Home decorating need not be expensive, nor do you need to be artistic. Just a little time, effort and imagination. That is all you need.

Colour Your World

The wonderful world of colour is one of the many joys given to us by God. The pallet is so diverse and plentiful. Colour gives us the illusion of joy or sadness, light or dimness, romance or plain old everyday reality. The four basic colours have so many different variations which make up the spectrum which we have at our fingertips. The use of these colours help to make our home warm and inviting to ourselves and our guests. With just one or two colours we can set the mood of our homes. But which colours do we choose? What colours best suit our needs? What colour will depict the mood I wish for my home? How can we add colour to our home without breaking the bank balance? These are some of the questions we have all had to face at sometime or another. I hope to be able to shed some light into this subject for you over the next few updates so please keep checking this page for more ideas over the next few months. I will try to cover ways for adding colour cheaply for the home owner on a budget and for tenants of rental properties. Adding colour to rental properties is not as difficult as you may think. Although some landlords don't allow you to paint your home, or expect you to paint it again to the same neutral colours it was in before you moved in, you can still add colour without the cost of painting. Actually there are times when the neutral whites, beige's and creams come in handy. Almost all colours go with those neutral colours. So no matter what colour your furniture or soft furnishings are there is the benefit of knowing it will suit your new rental home. If you are renting and don't wish to spend your hard earned money on the property you are renting, decorate your home so you can take the colour with you when you move on. This is simply by using soft furnishings like curtains and cushions, throw rugs or paintings. Dried flower arrangements and plants are great for adding colour to your home and setting a colour pattern. Or try some of these alternatives. Break the starkness of the walls with some nylon ribbon in the colours you feel will bring out the most dominant colour of your furniture, use one or two colours if you wish. Then using a few nails or pins, (holes in the walls made by nails and pins are easily patched) tack the ribbon in a corner and twist into a delicate string and tack it at intervals around the wall. Put it straight or swag it. The choice is yours. You can make bows in a different colour to go where the nails are or place a framed picture of loved ones, or even use some silk flowers or dried flowers. Even small ornaments are great to use in these spots. You can even use 2 inch fabric ribbon also, whatever you wish. The ribbons can be purchased at most department stores, craft stores or surplus stores. Look for the cheapest you can find as you will need a lot. Measure your walls width around the entire room and double the measurement, that's will be about how much you will need. Work out how much you need before you go to purchase the ribbons, as it may be a little more than you wish to spend, but much cheaper than buying the wallpaper friezes and you can take it with you to your next home. For a fancier way try sheaths of wheat or grasses. This can be done easily with wire and some wheat with plenty of stalk or some kind of grass that you can get from the side of the road almost anywhere. Little or no cost in that. You can colour the grasses with cheap fabric dye by simply mixing up the dye with water and dipping the grass. The length of time you leave the grass in the dye and how diluted the dye is will regulate the amount of colour the grass will have when dried. You can spray some with gold craft spray paint or even silver or chrome. One can will go a long way. Tie the grasses in small bundles about 3 inches from the end of the stalks and hang on the clothes line to dry. Hanging from the clothes line is the best place to spray paint your grasses also. To make the sheath, dye or spray paint the grasses the colours you desire. Using the wire twist around the stalks adding more stalks as you go until you have the desired length, making sure you have the grasses going in both directions <-- and -->. Don't make the wire to tight around the stalks or you won't be able to add more of another colour later. Now you bend it gently into the shape you want. A double scalloped shape is most effective, then in the raise center you can place a small posy of flowers, a bow or anything you wish. Little cupids are wonderful too. But first you add a little of the different coloured grasses to make your sheath outstanding, simply by poking the coloured grasses into the wire and base grasses, making sure it is secure as you go. Bows and posy's can be wired into place, ornaments or pictures have to be glued or you can glue a wire loop on the back of the ornament and wire it into place. Loop three pieces of wire to the back to hang the sheath. If you make a few of these, you can string ribbon between them or just have them intermittently around the walls. These are affective as another variation of a wallpaper frieze. You know those narrow strips of wallpaper you see about 1 or 2 feet down the wall from the ceiling. When decorating your home, so you can take it with you, choose curtain styles that will fit any size window. For example: Make curtain drops basic. But have a little extra material to drape across the curtain brackets and rods to spruce it up. Don't worry if the windows aren't full length, make you curtains full length, floor to ceiling. This will give the illusion of larger windows than you have, therefore, giving the illusion of more light. Then place an occasional table below the window and between the drops of the curtains. For the gap at the top between the top of the window and your curtain rod, have the extra piece of material draped to cover this gap. This is a neat little trick those big expensive interior designers use. Try to make your curtains, cushions and throw rugs as match as possible and make them the focal point of your colour pattern. Match the colour with your furniture, and you will have a very beautiful home and friends will be asking for the phone number of your interior designer.

I hope this has give you a little idea in your home decorating. This page will be updated regularly. So you will have a lot of ideas coming your way. If you have an idea you would like to share we would love to hear it. Email your ideas to us and we will place it here for the benefit of others around the world. Or if there is something you would like to know about or how to do, send us an email and we will endeavor to help you. Happy Decorating J LAST MONTHS DECORATING

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