Decorate for less: have your home look like Better Homes and Gardens

With a creative eye, and craft know-how, creating your own masterpieces can be done with ease. When visitors come over and see how beautiful your home is, and what you have created, they too will want all your secrets of what you have done.

Pictures and Frames

A great way to add colour to a room is pictures. The cheapest and nicest way to do this is to buy inexpensive prints that catch your eye in both patterns and colour. Prints can be bought for as little as $5. A great store to purchase your prints at are IKEA, or a store similar to that. IKEA has a huge assortment of great prints in all shapes of sizes from 4x6 to poster size. Frames are another way to add some colour to a room, since they come in a wide variety of styles and colours. To add personal touches and character to a room, buy wooden frames and paint them, or decorate them with articles yourself. A neat way to display pictures is to frame them in different sizes and styles and place on a side table. Matting can be done inexpensively by cutting out coloured bristol board. Bristol board costs less than $1, and can be easily changed to suit your decorating styles and colours.

Pillows

If you can sew in a straight line, why not sew your own throw pillows? Frequently, Wal-Mart or fabric stores have large sales on fabric. If you want a real bargain, head to a thrift staore and buy gently worn clothing or sheets to convert into pillows. Batting costs approximately $1 a bag, and that would fill 2 small or 1 medium sized throw pillow. To spruce pillows up, add decorative braiding or trim to them by glue gunning it to the finished pillow edges. Every throw pillow in my apartment, from the bed pillows to the floor pillows have been made from old clothing that I washed and sewed together. They are done in velvets in deep rich colours that add some colour and character to every room they accent. My favorite is the leopard print floor pillow which has lived through pets, children, and many slip covers to change their apperance.

Center Pieces

Center pieces make a great addition to any coffee table or kitchen table. They can also be made very inexpensively, but with taste and class. My favorite center piece cost me under $10 to make. I bought a wide shallow octagon fish bowl and filled the bottom of it with marbles. I added water, dyed with blue food colouring to make the water a deep blue, and added white floating candles. This looks elegant and expensive when the candles are lit. To set the look off, I bought two little guppy bowls for each end table and added marbles and the same deep blue water to each. Only one floating candle sits in each. Everytime that I light them I have a peaceful and relaxing enviroment, and people always ask me where I bought the kits to make them, or if I can make them for them.

Other Decorating Ideas

For items that you want such as dressers, bed frames, chairs, or anything on a big scale, the best place to look for these things are at garage sales, estate sales, auctions or thrift stores. You can pick up many quality items at these types of places that can be re-finished, painted, stained or just sanded down and altered to your liking. Chairs can easily be re-covered with a little bit of fabric and foam. And old dressers look very updated with a touch of paint and some unique stenciling. There is really no limit as to the creativity that you put into an item, and if it is something that you enjoy doing, then create away, the sky is the limit.