Playing Pillows

So while I was galavanting around Atlanta…scratch that…the Hyatt in Atlanta for the Haven conference, I learned a few important things about myself.  One, I truly am meant to be a blogger/creative business owner…two, I can handle 7+ hours in an airport waiting for a flight as long as I have my laptop and a blog post/project to work on…three, I am HORRIBLE with accessories!  Like hanging my head in shame I’m so bad at accessorizing my own home.  While I may be bad at accessories, I am damn good with an orbital sander!  But I came back home from Haven invigorated to accessorize the snot out of our house and really start fine tuning some of our spaces.  No sooner did I get home, but I was off on the great pillow hunt of 2013 to update our couch with some fresh, colorful pillows…bam…updated couch in your face!

And since you can’t appreciate a good after without a boring before:

Seriously…this has been our couch pillow combo for the past year:

Shameful.  That’s two sad looking came-with-the-couch-pillows that are made out of the same material and color as the couch, along with a pair of orange/white pillows that hailed from Target a year or so ago.  The combo was pathetic at best.  So off I went to my two favorite pillow shopping locations…Target and Home Goods and came back with a car full of all my favorite pillows.

I totally overbought the pillows.  No way would we need THAT many pillows.  But my game plan was to buy ALL my favorite pillows regardless of color or what I thought would look good.  Then I could play pillows, rearrange as needed and return any pillows we didin’t need.

We have a pretty colorful living room thanks to the postcard ledges with the hula girl postcards, so there really wasn’t a color that was off limits.  With the pile of pillows home with me, I proceeded to “play” pillows for the afternoon, switching up combos until I found one that I loved!  So here’s Option 1:

NAILED IT!  It’s pretty awesome, I’m not gonna lie.  Spoiler alert, this combo isn’t the winner.  BUT I’m kind of kicking myself for not going with this grouping.  I ended up ruling out the blue/white pillows right off the bat for two reasons.  One, in person I didn’t really like the navy blue (although it looks fantastic on camera!) and two, I was really hell bent on keeping the turquoise, pom-pom pillow.  So I moved on to Option 2:

Ummmm…too warm looking….with the orange and the yellow…next…Option 3:

Still not digging the yellow in this combo.  I don’t think the yellow pillows play terribly nice with the orange lamp.  Moving on…Option 4:

Hmmm…now we’re getting somewhere.  I liked this combo but it just need a bit of tweaking…but first…welcome to crazy town and Option 5:

It’s kind of like on Friends when Chandler hides Joey’s underwear and Joey decides to do the opposite to Chandler which is to “show him” all of his clothes.  Remember that one?  And Joey is wearing ALL of Chandler’s cloths and starts doing lunges?  Commando style?  This combo is kind of like that…in that I’m showing you ALL of the pillows (minus the already ruled out navy ones).  A little crazy town. Option 6:

Is pretty much the same as Option 5 but with a bit of rearranging.  Same beast…still me no likey.  And Ding, Ding Ding, we HAVE a winner, folks!

This is the same combo of pillows as in Option 5 just with a different arrangement to keep the striped like pillows from literally being on top of each other.  I’m loving the color combo PLUS it uses my two favorite pillows.  Just for the record, my favorite pillows are that bike pillow and the turquoise one with the pom poms (both from Home Goods…the other turquoise pillows the chevron stripe one is from Target).

Let’s talk living room for a little bit.  Despite being the room that we spend a vast majority of our free time in, it’s one of the rooms that we’ve neglected the most.  It’s a hodge podge of random found/thrifted furniture, a rug that doesn’t belong, and a yet to be refinished floor (no joke…all the rest of the floors around this room are a dark mocha color).  But it’s time to pay just a little bit more attention to the middle child living room.  So in between finishing up our bathroom remodel and Etsy office space, growing a brand new Etsy shop, and trying to keep the blog afloat, fixing up the living room and making it more of a cohesive, we-meant-to-do-that space is high on the priority list.  But can we take a moment to ooooh and ahhhh over my first go at coffee table accessorizing?

Not too shabby for my first go.

Pssst…In completely unrelated news, in the last couple of weeks we’ve been featured on a few other blogs including Knock Off Decor here, Ten June, and most recently at Thrifty Decor Chick.  Thanks ladies for all the bloggy love!