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.
Decorating | Comment (0)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.
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