Feathered Nest Friday/Show & Tell Friday: New Goodies for the House

I'm excited to show off some new things I bought for the house, pretty cheaply, I might add. I'm all about the cheap. Or, excuse me..... I should say frugal. 
The word 'frugal' makes you sound cool, especially these days when everybody wants to look like they are 'frugal', even if they don't necessarily have to be. It seems that the pendulum is swinging back the other way now; even if you have money, you're supposed to act embarrassed about it and pretend you don't have any. I think they're afraid the poor frugal folks might come after them with pitchforks, like in an old movie about Frankenstein!  ;-)
 I'm proud to say I was frugal before it was cool, but I'd be lying if I said that if I had the money I wouldn't be spending it on high-end antiques like crazy!  Ha Ha!

But I digress...........today I'll be linking up with Cindy at My Romantic Home for Show and Tell Friday, and also with Courtney at French Country Cottage for Feathered Nest Friday.


In an earlier post this week for Met Monday (click HERE) I mentioned that I'm finally working on window treatments for the formal parlour. I also mentioned the previous owners' penchance for ugly, old cheap horizontal blinds. They were everywhere in the house when we bought it. Most of them have been removed long ago, but one was lingering in the downstairs bathroom.

I was making measurements to buy rods for the parlour windows, so I thought it was time to get something different for this window too.

This is the downstairs bathroom (which we often refer to as the guest bath). It does have a shower stall, so it is considered a 'full bath' rather than a powder room, but it's location is somewhat odd. We actually believe it might have been a butler's pantry originally.  I added the dragonflies around the mirror after we moved in, using a stamp from a set I own and some craft ink.

The pale green walls actually looked good with the light brown and cream colors of the bathroom accessories, which had actually been Erik's at his apartment.

The bath accessories (incuding a bath mat, some hand towels, tooth brush holder and this shower curtain) have a dragonfly motif. I loved the ribbon embroidered dragonflies on the shower curtain.

The dragonflies on the bath accessories gave me the idea of stamping the dragonflies on the wall around the mirror. Later I added a couple more here on this wall and also a stick-on wall decal of some wildflowers. The craft ink, dragonfly stamp and the wall decal came from Stampin' Up. I've been stamping for about 10 years now and 99% of my stamping stuff is from there.

I found this pretty valance at Bed Bath & Beyond when I was buying curtain rods. It was on clearance, so I bought it to replace the ugly blinds. I love the wildflower pattern; it goes so well with my "theme", I think.


Something else that I found at Bed, Bath & Beyond was this ultra pretty shower curtain. It was in the clearance section also for $9.00 !! I think it was because it had been opened and returned. I love my plain white textured shower curtain, but I thought it might be nice to change out the curtain for spring and summer to this:

I love the sweet ruffles along the bottom; I have some towels with white ruffles on them like that.

For $9.00 I couldn't pass it up!

A few weeks ago I happened to be in Target buying something else and of course I decided to wander into the bedding aisle, specifically the clearance section, to see if there was anything of interest. I'm always looking out for sheet sets that would go with my bedding. I like to have lots of sheet sets. I'm one of those people who change the sheets on the bed about every week and I don't like having to wash them just to put them back on. I like to rotate.  I found this duvet cover, shams and a bedskirt for our guest room at 75% off.

I loved the colors and the pattern; it was more like what I wanted for this room. I already had the cream colored sheets and cream colored shams, (plus I have about 2 or 3 other sheet sets that will match perfectly), so all I bought was the Queen size duvet cover ($20.00), a bedskirt( $7.00) and two floral shams

($10.00 ea).

This is the bedding I had in here before:

This was the bedding Erik had in his old apartment. It sort of matches the room, but I had planned for a long time to get something different for this room eventually.

I'm happy with the way it looks now:

We also have a different bed for this room, but it's on our garage. It's an iron bed that looks just like the one we have in our bedroom. This bed is actually a full size, but I have Queen size sheets on it. The bed frame in the garage is a Queen, but we don't have an extra Queen mattress or box spring which is the main reason we haven't moved the new bed in here yet. By the way, the Okinawa pillow cover is vintage. My dad was a Marine during the Vietnam War and he was stationed for awhile in Okinawa, Japan. He sent this pillow as a gift to my mom probably in 1967 before they were married. She gave it to me a few years ago.

 When I was ordering lace sheers for the parlour windows, I came across an online store for Heritage Lace and found a pretty lace runner with fringe for about $10.00.

I wanted a lace runner for the top of the piano. I also wanted a fringed one, but wasn't able to find a vintage one that was the right length and had fringe.

So even though this one isn't vintage, it's so pretty! And it was $10!! I believe this is Chantilly lace.

I love lace. (So does my cat; can you see her foot in the upper left corner of the picture? She was bound and determined to get in the picture, no matter what!)

And lastly, I didn't really decorate for Valentine's Day ( I actually don't really have much in the way of decorations), but I did hang up this sparkly lavender heart in the parlour and added some lavender ostrich feathers to my feather arrangment on the mantle.

It was such a pretty picture I used it in my mosaic blog header.

Thanks for visiting me!