Ta-da! I read on Nie Nie's blog that she does this for every member of her family each year, and I think that would be a fun tradition to have.

I also re-framed the favor tag from our wedding with some fabric that matched our tablecloth on our kitchen table (when we bought the tablecloth, it came with extra fabric as part of the packaging):

Using fabric is an easy way to come up with a color scheme.

I think I'll keep trying to add green, light blue, yellow, and reddish-orange to our decorating scheme. We shall see. I tend to change my mind a lot, which is why I'm trying to use mostly stuff we already have or things that are really cheap until I can really nail down my vision.

Oh and we finally got a wedding photo book! This is something I've looked forward to having since I was young. (Well, younger.) I've been keeping my eye on a few different online photo-book printing companies to see when the best sales are. We got this one for a total of $10, including shipping! It has twenty full-color lay-flat pages, and I hope that people visiting our home for years to come can just pick up this little book on our coffee table and flip through it to get a sense of what we're like and what our wedding was like and how much we love each other and stuff! I don't know, I just really like it.

We used the Artisan State new customer trial. I don't think we'll ever get anything else from them; I just wanted to take advantage of that discount!

And speaking of our coffee table, it's  pretty schmancy now! My mom got us a plant—a real ivy plant! Apparently it's supposed to be easy to keep alive but I'll be honest: it's already looking a little droopy. It was brand new in this picture, but today it's crying out for some help. Cross your fingers that it makes it!

I also love the little ivory-cream colored pot my mom got for it. It's awesome. She said we'll need to re-pot it in something bigger soon (maybe that's why it's dying?) so I'm planning on transferring it to the pot behind it in the picture—a beautiful Greek-styled vase my sister made in pottery class. I absolutely love it and can't wait to make it a functional fixture in my home (it even matches the red-orange I'm trying to use in our living room)! But I guess we'll need some potting soil first. This is like a whole new world. Maybe, if I can take care of this plant, I'll feel ready for growing our family someday. But if this plant dies, I might lose confidence in my ability to keep anything alive ... hmm ...

The quality of this photo is just astounding.

 And finally, we set up the Wii! The display looks laughable on our tiny TV screen, but it's still fun. We lost the "dongle" to connect the Wii to our guitar, though, so Rock Band's no good, but we had a good time with Wii Sports the other day. It'll be interesting to see how our additional access to Netflix will affect the dynamics of our home ...