Lessons to Learn When Shopping for an Interior Decorator

Often, the best way to ensure that your home is beautifully decorated is to trust in a specialist. Since financing your decorator can be a task all of its own, we recommend you shop around before you choose one. Because interior decorating is so based on your own opinions, it is important that you get samples, ideas, and possible references for the interior decorator. Often, you will be able to find examples of the decorator's work online or in a booklet that they can provide you. When talking to others who have used this interior decorator, ask them about how timely, how inventive, and how serviceable he/she was. Guidelines such as these ensure that your interior decorator will have exactly what you are looking for.

Learning What You Love in Interior Decorating

At one time or another, almost everyone feels the need to try their hand at interior decorating. A few simple steps can help you learn more about this skill if you are interested in redecorating your home. A good beginner's step to learning the art of interior design is to find out more about the subject. There are books, magazines, books on tape, forums, and blogs on this topic, just to name a few sources of information. It actually does not take a lot of time to learn tips and techniques that will save you hours of trouble. Magazines like Better Homes & Gardens or Home and Design, or catalogs for furniture and home decoration stores, are great places to turn to for ideas on the overall "look" you may use. It will not take you long to narrow in on your likes and dislikes in the home décor world. Next is to choose your first project and run with it. As you begin, the experiences you gain are more significant than the creation you come up with. After all, experience will teach you more than all the research you can do.

Drying and Preserving Flowers: The Basics

Special events such as weddings, graduations, church ceremonies, dances, and even special birthdays are days you will always want to remember-and a great way to preserve that memory is by drying the flowers used on that day. It usually doesn't take long for flowers to begin wilting, especially if the ceremony they were used for called for them to be out of water-so don't delay when it is time to dry them. Two techniques for preserving flowers lead to two totally different looks-but neither is difficult to do. One way is to attach a string around your flowers and hang them upside down until they have dried completely. You will need to dry them in a place with little moisture and light to get the maximum beauty preserved within your flowers. Also, dried flowers are very fragile, so to prevent damage we recommend placing them in a case or shadowbox. The second technique for drying flowers is to press them. This method works best with very small, thin flowers or the individual flower petals of larger, shapelier flowers.

Green Décor

A critical step to beautifying your home is creating a desirable atmosphere. Furniture pieces, colors, textures, and styles help mold a room and set that mood. For those who enjoy an earth based or natural mood in at least one room, adding greenery is an absolute necessity. When adding greenery, make sure you know the size and positions of the areas you will utilize so that you choose pieces with complementary shapes and styles. A good rule of thumb for tree height is to get a tree that is at least one to two feet shorter than the ceiling. Make sure that the branches of the tree do not look crowded or condensed. Plants come in many shapes and sizes - if you are planning on having a tabletop display, a shorter plant like a bonsai tree would be perfect. Hanging plants add greenery to places that otherwise may look too bare, such as the corners of your ceiling. The benefit to silk plants is that they can be placed in areas that do not receive direct sunlight, yet they still retain a natural look.