Blue is so much more than a mood!

~Shades of Blue~

I love all of them....and if you walk into my house, there is an element of that color in almost every room. When I was a young girl we moved around frequently with my dad's job. To ease the adjustment, my parents would let us chose the color to paint our new room. My choice was always blue. As I got older that color preference has stayed with me and despite a brief dalliance with green, all my bedrooms have been blue.

If you read my blog, you saw this picture in my Mother's Day wishes. After our renovation, my bedroom is now my favorite place in the house...although the one in which the least amount of time is spent in it! The linen curtains are a pale blue that I matched to an entertainment center that I designed and my artist friend Jennifer built. We were stripping old black shutters to make the doors and after a couple of hours we had gotten it down to a shade of gray. We decided to just prime over it and this lovely shade of pale blue was the result. 

I found this beautiful blue sink at the tile store and used this to pop blue into our Bathroom. This and the bedroom were the only rooms that we had to gut and redo when we moved in. I had the builder mount these sinks on an old farm table that they cut down to fit into this spot and I love the way it turned out!

This is the tile that I chose to match the blue sinks for the shower. We have a great old fireplace in the bathroom of all places! To help bring down the cost my artist friend Jennifer painted the pattern of the tiles on the fireplace surround.

Love the way this brought together the patterns and brought a pop of blue into the room! The "painted" tiles look as if they are the real deal.

All of my son's bedrooms have blue running through them in some way, shape or form (by their design) but the pictures will have to wait for another day when they are clean enough to photograph...I hope I am still blogging then!

To me, blue brings the beauty of the outside in. I often use greens with the blues to give a feel of the contrast of a bright blue sky with lush green grass.

In my dining room there is this fabulous fish pond...yes, I did say a fish pond! The room was added on in the 1920's and at that time it was very fashionable to have a water feature in a formal room of the house where there were windows. This would allow the sun that came through the windows to heat the water and create a humid environment. This environment was perfect to grow your orchids (also very fashionable at the time) as they would sit on or hang above the tile of the fish pond. When we moved in, we nixed the fish pond and the orchids due to 4 boys who thought swimming in the dining room was a novel idea. Sorry to digress, but I love that historical little tidbit of info! So instead of orchids, I placed objects that brought the inside out around the fish pond and combined rich shades of blue, green and chocolate brown together.

For those of you who know me, along with a penchant for stationary and paper items which I have already disclosed...I have an even stronger penchant for dishes. The now blue and brown dining room was the perfect place for displaying the blue and brown china that I have been collecting from yard sales, barn sales and antique stores.

In the kitchen we retiled the back splash with a neutral earth tone natural stone as well as the floor. The cabinetry was a lovely cherry that I wanted to keep but my artist friend Jennifer (here she is again) painted and distressed a few select cabinets a deep blue and creme to make them pop out. I found these hand printed silk screened garden tiles at the same fabulous tile store (Devon Tile) and had them installed over the wet bar sink. In doing just a couple of beautiful tiles it kept the cost down significantly.

With a few paper mache' balls from Ikea in a glass bowl, the scene is complete.

Don't you just LOVE the way the moonlight is coming through this night sky and down through the trees as the leaves are falling from the branches? This photo does not do this picture justice but it is an oil painting by an artist in Canada, Yan Eric Cote'. Yan has perfectly captured the movement of the trees and how they splay their branches up into the sky. The vision is as if you were lying on your back and staring up at the moon. We fell in love with this artist's work when we were up in Canada on vacation with the kids. 

Thank you for indulging my love of blue! Do you have a color that you love? I would love to hear about it!