Creative Juice

Okay, so you all remember my room that needed decorating, well it's almost done. And, I have been doing pretty good at just using what I've got. I got some great ideas for the creative room decor from a great book I just read. It's not a decorating book. It's a book about how to help you and your wee ones be more creative. It's called The Creative Family by Amanda Blake Soule. She has some great ideas, mostly geared toward children, but really some great things for everyone! I love that her ideas are simple and low-cost. Check it out:

One of the ideas in the book is a Nature Table. It's just a little place in the home where the kids can play with nature. She likes to center hers around the seasons, but really anything goes. At our nature table right now are a couple of seed packets-in a bucket so they can be dumped and played with-, some rocks Grace found, some books about Arizona wildflowers, a star-chart (we are taking a trip to the local planetarium next week), and The Very Hungry Caterpiller by Eric Carle. We also have this butterfly kit which has really been AMAZING and I could make an entire post just about it, but I won't. Anyway you get the idea...it can be so simple.

The Inspiration Wire. I LOVE this for me. You have all probably heard about inspiration boards, well this is the same idea-except it's a wire you can clip things to. You put things there that you find inspiring for whatever reason, to be used in later creative projects. I have totally used it to help me generate ideas for decorating my house. I really like how the wires look on the wall. Each of us (except Gibby) has a wire- Pretty!

Another of her suggestions that is so simple, but great, is to put a basket of fabric of all sorts shapes, sizes, patterns, textures where you kids have access to it. It's really fun to see what crazy things they come up with to do with the fabric: lay it out on the floor, cut it, tie it, throw it, draw on it...really fun!

She has some great suggestions for dress-ups. One of them was to have a mirror nearby-which makes complete sense, but I hadn't thought of it. My dress-ups were hanging up high completely out-of-reach. So, I moved them to the trunk shown above (which I painted ORANGE -a little crazy-not sure I really like it). And hung the mirror-which my sis made for me-thanks RicAnn!

And there's my red repurposed shelf.

Anyway, she's got a bazillion and one ideas. It's good stuff. Maybe you should check-it out.