Leopard Love

Oh. My Gosh! What a trip it was. I can't tell you how exhausting and exhilirating decorating this beach house was. We had a blast and were just about delirious with fatigue by the time we were done, but standing back and looking at the finished product was SO totally worth it all. And it was such a joy to see the homeowner walk in with her two little girls and just be totally awestruck at the difference in her new beach house. She LOVED it! My designer friend, Mary, has been at this for a long time now and has many clients all over Birmingham. I have had so much fun getting to know her. She is a precious Christian sister and we have a blast together and work well together. She has a wonderful eye for doing this and I'm learning SO much from her and soaking it all in. I told her she is my mentor. We did this entire beachhouse in 2 days and while we didn't get much sleep and couldn't believe we were still walking around at times, we persevered and made it by the deadline. I'm learning first hand how hard a project of this magnitude is. She spent about 3 days last week shopping for this project and had it all in her van and a rental truck that had to be driven down too. You should of seen us tooling down the highway, she in the Budget truck and me driving her van. It was a hoot! She amazes me how she can just take on a project like this, focus on it, get it done and then move on to the next one. I can learn a lot from this incredible designer. She doesn't even make lists, but rather goes in the stores, grabbing things that she has in her mind will work. She gets a plan going in her head of color schemes and then goes to town shopping for it all. She does overbuy on the accessories, pillows and linens at times and takes back whatever doesn't get used. It's amazing how much inventory she buys and keeps up with. Then, when the project is completely in place, she goes back and itemizes her inventory, room by room so that she can present an invoice to the client. Amazing what she has to keep up with to get to this point! Those HGTV shows are so deceptive in showing a room in 30 minutes. You can't imagine the sweat equity that goes into a project like this. I told Mary that this project should be featured in Coastal Living magazine. I would love to submit this and have someone look at it.

Now, all of that dialogue to say this: I CAN'T POST PICS!! Can you believe that? I'm so sorry, but Mary checked with the homeowners and while the wife was perfectly fine with having it posted on my blog, the husband said absolutely NOT. I'm not sure what he was afraid of. So, I can't do it. I had them all ready to go too, so you'll just have to imagine how pretty it was. It was done in the popular beach colors of aqua, blue, cream, chocolate, taupe, and some golds.

I do have another little project to share with you from my house. I know it's a let down not to see all these beach house pics, but hopefully you'll enjoy these a little bit!
You've probably all seen my little side chairs that were picked up separately at yardsales and fit quite well as accent chairs beside the livingroom console table.

I had a pretty needlepoint on one of them and just added some extra fabric to the other one when it was found last year. But, I decided they should both be out of the same fabric and remembered as I was looking through my fabric stash, that I could use the rest of a leopard print fabric that I picked up yardsaling several years ago.
I've added that fabric to pillows and lamps, so why not a chair or two? Got out the electric staple gun, my scissors and finished them in 1/2 an hour.
And I love the little update it makes with these two little lovelies. I've always adored a touch of leopard and this does the trick.
Try a little leopard love yourself.