What’s Hot for Spring

It feels like spring here in the South, thanks to temperatures in the 70’s!  Winters are short here in Tennessee, but the arrival of spring is still much appreciated.  Today I saw buds on one of our trees and heard birdies chirping (before the rain sent them packing).  It won’t be long before we find out if the dogwood we planted last year survived the winter.  Our beloved pink flowering tree died the year before and by the time we realized it really wasn’t coming back, it was the heat of summer.  Dave dug around it, chopped the big roots, and proudly strapped the stump to his car and drove it across the yard until he ripped the stump out of the ground.  Then it was perfectly primed for a new tree, once the high temperatures gave way to fall.

I had been dreaming about a dogwood tree for that spot.  I kept seeing little ones at home centers but we’d learned that impulse buys on trees just for convenience generally left us with a tiny twig of a tree.  Home Depot is brilliant at marketing trees.  There they are in a tall pot and then on top of a tall platform, and is easy to mistake a toddler-sized tree for a big tree because of the brilliant presentation.  We’d made this mistake enough times to decide to go to a nursery and get a bigger tree, no matter how inconvenient it was to haul it home in the car with three kids.

But, we bit the bullet and bought a man-sized dogwood at a nursery, and hauled it home on a borrowed trailer (thanks, Jan).  The only problem was that local nurseries here don’t seem to have the one-year guarantees like Home Depot, which scares me, and we planted it in October.  The leaves fell off shortly after planting it, along with the leaves on all the other deciduous trees nationwide, so we don’t know yet if our dear tree is alive or not yet.  Rest assured, we have prayed for our tree.

I’m hoping to give you good news soon.

In other news, I’m seeing two of my favorite colors in decor everywhere and I LOVE the look!  Pink is everywhere and so is gold or brass.  I love pink because it sometimes acts like a cheery neutral if it’s light and a bold accent color if it’s bright.  The pink that’s especially in style right now is a softer pink, which people are calling “blush” or “millennial pink”.  I just bought a pillow at Pottery Barn in this color that I added to the pillows on our couch, and I love it!  The picture below is from Pottery Barn’s website, because our living room is too messy with tax prep to photograph it right now.

Pink in vintage Turkish rugs is another of my favorite things. (We got these at Essy’s Rug Gallery in Franklin).

 

Rugs in the kitchen are wonderful.  At first, we thought they were impractical so we were just planning to use them for our magazine photo shoot last spring.  But once we took them away, we missed the softness of walking on them and felt a lot was missing without them.  We vacuum them or shake them out whenever we vacuum, and they resist stains.  We just wipe off anything we spill with a baby wipe and that’s usually enough to get rid of it (when our kids spilled frozen blueberries, stepped on them, and then left them for a few days, we had to use a rug spot-cleaner instead).

Note: we discovered, when our oldest was born in 2006, that unscented Costco baby wipes are the most useful cleaning tool in the entire world.  I still use them to spot-clean everything from our couch’s slipcover to avoid having to wash it all the time to rugs, finished wood, unfinished wood, the table, floor, brass, clothing, flea market finds, etc, even though our youngest has been out of diapers for years.

Here’s some more pink as well as some brass in our master bedroom:

And a brass tray plus pink milk glass in the coffee area:

Here’s a cheery scene at the dining room table with lots of pink and a few small touches of gold:

This little vignette was in our bedroom for a long time.  I love the small gold flowers on the pink milk glass vase plus the black and white oil painting.  You can’t see it well in the picture, but the frame on the painting has a line of gold on it too.

Happy Spring, everyone!