bringing the outdoors in

A great low-cost decorating trick is to use twigs & branches that you can gather up on a walk in your neighborhood. Imagine that – decorating as exercise! That’s my kind of workout!

I picked up the large branch in this vignette after a windy fall day in our neighborhood…

The birch branch above our entertainment center holds some sentimental value for me, since I cut it from the lovely birch tree in front of our old house in California, because I wanted to take a part of that home with me. Now it adorns our family room and I can see it every day.

With 2-story walls, the birch branch serves more than just a sentimental purpose. It also “caps” the vignette on the entertainment center, and grounds the whole thing, otherwise your eye would go all the way up to the ceiling, where there’s not a whole lot to see, aside from an occasional dust web.

And hey…don’t be too jealous of my Sauder entertainment center! I keep fantasizing about replacing it, but a replacement entertainment center never seems to make it to the top of my grocery list! Maybe some day a beautiful piece will find me when I’m out garage sailing or dumpster diving!

Don’t forget that you can also create a tablescape using twigs & branches. This was from a past Thanksgiving, when I spray painted some gnarled roots & branches for a free but lovely holiday table display.

OK, I probably should have ironed the tablecloth before creating the tablescape, but it was all about the juxtaposition of sophisticated mod and rustic!

So don’t think you have to spend big bucks to adorn your home…just take a walk on the wild side and bring some nature indoors!

Showing off my twigs & branches at the sticks, twigs & branches link party over at Funky Junk Interiors.

Robin’s egg blue. Sky blue. Tiffany box blue. I love all of those gorgeous blue hues. But there aren’t really any rooms in my home where an entirely blue room would work well. So I decided to create a little vignette at the bottom of the stairs that isn’t really part of any room, but the perfect place for a splash of robin’s egg blue.

And because I have a bird problem, when I think about robin’s egg blue, I start getting all literal, thinking about eggs and nests and feathers and birdhouses and branches…need I say more? I’ll just show you…

I decided to create a vignette that brought a bit of the outdoors in. Most of the items in the vignette I already owned. Only had to purchase the nest, eggs, and feather, so this whole arrangement cost me less than $5.

This small square glass plate is from my old house, where I used it as a candle dish on the mantel. I think it set me back a whopping $1.99 at Home Goods.

Then there’s this gorgeous blue & black floral bowl. Another inexpensive Home Goods find.

My favorite part of the vignette is the nest with eggs, and the branch with a feather. I simply hot glued the eggs into the nest, then tied a little floral wire on the back of the nest so I could hang it on a nail.

When I got the bug to do this project and needed a tree branch, I took a walk on the path that goes around our neighborhood, which backs up to a tree-lined corn field. Whenever I ride my bike along the path, I have to dodge fallen branches, so I figured I’d find something good there, and I wasn’t disappointed. I hammered some nails strategically at the joints of the branches, so I wouldn’t have to nail through the branch itself, and risk splitting it.

To give the illusion of a bird, I used a colorful feather, which is actually a Christmas ornament, tucked behind the branch. Who would decorate their Christmas tree with bird feathers? Me! Guilty as charged!

Rather than try to hide the thermostat, I just incorporated it into the vignette, and it more or less becomes unnoticeable.

On the little black table sits a metal candy dish with a bird perched on it, a picture frame, and the lid from a china teapot. Yes, that still is the fake photo in the frame from when I first bought it, even though I’ve had it for a solid 4 years! Eventually I’ll get around to finding just the right photo!

The teapot lid has a story to it as well. Someone – a child or pet, but I can’t quite recall – accidentally sent the whole thing flying across the room on a collision course with a tile floor, and I had to piece together the lid with ceramic glue…now that was a project! But I loved it so much, I couldn’t bear to call it a loss and toss it in the trash. It lives again in this fun vignette, full of robin’s egg blue.

Do you have something in your home that’s inspired by good ole’ Ruby Redbreast?

PS…this post was inspired by Donna over at Funky Junk Interiors…she’s having a Robin’s Egg Blue link party, so check it out!