A Little Love For My Trusty Kitchen

For a long time now, I've stared at the blank yellow and green walls and unshaded windows in my kitchen trying to come up with some way to snazz it up. By a long time, I mean three years. I had no inspiration, no cute ideas at all. Until this past week that is...

Now mind you, I am on a very tight budget so I knew that if I was going to do anything, it was going to have to be inexpensive. It all started with my Decoupage Wall Art idea which came out of nowhere. I was out in the garage and noticed the large, lonely, blank canvases that have been sitting in my garage for years, just waiting for someone to show them a little affection. I knew that I wasn't actually much of a painter but I'd been seeing a lot of decoupage crafts on different blog sites and decided that was the way to go. So that's where it all began. I bought some rugs that were on sale at Kohl's a while back that are varying shades of green, yellow and blue and liked the idea of using the canvas to tie in more of the blue (as I mentioned before, the walls are yellow and green).

Once the picture was up on the wall, I just couldn't stop. My parents gave me a few of these cute little lanterns a long time ago...

Unfortunately, the colored glass didn't match anything else, so I used acetone to remove the paint on the glass and painted them with some of the Frosted Glass paint I had left over from previous projects.

When they were finished I hung them over the kitchen sink using anchors, ooks, s hooks, and some chain that I bought at Home Depot.

Next was the window shades. We have a pretty private back yard but I always hated feeling like the neighbors behind us could see into our kitchen at night since we didn't have any window treatments. Thankfully, that's no longer an issue since Little Green Notebook had a great tutorial to Make Shades Out Of Mini Blinds. It was so cheap and easy! And my favorite part... no sewing required! Woo hoo!

Here are pictures of the finished product: