Simply Spring #11: Americana and Bird Decor

Hello friends!

Welcome back to my Simply Spring series, which as usual carries on my Pretty and Practical theme, too.

I've been meaning to redecorate my front hallway in a patriotic Americana theme for summer, and I figured Memorial Day was a great time to start the season.

My one big chalkboard was the obvious place to make a change. This is what it looked like until today.


I Googled "God Bless America chalkboard art" and came up with this from the StoneGable blog. Yvonne has quite lovely posts there, so check it out.

I obviously didn't include all of her embellishments or the words at the bottom. I made it my own. I may be a patriotic American, but at heart I am more of a global thinker. Hence, "and the rest of the world." I found the wood hearts on clearance at Target for about $2.

Another clearance item, this sign from Old Time Pottery, hangs above my hall closets directly across from the front door.

Underneath of that, I hung wooden hearts from my decorations storage bin. I generally don't prefer distressed furniture with purposely worn or scratched paint, but this is more primitive than distressed, and it's small enough to not be visually overpowering.

The little birds had been up on the cabinet with the chalkboard, along with others. I picked out the ones that looked sort of red, white, and blue and arranged them on the tea cart near the door. As you'll see later, the others moved into the living room.

On the other side of the door, my red and blue basket is filled with water bottles, easy to grab on the way out. At Jo-Ann Crafts today, they had a 60% sale on many items with an additional 20% coupon beyond that. They had a whole bunch of patriotic decor, but as I looked and looked I didn't see anything that really grabbed me, that I had to have. I did buy the blue star ribbon with wires and added a bow to two baskets and a cinnamon broom in the hallway.

While working in this area, I took the time to organize all of the shoes, make the kids take their backpacks to their rooms (only a couple of more days of this anyway as school lets out on Wednesday), shake out the hall rug, and sweep.

So that is my front entryway right now. Oh, and our front door. I took down my spring flower wreath and put this up instead, again from my decor bin.

How about an update on my living room, which I've been featuring in this series? (See here.) Last week I mentioned that I had bought lighter blue curtains to replace the darker sheer and silky ones I bought just before Easter. I moved that first set into the computer room to cover the sliding glass doors since we need extra privacy.  Well, as it turned out, the newer blue ones were too sheer for my purposes too, so I moved them to the dining room where we only had blinds. Then I started hunting for room darkening curtains for the living room. This limited my color options and I gave up on finding blue ones.

I finally found brown to match the couches, and had to travel to three different Target stores to get the 10 panels I needed for the two big windows. They still aren't quite as "room darkening" as I'd like - for that, I guess I would have had to buy blackout curtains. But I did figure out to put cardboard panels behind the curtains to cut more of the light. This will save on summer energy bills and reduces the glare on our TV screen. My curtain buying is not done, though, because I still need some for my bedroom to cover up my worn out blinds.

I moved the birdhouse picture and the ceramic birds in from the front hallway to complete my pastel bird and garden theme.









I found this sign at a church rummage sale. It's perched on top of our DVD rack. I love the words. We have a pretty crazy home.

I finally hung the last four curtain panels this evening. These don't have the cardboard behind them yet. I may leave it that way for now.  My oldest daughter, Mary, just gave me the big blue ceramic bird today. She's been rearranging her own house, and as she was thinking of my new decorating scheme, she realized she had something that would fit in just right! I needed something of that blue tone big enough to go on the piano, and it's also a similar style to my little ceramic birds. I love being able to wrap the same colors and theme all around the room.

These birds also remind me of freedom, and that in turn reminds me of the great blessings of liberty we have here in the United States of America.

I am grateful on this Memorial Day for the brave men and women who have given their lives to serve and protect to our country.

God bless America!
God bless you... and the rest of the world, too!

Virginia Knowles