Café Design

Decorating Consultations

Create Academy | How to Make Beautiful Curtains by Gemma Moulton 

Disclosure:  This post is sponsored by Create Academy and contains affiliate links. As always, all opinions are honest and my own.

If you’ve been following Café Design for some time, then you know how much I love Create Academy and their course offerings so, when they reached out to ask whether I was interested in taking a few of their classes and share my opinions with you, I leaped at the chance. Taking a Create Academy class feels like chatting with incredibly talented friends who are willing to share their wealth of knowledge and experience with you, and are cheering you on as you discover your inner crafter and decorator. Today I’d like to share my thoughts on a relatively recent class added to Create Academy ’s Arts and Crafts curriculum  – How to Make Beautiful Curtains, by Gemma Moulton. Gemma is a prolific curtain-maker and owner of East London Cloth, a workroom specializing in bespoke window treatments and soft furnishings.

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Small Victories

Good morning! It’s spring break in our neck of the woods which means I have my girl and our borrowed (and incredibly mischievous ) pup with me all day this week, and my productivity reached record lows. I had a home tour in mind for today’s blog post but instead I’ll be content to show you my victory moment so far this week – the house was clean, quiet and still for a minute (it rarely is) and I had fresh flowers from the supermarket to document it…

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  Hanging Wallpaper – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly 

Many of you were curious and reached out through comments, emails and private messages here and on Instagram after I shared glimpses into our dining room wallpaper hanging process last month – Thank you! – so I thought it would be interesting to share my experience in a blog post, in case you were considering a similar project in your home. I am by no means an expert, far from it, but the results were pretty great for a first try… Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links.

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Book Review | Deborah Needleman – The Perfectly Imperfect Home

Former editor in chief of WSJ and The New York Times Style Magazine and founding editor-in-chief of Domino, Deborah Needleman needs no introduction on my part. Her creativity and editorial talent have left a considerable mark in the design world, while her books on the art of decorating – The Perfectly Imperfect Home: How to Decorate and Live Well and Domino – The Book of Decorating – have become design classics. Published more than a decade ago, The Perfectly Imperfect Home is a collection of principles distilled throughout Needleman’s successful career as an editor. Although not a decorator herself, Needleman’s astute observations and impeccable taste (no doubt honed by looking at thousands of pictures of beautiful rooms) are as real as they are insightful.  Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate we earn a commission on all qualifying purchases. Thank you!

Deborah Needleman book on decorating; The Perfectly Imperfect Home, illustrated by Virginia Johnson;
Illustrations by Virginia Johnson
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Wallpaper & A Big Thank You!

Originally I had something else planned for today’s story but I changed my mind halfway trough writing that post and instead, I’d like to take a moment and thank you all for your sweet messages the other day.  Your kind comments, here and on Instagram, your DMs and emails after Wednesday’s post have left me speechless… Thank you all so much! Your thoughtful words and encouragement have made my week, and they mean more to me than you’ll ever know. You’re the best! And for those of you who are interested, here’s how the wallpaper installation is going so far. (If you’re just tuning in – we shared the evolution of our cottage style dining room in this post, and are now in the process of installing a vintage wallpaper above the wainscoting. )

Cafe Design Home: cottage dining room
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