designing for yourself is the hardest job
There’s honestly nothing I love more than when someone asks me to help them with a wedding suite, a child’s birthday party invitation, or create printed artwork for their home. I really enjoy the structure of design for a corporate world, but there’s nothing quite like flexing your creative muscle. These “personal” jobs allow me to crack open a wide palette of colors, patterns and textures. Requests are usually very broad and flexible, with a client saying something along the lines of “do whatever you think is best!”
A few months ago, I threw a Welcome Home party for my newly adopted nephew, and I was so overwhelmed with the bright colors and patterns I wanted to include that I ended up designing all of the materials with the theme “rainbow”.
So why is it that when I am faced with an utterly blank canvas (a room with flat paint that is named – I kid you not – “Agreeable Gray”) in my own home, I am too paralyzed to make a choice? I’d always thought designing a nursery would be my dream, and as it turns out, it IS a dream, so long as it’s someone else’s nursery.
I started thinking of a nursery plan shortly after finding out our baby was a girl. I’m not a fan of pastels and soft pink, so I stuck with what I know best – bright colors. Luckily for me, I found a fabric that I absolutely fell in love with on Spoonflower, and that guided most of my choices. I drew the color palette from that and quickly after found a perfect stencil for the walls that looks like hand drawn diamonds.
Over time, I ended up letting my own taste guide me. The room has no theme, it’s simply things that I love, with bold and colorful patterns layered on top of one another. And of course, one simply can’t have a nursery without letters on the wall, can they? I commissioned these wire topiary frames from a welder on Etsy and spray painted them gold for a cool, modern twist.