DIY: Monochromatic Photo Print

I love putting up old family photos in my home. They're fun reminders for us of people we love and have been inspired by. The challenge has been figuring out interesting ways to display the photos.

I've always thought this image from Elle Decor of a child's room with giant pink print of Elizabeth Taylor was so cool:

The image (and this idea too) came to mind when I was printing out a photo of my great grandma in front of her home in Sweden for our playroom.

It's easy to change a photo's color in Photoshop, and I'm sure other programs. Also, there's probably better ways to change hue, but here's what I did. In the Image menu, under Adjustments, select the Color Balance option.

I turned up the Red, Magenta and Yellow all the way on both the midtones and the highlights.

And then I played with the Curves tool a bit to brighten the whites in the photo.

When I was finished, I cropped the photo and saved it to be the right size for printing and emailed the file to my local Kinkos. It cost about $60 to have it printed to 30x35, which was the size I needed it to be for a pretty brass frame I found at a thrift store.

The existing matting in the frame had been dark brown, so I painted it orange with a couple light coats of acrylic craft paint, and then I mounted the photo print right on top of the mat with permanent double-sided tape.

I think it's a really fun part of our playroom and I love how it looks with the other art we have hanging in the space!

Here are a few other posts and links on the things in these photos:

Chalkboard-painted kids table

Kid chairs here and here 

Red storage stool

Concrete-topped vintage credenza

Favor poster

Vintage gouache paintings

Butterflies

White Floors and Serape Pillows

Thank you all for your very kind comments and emails about the baby news! And thank you so much for the input on this blog and its future. I know how lucky I am to get to do this for a living and I don't take that for granted. Thanks for giving me some time and space to figure out my next move. In the meantime, I'll still be here a couple times each week so don't give up on me yet!  :)

In other news, we finished painting the floors in the studio this weekend!! I used the pre-mixed white Rustoleum enamel and rolled on the paint in a really thick coat - no primer or top coat necessary. I LOVE how glossy it is!

The fabric shelves in the studio are almost all organized too and we'll be sending out special textiles to be made into pillows to sell on the new site (or at least that is the plan). There will be some made out of the fabrics that I only had small quantities of, but I also like the idea of using found textiles to make pillows too. I used a vintage serape blanket to make a bolster pillow for the daybed in the library and I really love how it turned out. It's such a fun piece of the design puzzle of these rooms that are all open to each other.

I'm so happy with how the colorful striped pattern of the serape mixes with the neutral color but big pattern of the Bengal Bazaar linen on the upholstery.

Plus, I think you just can't go wrong with a good bolster pillow! I love the oversized shape. I picked up the fluffy down insert on sale at West Elm for just a few dollars last year. It's a good one.

A little note though (in case you want to try something similar yourself). With woven textiles like a blanket, you'll want to iron on a fusible backing to help keep the fibers together, since the weave is not really meant to be cut. You can find the inexpensive iron-on backing at Joanns or pretty much any fabric store.

PS - How to sew a pillow in jut a few minutes!

Studio and Blog Makeover Underway

I've been doing this blog thing for a long time now (going on seven (SEVEN!!) years!). I love that I've been able to help support my family and do so many of the things that I love to do, and do them from home. Truly, I'm so grateful for what I have, and the trade offs have been just right for me, but I also have a million regrets about things I chose to not make time for (never wrote my book, still totally stink at AutoCAD, still on blogspot, etc, etc, etc), but I'm trying to let go of some of those regrets and focus on the good parts. I hope to hang on with the blog after the baby comes, too, but I am also ready for a bit of a change in my schedule and content that better reflects what my life and career look like now, seven years after starting LGN.

There are so many question marks, and my feelings on the answers change daily, hourly. Should I scale back and focus my work on the things that bring me the very most joy? Or hire and expand and take my design and blog/Domino work out of my house and maybe let go of the reins a little? The blog world seems to be changing at light speed lately (we're dropping like flies!!) and it seems like a good time, both personally and professionally, to gear up for some of my own changes.

One piece of exciting news is my site redesign is suuuuper close to being done! We're moving everything to jennykomenda.com (long story for another day - been in and out of litigation for years on the obvious url), and everything is looking great. I can't wait to show you the pretty and way more organized site when it's ready for it's close up.

While that's getting done, and while we're figuring out what my business will look like and where I'll run it from, I've decided to do some quick updates to the studio space we have over the garage, mostly just to hold me over. Whenever I feel the itch to make some big life changes, I force myself to get organized first, just in case that was the underlying problem all along.

We're almost done painting the floors a glossy white to brighten up the room and I spray painted the frames of three giant, industrial shelving units (inspiration HERE). We started organizing my fabric stash and I think I'm going to hold another big fabric sale in a couple weeks. Maybe with pillows this time!

