Gorgeous Gourds Of Holiday Decor

Preparing your home for the Thanksgiving Feast can be difficult at best - there will be tons of people in your home, and busy work creating fantastic meals to be shared around a family table. It's the start of the most wonderful time of the year. Decorating with pumpkins and squash may sound funny - but it is - every year, a reliable and relevant trend in holiday decor.

There are many different ways to incorporate gourds, pumpkins and squash into your interior design during Autumn.

According to Martha Stewart (and she is in authority on this sort of thing...) Autumn is the easiest season to decorate your home because of the use of a just even a single pumpkin, some squash and a little creative thinking can make a huge difference in the entire atmosphere of your home.

Sur la table, you can clean out your pumpkin and use for a dip dish, and place on a nice platter with your favorite crackers. You can also use a cleaned out pumpkin for soup or chowder.

Use the big pumpkin for your Thanksgiving Day feast centerpiece. Place in the center of your beautiful dining table and place some small squash, random leaves scattered around it. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

The great thing about pumpkins and squash are their unique and wonderful natural fall colors. Decorating your home or work place with these wondrous fall colors such as the different types of pumpkins can not only be unique but also will save some money. You can use these decorating tips from mid-September up until the day after Thanksgiving.

Visit a Farmers Market to get some great unique and no-two alike pumpkins and squash to scatter on the front porch steps to give that inviting and warm welcome to friends and family.

Interior Design Ideas - Incorporating Feng Shui Part II

Two rooms we don’t want to neglect when applying the principles of Feng Shui to our interior design are also rooms that are quite useful: the home office and the kitchen.

HOME OFFICE

For those with a home office, it can be difficult to make this room more than just a 'storage space' for files, paperwork and computers. Implement some of these changes to make your home office more room-energy friendly.

Align your desk so that it is facing the door. It creates a presence of power, you’ll be the first to greet anyone that enters.

Eliminate sharp edges, whether that be furniture or artwork and replace them with rounded shapes and sensual objects that encourage productivity. File all of those papers! Create a storage or filing system that is easy to use and clean for those who happen to stumble upon them.

KITCHEN

Lastly, homeowners spend a majority of their time in the kitchen. Kitchens now serve as entertaining spaces on top of the need to be a room for preparing and serving food. Use some of these quick kitchen tips to optimize your space.

Similar to the office principle, you want to face the entrance to your kitchen while you’re cooking. This can be done by hanging a mirror on the backsplash or by installing a stove top on an island.
Organize pantries, especially if using cloudy glass in pantry doors. It gives you the opportunity to present dishes as artwork.

Lighting is very important in the kitchen, so utilize warm lighting from halogen bulbs or incandescent lights to make food more visually appealing on top of being tasty!

Keep it clean. Always clean your stove top and countertops after making dishes. Nothing is more unappealing than caked out foods from dishes cooked weeks before. A quick swipe with a paper towel can often to the trick. 

Interior Design Elements: What Is Color?

There are so many different colors in the vast world; such as various shades of colors found in nature, or brighter hues and tones of paint on a canvas. But, how do we get all of these colors? Well it might surprise you to know that we actually get all colors from the way our eye perceives light and the way materials either absorb or reflect this light.

How could this be? Well it’s simple – you just combine the lights in different ratios. By changing the brightness in certain different colors you can get every color you could ever imagine. Millions.

In the world of painting, we use additive coloring to get lighter tints (basically, we mix white with the color to get a tint), and to get a shade, we would add black to produce shaded versions of the same color.

But in other industries, and in color theory itself - additive coloring is a bit different, where for example, combining all three additive primary colors in equal amounts will produce the color white itself. Good examples of this include televisions and computers.

What happens, though, when the source of your color is not light, but instead is something like a book or photograph? Well it’s easy – we just use Subtractive Coloring instead. Subtractive Coloring’s colors are Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow. What makes Subtractive Coloring different from Additive is that in Subtractive the three colors are used to make darker colors, and when all three are mixed together they create the color black. For all you Photoshop experts out there - this is what happens when you 'invert' an image.

In essence, all colors are made up by how we, as individuals, see them. So, in theory, colors do not exist in nature, but instead are something that we perceive as color given three different situations: white light, the way materials absorb or reflect light, and by the sensibility of the human eye. This would also mean that colors do not exist in powders and paints or fabrics.

Some eyes can be more sensible than others, though – and at J. Douglas Design we know that we have the right eye to help you combine any types of different colors that you may want in any kind of home décor.