AfrikBoutik Blog

Stumbles for February 29, 2008

Recharge Your Home With Your Own Decorating Ideas | AfrikBoutik

Nice blog about African Art & Home Decorating.

Recharge Your Home With Your Own Decorating Ideas

A tastefully decorated home speaks volumes about your personality. It reflects your aesthetic sense and creative spirit. Decorating a home to match your personal aura may not always be a very expensive proposition. Your ideas and your ability to use small things to decorate your home can even work wonders.

The first point about home decoration begins with adopting a holistic approach. Consider your home in its entirety and not in segments. Whatever theme you choose should preferably be applicable for the entire room. Mixing of themes in one room generally does not go well. If you belong to the classical old school, go for gothic furniture, subtle colors and ornate décor. If you are absolutely modern in style, then you must be looking for new generation furniture in wrought iron or steel, dark and bold shades of color, lots of gadgets and contemporary décor to spruce up your room.

Small things like vases, murals, wall hangings, lamp shades, antique items, pictures, wall papers, mirrors and show items carry lot of importance in giving your home décor the right dimension. Vases with ornate or floral designs have unique appeal. If you have a particular theme for a room, your murals, wall papers, wall hangings and pictures must match that theme. Say, you are doing a room on an African Safari theme. Use Savannah wall papers, African masks, jungle décor, animal pictures and knick knacks, rugs looking like animal skins on the floor and lots of bamboo items here and there to create a lively jungle ambience in your room. Lamp shades always create special effects with their light and shade. If you are having a party, you can switch on to bright lights and twinkling LEDs, but when you are planning to listen to some music in a pensive mood, corner lamp stands with their mystic shades are always the perfect choice.

In order to prevent your home from getting a stale look, you must always change the room décor periodically. Rearranging the furniture, changing the cushion covers, hanging a new set of curtains, bringing in some new plants, changing the showcase artifacts and décor items and laying a new area rug are some good ideas. Removing clutter always creates additional space and breathes life into your home. This must be done regularly. Ideas are all that create the best decorated homes. The best tip in home decorating, therefore, is to continuously refurbish your idea bank and experiment on new things.

Home Decorating Tips Using Mirrors

Mirrors can significantly enhance the beauty of any room by using their light reflection properties. They can add depth to any closed space like a small room and focus any beautiful object to create a unique aura. Mirrors can illuminate spaces more brightly, and the shine on them can make even ordinary things look exotic.

Here are some good tips on how to best use mirrors to decorate your home:

Large sized, wall-to-wall mirrors can create a special ambience in your room. With ceiling-to-floor spans, you can add depth to your room. If some part of your wall is damaged like scrapping of plaster or fading away of paint due to moisture, instead of repairing it, you can place a big mirror over the damaged area. By intelligently placing a light source in front of the mirror, you can create a brightening effect in the room due to reflection of light from the surface of the mirror.

If there is some special décor item in your room, like an ornate vase, a beautiful wall hanging or some antique piece, you can place a mirror close to it and use the reflection effects to create multiple visuals across the room. The item gets extra prominence and simulates a unique appeal.

If you place a mirror on both sides of the fireplace, the span of the fireplace increases and all the objects around the room get reflected on it creating a very stimulating environment in the room. Since mirror effects are always enhanced by light, placing lights in strategic positions around the mirror can create series of reflections and brilliantly illuminate the room. You have seen how mirrors reflect light in chandeliers to simulate a royal grandeur in your room.

Peer mirrors on windows create additional depth and liven up the atmosphere in the room. You can even place small mirrors on cabinet ceilings, so that you get better visibility of the upper shelves. If you want to create the skylight effect in your living room, you can fix mirrors on the ceiling of your room and enjoy the delightful ambience.

Mirrors come in different sizes and shapes. You can use the traditional rectangular or oval versions and even go for the most modern designer and decorative versions. However, the most important thing about the mirror is the quality of glass. Highly polished and perfectly cut glasses create optimum reflection levels and add unmatched sparkle to any object. You must be sure about the quality of glass in the mirrors that you buy. There is one point of caution about mirrors. Keep children away from mirrors and glass objects, and when you are positioning mirrors in your room, you must keep them away from the reach of small children as far as possible.

If it’s about enhancing the beauty and brilliance of your home by using a natural resource like light, mirrors can be your excellent option.

Monthly Bloggers Contest

Blog about AfrikBoutik.com and Win Fantastic Prizes!

