My magic wand decorating project is almost done, I just have to finish up the piano room walls which has turned into a bigger project than originally intended.  So that one might be a while.

But in the meantime, I’m tweaking some details in the living room.  For example, I finally added something to the chalkboard that hangs over the sofa.  Here it is blank …

and if you’re interested, you can find the original post on how I made that chalkboard here.

As much as I love chalkboards, I have to admit that I’m not very good about changing up what’s drawn on them regularly.  I want to be, but somehow I always find myself looking at a chalkboard that still says “Let it Snow” at the end of August and thinking “well, I might as well leave it now, it’s going to be winter again soon.”  Is anyone else like that?

I also don’t have the patience to draw a design on a chalkboard free-hand.  So instead I fake it either by tracing something, or by using stencils to help get the outline and then filling things in by hand.

So I dug through all of my stencils and came upon a combination for this chalkboard that I thought would work.

And on the plus side, it’s not seasonal, so I can leave it this way for a while.

Once I had the stencils laid out, I used sharpened chalk to fill them in.

I use an old lip pencil sharpener to sharpen regular old white chalk.  Keeping a nice sharp point on the chalk allows me to get a good outline using the stencil.

After I pull away the stencil I go back and connect lines, fill things in, or add a few more embellishments.

I added a couple of my favorite old black & white family photos to one of the shelves too.

So now the chalkboard looks a bit more finished.

Another tweak was to add this cute little chair to the corner of the room.

I mainly use this chair as a prop in furniture photos, but I put it in this spot to get it out of my way one day and ended up rather liking it there.

Finally, I did decide that the brass reading lamp I chose didn’t work in the room.

As much as I like the way it looks, it’s really a reading lamp and we need a lamp in this spot that lights up the entire room.

For now I’ve put my old chrome lamp back in that spot, but I swapped out the shade for this fabulous Light Reading shade.  If you’re from around here, and you want your own amazing lamp shade, it looks like Light Reading will be at Junk Bonanza again this spring, so be sure to look for them there.

This lamp shade looks positively amazing with my dark grey walls, but the chrome is out of place.  I plan to try spray painting the chrome gold as soon as it’s warm enough outside to spray paint.

In the meantime, we’ll just use it ‘as is’.

In other news, I found a little time this past weekend to paint a piece of furniture and I’ll be sharing it here on Wednesday so be sure to stay tuned!