Copycat Creativity

Remember my hot-mess-living-room dilemma a week or so ago?  I'm still working on it.  We spent last Saturday painting a few of our older pieces of furniture -- just sprucing things up a bit.  Reinventing.  In our most dramatic transformation, the coffee table went from drab brown to a beautiful blue called Mermaid.  I LOVE IT!!!

(But please ignore the real-life mess all around it.  Embarrassing ...)  I actually painted it dark gray, then celadon green, THEN Mermaid blue so that when I sanded and antiqued it we would get a pretty, multi-layered, weathered effect.  Looking at that photo I can clearly see that the top needs a bit more sanding.  Whatever.  (Next up, the entertainment center will be painted black and antiqued.  School starts next week and mommy's gonna' have some time to kill . . .)

As beautiful as that is, it's not what I gathered you all here to talk about today.  That perfectly blue coffee table is the only thing we own that is blue (except for the interior of my craft closet which is where the Mermaid blue paint came from, but that doesn't really count.)  I need some accessories that introduce light blue as a part of the red, black, yellow, green color scheme going on in there.  It's not a stretch, really.  Those colors all look lovely together.  Just look at the Thrift Shop collection of scrapbooking paper from October Afternoon.  It's a gorgeous pallet.  Luckily I had purchased a pad of that cute paper from Amazon on an impulse a few months back.  But what can you make for your living room out of scrapbook paper that doesn't look too Becky-Home Ec-y?  OK, several things, but that's when I remembered some beautiful butterfly collages I had seen while blog hopping a while back -- from Amy at the Idea Room  and from Julie at Less Than Perfect Life of Bliss.  If those two ideas got together and had a baby and wrapped it up in a burlap receiving blanket from Jen over at Tatertos & Jello, this is what you'd get:

My brand-spankin'-new addition to our family art gallery wall (which is currently under reconstruction due to recent changes in furniture placement).  Look at those colors up close:

To. Die. For.  It may not be your cup of tea, but it's doin' the job for me.  And, really, isn't that the best we have to hope for in our homes -- surrounding ourselves with things that we REALLY enjoy looking at, damned if anyone else likes them?  This room still needs a lot of refining, but it's getting there.  And I LOVE that huge table that creates the office area behind the couch. (The one on the space plan that I was a little iffy about before.)  It just works for us.  And that's what HOME is all about.

I'm linking up to one of my favorite crafty parties: