Decorating – Page 19

A Look at Computer Desks for Children

Children’s use of the computer has increased tremendously. To meet the requirements of young users, manufacturers are re-designing computer desks. The main requirement of a child’s computer desk is the lower height. It should also be comfortable for the child to work on. The main aspect in designing special computer desks for children is ergonomics. Monitors should be at eye-level to reduce neck and eye strain. The keyboard and mouse should also be placed at the ideal height to make it more comfortable.

These days, computer desks are being designed in attractive colors and shapes to appeal to young users. The material used for the desk is important, as children are not usually careful about the cleanliness of the desk. Plastics or fiber is usually easier to clean than wood or glass. Cables and wires can be kept out of the way through discreet wiring systems for more safety and comfort.

Wider spaces, more space for keeping books, pencils or paper, more writing space, etc., make the desks more attractive to children. When fitted with additional drawers for books, they also help to keep the working space clean. Children’s computer desks can also be converted into tables for writing. Some computer tables are built to accommodate more than one kid; for instance, such furniture may accommodate a sibling or a friend as well. They can be made in different attractive colors to suit the rest of the room. Most modular computer tables can be disassembled and re-assembled somewhere else. They can also be moved from one place to another. As the child grows, they can be increased in height and width.

A Guide to Wine Picnic Baskets

Wine picnic baskets are just the ticket for two, four, or more people. When it’s just too nice to spend the day indoors, why not go for a hike in your garden, in the woods, along the beach, or up on a mountainside? The great outdoors beckon.

But you know you’re going to need something to keep you going. You may want food. In that case, a picnic basket is going to be all you’re going to need. You can buy one that has handles for carrying similar to a regular basket, or you can buy one that is in the form of a backpack, with shoulder straps. These picnic baskets are packed with all you need to have a fine dining experience on the grass or at a picnic table. They include plates, bowls, glassware, mugs, water thermoses, silverware, napkins, picnic blankets, cutting boards, cheese knives, and corkscrews! That way, you’ll never go hungry when you’re outside walking.

But what if you know you aren’t going to need that much food? What if you’re just taking a quick trip to the park for a few hours of lolling about, doing nothing? Are you taking a loved one or good friend with you? Maybe you’re going to need a little something to help you relax even more.

There are many types of wine picnic baskets out there. Wine picnic baskets are just big enough to keep a bottle of wine, two glasses, a corkscrew, and perhaps some space for cheese, a cheese knife, a cutting and display board, and a few extra things, which you can throw in yourself.

And if you are planning to stay out for a long time, or if there are more than just two people coming along, there are wine picnic baskets for four or more, with enough glasses for all.

A Guide To Wedding Flower Arrangements

Each wedding is unique in its essence and so are its flower arrangements. It reflects the personal preferences and style of the bride. These are some of the points about the arrangements.

Flower arrangements include everything from the bridal bouquet to the central pieces in tables. There is no guide to proper flower arrangement. Anything personal would do the trick. Flower arrangement includes everything: the flowers, the colors, the greenery and the garnish.

There are various things which can be incorporated in a flower arrangement. Small flowers can be attached to candles to create centerpieces. Flower buds can be arranged in bowls of water to be placed in the reception. Flowers can be attached to archways to indicate the entrance. The same color scheme can be followed throughout, including ribbons and beads according to mood, budget and style.

Wedding flower arrangements can be added in areas like dressing rooms, guest room tables, reception table, gift table, church door handles and so forth.

Choosing a good florist is very important. A florist whose general idea matches with the bride does tend to be more successful with last minute replacements. The choice of the bride and groom, the location, the color of the bride’s and bridesmaids’ gown- all set the mood for a particular flower arrangement. Bouquets can be of many shapes and sizes, proportionate to the size of the person carrying it.

Some of the most popular arrangements are:

Round: sometimes called a “colonial bouquet”. This type has the flowers bunched together into a tight or loose cluster and can include formal or informal arrangements.

Nosegay: A small round cluster of flowers, often not as dense as traditional round bouquets. It often includes more greenery and ribbon streamers.

Cascade: sometimes called the teardrop or waterfall, this arrangement can give a “wispy” feel. Flowers with heavy blooms are arranged with flowing foliage.

Biedermeier: A European-inspired bouquet with blossoms of different types and colors placed in a defined circular pattern.

Heart: often seen at Valentine’s Day, symbolizing love and romance. It is an alternatively shaped bouquet featuring two full, arched shapes at the top, while tapering down to a point at the bottom of the bouquet.

Single stem: While not technically a bouquet, single-stem arrangements have gained in popularity in recent years, as simplicity has become the trend. Single-stem designs generally feature a unique design element, such as an intricately wrapped stem (for a long-stemmed flower), elaborate bow, streamers, or a decorative lace bloom collar (for a shorter-stemmed flower) to give the design more interest and appeal.

Basket: flowers arranged and carried in a shallow basket and often used in a garden-like wedding setting, most often carried by young attendants.

These are the basic popular wedding flowers arrangements. They are as unique as any individual wedding.

A Guide to Wall Mural Kits

Wall murals are an easy and inexpensive way to decorate your home. They can personalize and brighten any room, and, perhaps best of all, can be done by almost anyone. Even if you feel you have no artistic talent, you can design and paint a wall mural to be proud of and show to all your guests. Look for inspiration in your favorite books, greeting cards, or art. You can also incorporate words, like favorite quotes, into your murals.

Wall mural kits have made it even easier to create a beautiful wall mural. Wall mural kits exist for almost any type of mural, big or small. The smallest kits contain stencils for room accents, like butterflies, bugs, flowers, or stars. These kits provide an easy introduction into creating wall murals because they are small and don’t require much planning. Themed wall mural kits, each with several stencils, start at around $30. Border wall mural kits are another easy way to decorate a room. They can accent furniture or woodwork and look cute painted on children’s furniture. Most border kits cost around $5.

You can also buy large wall mural kits. These kits will help you paint a mural on one large wall. The murals are usually around eight by five feet. Children’s wall mural kits are particular popular. You can find stencils with construction equipment, cowboys, castles, dance, garden, and animal themes, for instance. Large wall mural kits cost around $30. Many of the large wall mural kits also have matching accessory kits, like a wall border or dresser knobs.

Parents wave how much their children love the murals they created using wall mural kits. Adult wall mural kits are a bit harder to find and more difficult to do, for the most part. Children’s wall murals can look like cartoons, but adult wall murals are generally subtler and take more artistic talent. You can, however, borrow aspects of children’s wall mural kits for in your own home, or use the kits to create a rustic, homey feel.

A Guide to Tropical Wall Murals

Popular tropical wall murals create the illusion of paradise in your home. They can bring sunshine and warmth into a room with no windows or help stave off the winter blues. You can incorporate a tropical scene into your room by painting windows framing a white-sanded tropical beach. You can paint a giant palm tree growing from you floor, with colorful parrots perched in the trees. You can have a sea and water theme, with sandy beaches painted near your ceiling, and water filled with beautifully bright tropical fishes below.

Tropical wall murals can be difficult to lay out and paint because, to make the scene look lifelike, you’ll need to use perspective and complex coloring to capture light and shadow. To start easy, you can incorporate small tropical elements throughout the room, like small fish darting out from behind a couch, a palm tree in the stretching on one wall with colorful butterflies flying around it. You could buy a tropical print, hang it above your couch, and then paint crisp white shutters around the print so that you now have a fantastic view of the beach from your living room.

Online retailers sell various tropical wall mural stencil kits. They send you a stencil you trace to transfer to your wall, and then you paint by numbers. These kits cost between $40 and $150.

Most professional mural painters have done tropical wall murals. Commissioning an artist to paint your tropical mural will save you time, but not money. Depending on the size and complexity of the mural, you can expect to pay between $30 and $100 per square foot of the mural.

A Guide To Silk Palm Trees

The best way to create a truly magical, tropical, and exotic setting is by adding beautiful palm trees to it. Unique in their beauty, palm trees can transform any place, multiplying its beauty and exoticness within seconds. However, to plant tropical palm trees and take care of them can be cumbersome. Hence, life-looking, exact replicas of palms are available in silk which can be bought, assembled, and kept indefinitely without any hassles or pain.

Research shows that silk palm trees are among the most popular silk trees. As such, they come in plenty of sizes, shapes, and types. Multitudes of companies exist that are dedicated to producing silk bamboo trees.

Some companies that produce excellent-quality, beautiful silk palm trees include Silk Tree House, Inc, Indoor Tropical Foliage, Silk Trees, Silk Plants Plus, Silk Plant Design Center, Kinkade Studios, Earthflora, Valentine Floral Creations, Autumn Foliages, Brands on Sale, Andreas, Inc, Your Silk Garden, Silk Worx by Lori, Silk Reflections, Silk Plant Jungle, Seasonal Impact, Oasis Illusions, Hillcrest Mill, BotanicusEtc, Amazon Foliages, and Northwest Supply, among others. Shipping normally includes an additional fee, but companies such as BotanicusEtc, among others, ship their trees for free.

Different silk palms like areca palm, cycus palm, parlor silk palm, bamboo silk palm, kentia palm, real wood date palm, phoenix palm, Buddha palm, and many, many more are all available at the aforementioned companies, ranging in size from small to giant.

Northwest Supply, Office Scapes Direct, Amazon Foliages, Seasonal Impact, Brands on Sale, Kinkade Studios, and Save on Crafts are some companies that provide discounts and hence, offer quality trees with huge savings.

All trees come in non-decorative baskets or containers, but some even include a decorative container or pot without charging any extra fee.

Companies usually provide a hundred percent guarantee, but some like Hillcrest Mill, BotanicusEtc, and Office Scapes Direct offer a full refund if trees fail to match up to the expectations and returned within a specified time period.

A Guide to Recliner Slip Covers

Your recliner has been a faithful and loyal friend. You’ve spent many hours sitting in it, reclining in it, resting in it. You can’t even count the number of times you’ve fallen asleep in your recliner while watching television. It has been part of the family. When you were down, it silently offered a bit of comfort. Now, you fear you’ll have to part with it. It has gotten old and out-of-date. Its fabric is no longer bright and beautiful. Plus, you’ve redecorated the living room and the recliner sticks out like a sore thumb! Oh sure, it still feels good, but its looks leave a lot to be desired. Don’t worry; you do not have to get rid of your old friend. Just renovate it. Make the old new again. Buy a new recliner slipcover.

Recliner slipcovers are fabrics specially cut and sewn to fit over reclining chairs. They simply fit snugly over your existing material to give you a whole new look. It’s like an instant facelift for the entire room. Visitors will not even know you’ve covered your chair—it will look like a whole new recliner!

Recliner slipcovers generally cost under $100 – or much less if you find one on sale or at a discount store. That’s merely a fraction of the cost of a whole new recliner.

When shopping for recliner slipcovers, pay careful attention to the material. Your recliner gets a lot of use, and it needs a fabric that can handle that. It also moves and bends a lot, so the material must be able to withstand that. Stretch denim, cable knit, velour, chenille, and most elasticized fabrics are good choices.

If your recliner feels great but looks terrible, don’t buy a new one. Consider a recliner slipcover instead. This way, you get a “new” recliner, without the new recliner price.

A Guide To Outdoor Lighting

With the evolution of lighting technology, outdoor lighting has seen its share of breakthroughs. Outdoor lighting is as important as indoor lighting. Lighting up the spaces immediately outside or surrounding our living areas is extremely vital for visual orientation, safety while navigating, and security, as well as for balancing out the indoor ambience. The outdoor milieu prepares and provides a preview to the life and living style within the four walls. Outdoor lighting is equally important in reflecting the external persona of a structure and its surrounding area. It sets a particular mood and provides a visual treat.

Outdoor lighting presents enormous scope for experimentation. It’s a virgin canvas waiting to be colored by unique lighting approaches, ideas and techniques. Outdoor lighting spaces comprise the areas surrounding the structure, pathways, swimming pools or fountains, landscape surrounding the structure, patios, balconies, decks, porches, etc.

There are a variety of options on the market, including low-voltage lighting, flood lights, tree lights, post lights, lanterns, string bulbs for festive occasions, recessed lighting, scoops, pagoda-style louvered faced lights which granite finish that easily blend without door environs, and even solar lights devoid of wires and operating on NiCad batteries.

Various techniques of lighting can be used in outdoor lighting. Spot lighting, which focuses light on architectural features, may be positioned to minimize glare and focus fully on the focal point. Silhouetting is placing the light sources behind the object to bring out the shape of the object rather than the exact color and texture. Key light or shadowing requires placing the light source directly in front of the object of interest to create a light and shadow effect. Moonlighting requires a fixture to be placed on the trees and aiming it down to provide a natural peaceful moonlit effect. Deck lighting, grazing (light focuses on the object at a sharp angle) and washing the surface (light focuses on objects at a wider or blunt angle), step lighting, walkway lighting, pond and fountain lighting, and sign lighting are some of the various techniques used for outdoor lighting.

In outdoor lighting, a basic thing that has to be kept in mind is that the lighting fixtures are exposed to all the elements outside. In case of lighting water features, the light source is sometimes from the inside to create a magical glittering and rippling effect. Therefore, appropriate lighting fixtures and lights should be chosen. Self-lighting kits of low voltage are also available for those who wish to try out their creative lighting talents.

A Guide to Outdoor Gas Fireplaces

Imagine that you are sitting in your backyard on a cool, breezy night. You’re sipping hot tea and looking at the stars. The sound of crickets chirping and frogs croaking is nature’s symphony. The scent of jasmine is in the air. It’s the perfect night—almost. It is a tad cold, the air a bit too nippy. If only there was a way to heat your outdoor space the way you do your home. Thanks to outdoor gas fireplaces, you can.

Outdoor gas fireplaces can range from rustic simplicity to elegant extravagance. They can be free-standing or built-in structures. A built-in fireplace can be the centerpiece of an elaborate outdoor living area. These fireplaces are designed by landscape architects or designers. Some are built by pool and spa professionals. Made of bricks and mortar, they can feature any design elements you might desire. They can be a part of an outdoor kitchen or near the pool. Many people are using outdoor gas fireplaces to make their pools and hot tubs more useful year-round. In cool months, they can sit on the deck and enjoy hot chocolate and roasted marshmallows by the fire. Others create an elaborate backyard oasis, complete with palm trees and veranda—with the fireplace an intricate part of the design.

On the flip side are the smaller, less expensive portable models. Pacific Products, for example, offers a portable outdoor gas fireplace. This lightweight fireplace can be easily transported on camping trips, to tailgate parties, or simply to your backyard deck.

Chimineas are another form of outdoor fireplaces. While these are not technically gas fireplaces, some can use natural gas inserts.

Target and Sears both offer a selection of low-cost outdoor fireplaces. These are small, portable models. You might also want to check your local retail, department, and garden supplies stores.

Montigo is another source for outdoor gas fireplaces. An internet search for “outdoor gas fireplace” will uncover even more resources.

A Guide to Natural Gas Fireplaces

Many people long for a simpler time, for hours spent with the family, happy just to be together. People long for a quieter time as well, time to sit and think and read, time to be. Somehow, for many people a fireplace represents all of those things and more. A fireplace evokes a feeling of home, family, security, and warmth. People imagine their family and friends gathered around a fireplace, smiling and laughing.

Despite this, most people just do not have the time or the patience to maintain a wood-burning fireplace. That involves chopping or buying wood, storing wood, and starting the fire. Long after the fire is just a distant memory, you still have the ash and soot to clean up. Most people just don’t have the time, patience, energy, or desire for all of that work. That’s where natural gas fireplaces come in.

Natural gas fireplaces are available in styles ranging from traditional to contemporary. They can be found in a wide variety of colors, such as cherry, mahogany, oak, pine, white, antique white, black, and designer colors. Some natural gas fireplaces are used primarily for decoration, although they do produce a small amount of heat. Others, though, can be used as a primary heat source.

Fireplaces are available as direct vent, which must be installed near a gas line and vent through the wall behind the fireplace. Direct vent fireplaces do not require a chimney. Natural vented fireplaces must also be installed near a gas line and they are vented through the roof. Ventless or vent free natural gas fireplaces can be installed most anywhere as they do not require venting. You must be careful in buying a ventless fireplace, though, because they are illegal in some areas and have specific rules in others. If you do decide to purchase a ventless natural gas fireplace, you must follow precautions to prevent dangerous gases circulating throughout the home.