Olioboard + a beautiful post on Christmas decorating

Today I wanted to share with you a little something I thought you might find useful.  Maybe you have heard of it but if you haven't and you like to decorate, then you probably need to know about it. When I first heard of it 6 months ago, I said to my husband, "How did I not know about this until now?!".

Introducing Olioboard...

This amazing website allows you to create "mood boards" for rooms in your house. Mood boards help you to see everything together in one place to know how colors, textures, patterns and different furniture will all play off of each other. 

Sure, you can make something like this in Photoshop or PS Elements (if you have those programs) but it could literally take you hours and hours finding and cropping all the photos you need for your design board.  Olioboard saves you the hassle and crops the backgrounds out of the images for you and even has a library of products to search that can easily be added to your board.  Also, you can have an "add to Oliboard" button on your browser's bookmark bar so when you find something at Anthropolgie.com that you want to incorporate into your mood board, you can click the add button, and voila, it's added to your account on Oliboard!  LOVE!

Here is a board I made for our art room:

If I showed you pictures of our art room I think you could see how this references the board.  That room isn't 100% finished but someday I will photograph it and show you!

This is a board I made for our master bedroom:

We haven't started in on that room yet (who knows when we will!) and my design may change along the way but I like what I have so far.

Next, I will probably do a board for our TV room.  It's dark and has low ceilings, I REALLY need to work some magic in there!  I might even solicit your help for that :)

So, check out Olioboard.  It's simple and easy to use.  I promise you will love it!


I also wanted to share with you this beautiful post from The Nester.  Sure the photos of her home are gorgeous but the heart behind the photographs is what I really love.  Nothing is ever perfect and neither are our homes. None of us have it all together and in the adjacent room to something beautifully decorated, might be spilled cheerios on the floor that I have been stepping around for two days.

I have a deep desire to be authentic in my life.  I love sharing my heart; probably to a fault.  So I hope this blog will be apart of my heart as you journey through my home.  You may see my tree that I lovingly decorated but you don't see how my kids broke an ornament the night we decorated it, I yelled and they went up to bed crying.  Sigh.

Life happens here.  Joy, sorrow, strife, peace, stress, tears... it's all here, it just might have a pretty bow on it.  So let's be real together.

See you real soon!
Rachel