This month AfrikBoutik will be giving away a AFRICAN MASK: “Old Lawyer” (Valued at $175.00) to one of the top bloggers that will be chosen from the best blog posts.

(to see African Mask: “Old Lawyer” click here )

A Jungle In Your Home With Safari Decoration

If you are interested about creating a unique jungle ambience in your home, try safari decorating. It’s an innovative way of using jungle décor, natural items, animal prints and earthwork to give a thrilling dimension to your home. Children have lots of fun with this exotic style. It all depends on your creativity and your ideas to simulate the most close-to-natural feelings with this interesting décor in your home.

To create the jungle ambience in your home, you need plants, animal knick knacks, special lights, safari accessories, jungle paintings and lots of things made of natural items like woods, twigs, and stones. Most of these items are readily available in the market. You can begin by sprucing up the windows. Curtains, drapes, shutters and blinds have everything to do with the jungle theme. Jungle printed curtains and wooden fittings are very popular. Your painting has to be commensurate with the general jungle ambience. Dark and bold shades create the most natural and stimulating jungle backdrop. Wooden furniture, floral, fern or animal print fabric upholstery and bamboo and rattan items go very well with the jungle and safari theme.

Lights create special effects in crafting the jungle theme. Animal and plant themed lights, zebra prints lamps, control devices like dimmer can really work up a terrific jungle environment right in your home. Most of these lamps and shades are available in the market. Another important item in a safari decorating theme is a rug. Rugs shaped and colored like animal skins create natural effects. You can also try rugs with animal and plant prints in sharp, striking and contrast colors. Natural sisal mats are also a great choice for the floors.

The idea of safari is never complete without the tale of African safari. Obviously, no safari decoration is complete without a special focus on the African safari and its accessories. Use the tall grassland, Savanna concepts in doing up the safari theme. Wall papers with shades in crème and visions of the tall grasses and trees can decorate the walls. Putting some items that typically represent the typical tribal African culture like masks, headgears, ethnic dresses and ornaments can really liven up a true African safari ambience. African paintings are also another great decorating item. By positioning the articles in a creative way and using appropriate light and shade effects that is very representative of a jungle, you can have a real safari feel right in your home. Though you can do most of the work yourself, you can get the services of expert safari decorators to create a perfect jungle safari ambience in your home.

How to Get Top Quality African Art at Affordable Prices

African art, crafts, and clothing are more popular than ever in North America and Europe. People love the way genuine African items let them connect with a peaceful, thoughtful world view that is the hallmark of many African cultures.

These days headlines in the West frequently report on Africa. Millions of tourists fly, ride, and even walk all over Africa every year. Because African art is so impressive and so uplifting — while being quite affordable — visitors and tourists almost always bring art, clothing, and crafts back home with them.

Why all the interest in Africa? Africa is different. Go to just about any large African city and you’ll see what I mean. The downtown area may be populated with high rise buildings and people wearing business suits. It may not look all that different from the business districts of Chicago or Paris.

But then take a look at how people are getting to and from work. Most don’t drive, they walk, often for miles. Huge freeway-sized paths filled with thousands of people walking flow in and out of the city.

That’s often a Western visitors first clue that being born and raised in Africa helps you see the world in a dramatically different way. The more time you spend in Africa, the more you begin to appreciate the open, relaxed, thoughtful, and inspired view that permeates society. It can be a big breath of fresh air for anyone who normally lives in the hustle and bustle of LA, London, or even Albuquerque.

African art items deeply capture important aspects of the cultures in which they are created. A very skilled artisan can create an African mask, sculpture, or piece of jewelry that gives you a profound spiritual boost every time you see it.

Today you no longer have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to travel to Africa in order to get truly top quality art. Art experts living in Africa are working with Western business to establish ways to efficiently export quality art to consumers in the West.

Many of these changes happened when my long-time friend Joseph Bilson, who is an art expert in Ghana, West Africa, joined with me to figure out a way to make all the great art he was seeing in Africa available to people in the West. We soon realized we could create a web site called AfrikBoutiK.com, we put high quality photos of our art items on it, and let people purchase the art with credit cards through an e-commerce system.

Rather than convince the likes of Wal-Mart or Bloomingdales to carry the art, no doubt with a huge markup, we are able to bring Africa’s best art directly to the consumer at a dramatically lower price.

More so now than ever in history, the connective power of the Internet is making even the best art in Africa readily available to interested people all over the world.