New Valences

Check it out! Chuck and Ladonna came up last weekend for a visit, and Ladonna did a day-long sewing stint to make two new valences for us. Kind Ladonna! Skilled Ladonna! Here she is, cutting out the fabric for our guest bedroom valence.

Ladonna, seamstressing

And here are the results. This is the pièce de résistance , the valence for the master bath. It's silk. Embroidered silk at that, from the charming boutique fabric store in Austin, Silk Road. And it has a tassel! It makes the room look so much more finished and together now that you can't see the fact that the shutters don't actually reach to the top of the windows. I think she did a lovely job.

Master bathroom valence

And then upstairs we installed this uber-minimalist panel in brown peau de soie (doublespeak for "polyester") with desaturated aqua flowers. I really like the simplicity and cleanness here.

Guest bedroom valence

At the moment, the window is partially covered by a piece of crepe paper, but one of these days (or possibly one of those days--those days in the far-off and vaguely perceived distance), we'll buy some cellular shades like the ones in our bedroom to go behind the valence. Note, please, that the crepe paper matches the flowers in the valence. These things don't come about by accident, my friends. It's all part of living to the manner born. (Product placement: I've been buying my blinds from justblinds.com--so far they've been fairly inexpensive, fast, and of good quality. Very happy about that. [To the corporate headquarters at JustBlinds: will cheerfully accept small consideration in exchange for this endorsement at any time. Don't be shy.])

Blinds-to-be

And a bit of Lagniappe
Photoshop has a new, free online photo editing application called Photoshop Express. I mention this because (1) it's Photoshop (sort of), yet free, and there are those among my acquaintances who might find that compelling, and (2) it has this cool feature called "color pop" that I expect you'll be seeing more of in entries to come. Ooo, trendy!

Our pink mystery rose with "color pop" filter applied. We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

Note, however, that it turned all my freckles grey. Ew. Not all images are well-suited to color pop.