New Couch & DIY Pillows

Our apartment finally has a new couch!

About a month ago we finally bit the bullet and decided to finance a new sofa to replace the old, dingy couch I inherited from my parents when I first moved to Michigan. So when an awesome sale was taking place at Art Van (like, every week), we picked out a new couch to have a nicer, newer and more comfortable couch to lounge on.

The downside? We had to special order our new couch (the only color they had available immediately was some weird green-khaki shade), which meant waiting up to eight weeks for it to arrive in-store and be delivered. Bummer.

Lucky us, though, our new couch arrived in about half the estimated time! So now our living room looks like this:

So much better than it looked with the old couch. (By the way, I explained the mirrors earlier this week).

As for the old couch, we opted not to get rid of it immediately and moved it into our second bedroom/office. Plus, we didn't have to lug the old couch out to the dumpster or figure out how to get it to Goodwill (there's no way that beast could fit in a normal car).

But back to our new couch. We love gray, but not that much, so we needed something to bring some life into the color palate. I had some extra fabric lying around that I had picked up from the clearance aisle at Jo-Ann's awhile back, so I used that to whip up some pillows.

This was my first attempt at sewing my own pillows, and it was so incredibly easy. I didn't use any tutorial or a pattern - I just measured out 4 equal pieces of my remaining fabric to make two small pillows. Pretty simple!

I used this tutorial to sew an "invisible" seam to close up the pillows.

The pillows aren't perfect looking, but they're pretty comfortable and add a nice pop of color to our giant gray couch.

Making these pillows gave me more confidence in my ability to sew in a straight line, so now I feel like I'm ready to tackle a more involved project. I definitely have plenty of ideas floating around on my Pinterest boards right now, so I just need to get started!

Mirror(s), Mirror(s)

Drew and I have been busy redecorating our living room lately: new couch, DIY pillows and a fun mirror project. I'll get to the couch and pillows later this week, but for now let's talk about the mirrors.

Of course I found inspiration for this project on Pinterest. I found this pin a few months ago, and we've been hoping to implement something similar in our apartment ever since.

Source: apartmenttherapy.com via Kristy on Pinterest

We loved that the project used simple back-of-the-door mirrors and would be super cheap, especially compared to a larger mirror that would take up the same amount of space.

Hanging up three mirrors on a wall seems pretty simple, so why did it take us somewhere around 4 months to finally get this project accomplished? Well, we didn't want to hang up plain mirrors. Sure, they look great in the picture and would look great on our walls as well, but we wanted to add a personal touch.

Our second inspiration for our project came from quite a few sources, but the one that helped us out the most was (of course) Bower Power. Katie added a stenciled pattern around a window, and we loved the idea enough to try it on our mirror project.

We like the look of frosted glass stencils, and Katie had nice, thorough instructions for us to follow. We basically did the exact same thing she did with her window with almost the exact same products.

Frost effect paint and stencil sponge brushes by Martha Stewart, purchased at Michaels.

Originally we planned to put the mirrors above the dresser in our bedroom, so we picked up a floral stencil from Michael's that coordinated really well with our bedding. By the time we got around to actually tackling this project, though, we changed our minds and decided to put the mirrors in our living room instead. So the floral stencil had to be replaced.

Drew came up with the awesome idea to use a skyline as our pattern, so he printed out a picture of the London skyline and cut out the image with an exacto knife to create a stencil. (Why London? No real reason, but it is the only foreign city we've both been to - although not at the same time).

The project was super straight-forward after that. We taped the stencil in place and used our stencil brush to lightly layer on the frosted paint (we ended up doing two layers of paint). After the paint dried we peeled off the tape, and were finished!

Well, except for actually hanging up the mirrors, which was a little tougher. A little piece of advice: when using 3M velro strips to hang up a mirror, do not put all of your body weight into the back of the mirror. It will crack, and it will be tragic. Plus, you'll have to delay finishing your project so you can pick up a new mirror at Target. Not that I'd know any of this from experience or anything...

Anyway, we relied on good old trial and error to map out where we wanted our mirrors to hang and where to place the velcro strips. There is probably a simpler way to hang up mirrors in an evenly spaced pattern than using pencil marks, rulers and guessing, but eventually we figured everything out and now have three mirrors hanging next to our brand new couch in the living room.

We still have a lot of rearranging/redecorating to do in our living room (and our apartment in general), but we think things are coming together pretty well so far. Our mirrors make the room feel bigger and brighter, and we love how they turned out.

Don't forget to check back later this week for a recap in my adventures in pillow-making.