Other changes to the space will be pretty minor, mostly just streamlining what I already have. I do have a desk project in my future though. My brother and his wife bought a new house and I gave them the Widdicomb table I had been using as a desk. And as luck would have it, the very same day I found this beat-up beauty at Goodwill for a song.

It's clearly not in the best shape, or at least the top isn't, but the lines are amazing. It's pouring rain here (like flash flood warning levels of water), so as soon as the weather cooperates, I'll start fixing her up and hope that in return for the favor, she'll whisper to me what I should do with my career.

It's just occurring to me that maybe this desk is like my blog? Not in perfect shape, especially compared to others, but the lines are there, and it's probably worth fixing. :)

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PS Some of you asked what the Arteriors Tilda chandelier in our entry looked like at night. Ask and you shall receive!

One Big and One (literally) Tiny Announcement!!

First of all, the fall Domino is out every where now! (Here's an online peek!) Linus is featured, like, three times at least, so it's worth picking up the issue solely for a triple slice of that big, fluffy guy.

I'm so thankful to the wonderful Domino team, especially to Robert Leleux, Domino's Editor-in-Chief, and to Brittany Ambridge, photographer extraordinaire. These two are an epic duo. They work together with such grace and ease. And they are downright hilarious. I love any chance I get to work with them on the magazine as one of the contributing editors, and this two-day shoot of my own house was the tippy of tops. Thanks, Robert and Brittany!

And in even better, more exciting to me news, WE ARE HAVING A BABY! And it's another girl! :)

We could not be a single ounce more happy about her. We've felt for years that we've wanted another (and likely final) child in our family, and after a long road of hardship there, she's finally on her way. I tear up every time I think of how sweet my older girls are being about the idea of having a little sister this January. Nearly every morning they crawl into bed with us and whisper sister secrets and sing little songs to my belly. This is the good stuff, friends. Thanks for being here to share in my joy. xo

DIY: Fabric Decoupaged Office Chair

For our little homework station project, I wanted to find a really inexpensive option for the girls' desk chair. I bought the vintage wood desk at a store called Another Man's Junk here in Phoenix and I love it's simple lines, but I wanted the chair to feel a little more fun and youthful. I poked around online trying to find a cheap upholstered office chair to recover in a pretty fabric when I stumbled on these $20 chairs at IKEA. I thought they would be a good candidate for a decoupage project (this one has really stuck in my brain!).

I pulled out some pretty, lightweight cotton fabric from my stash. I had bought several yards of this gauzy cotton Nani Iro for Kokka Fabrics at Purl Soho for a client project a few years ago. We ended up choosing another fabric, so I kept the yardage and I'm so glad I did! It worked perfectly here.

Before we started with the decoupage, we sprayed the chair legs gold with Design Master's Gold Metal and the chair back with a coral spray paint from Krylon which is supposed to work on plastics (and seems to be doing a good job of holding up).  

I started by brushing on a pretty generous coat of matte Mod Podge on just the front of the chair back. I left the edges of the seat alone for this part and just worried about the front face.

I had figured out the pattern placement and cut out a section of fabric before I started glueing that was several inches bigger than the chair on all sides. I carefully placed the fabric on top of the Mod Podge layer and used my hands to smooth out all the bumps and wrinkles. It takes some work and time, but it's really not all that hard to get a taut, smooth surface with the fabric.

When the upper chair back was smooth, I repeated the same process on the chair seat. Again, I left the edges dry at this point and worried just about the big surfaces.

If you do this project using the same IKEA chair, you'll want to leave just a bit of fabric bunched around the curve of the seat (where the little hole in the back is).

Once the seat and the seat back were all smooth, I trimmed the excess fabric a bit more, just to make things more manageable, and then I brushed Mod Podge onto the face of the edges and started the same process of smoothing.

The corners and curves are really the only tricky part. I cut out some of the extra fabric in a triangle shape until the fabric sat perfectly smooth around the corner edge and then I glued it down with Mod Podge.

A damp cloth really helps smooth everything down and was a big help with the edges especially.

I cut away more fabric for the curve and the hole in the back of the chair before gluing the fabric down. Mod Podge is so easy to work with. It is so forgiving and can be repositioned for a long time.

Once the Mod Podge had dried (about an hour or two later), I ran an X-acto knife down the inside edge of the back. And then I brush on another little bit of Mod Podge along the edge to help seal the fabric and prevent fraying.

Once the whole chair was done and dry, I brushed on two thick coats of satin Polycrylic sealer on top of the fabric. This changed the look and feel of the fabric a bit - it sort of looks like laminated fabric now, or like the chair is made from a textured, printed plastic maybe? But the surface is solid and waterproof and easy to clean now, so I'm cool with it.

Still pretty cute, right? I love how it looks from the back especially, with the pop of coral!

It feels pretty indestructible and my girls love it. Win-win. :)