Color Capture

Benjamin Moore release their Color Collection 2014 and in it where some pretty new shades of green that put me back on the hunt for the color for guest room 2. This room is staying our junk room for now, but my Papa Bear is officially moving down to Charleston in December and bringing an extra bed for our guest room with him. I figured it's time to get the ball rolling so when the bed arrives we can throw the bedding on it and call it a done deal!
Back to Ben Moore though. So as I was trolling their website I noticed they had a note about an app called Color Capture. Say What!?! In essence you take a pic with your phone and then the app will match a color in the picture to a bm shade. So cool. Also where was this app about 3 months ago when I was in the thick of trying to pick paint colors!

Screen face of Color Capture app. The best part is that its free! 

You just take a photo and poof! I would recommend taking a photo on with the camera and then uploading it to the CC app. Otherwise if you leave the screen, you loose your original image. However, once you have picked one you can save it and use different categories.  

This is also the illusive Home Goods palm pillow. I'm building everything in guest room 2 around this pillow, but of course could only find one. Its actually a Tommy Bahama fabric, and lucky for me Jo-Ann's carries it! I plan on putting the single pillow on the bed, then getting extra fabric to make a couple of chair cushions. Guest room 2 is as big as our master so there is going to be plenty of room for some seating. 

This app is so cool. It picks the shade then gives you several that are close. You can move the shade picker around to get the different light and dark tones. 

So adding the new color CC found for me along with one I found from the 2014 newbies, I have a total of 5 paint samples for this one room. Three of them were nixed weeks ago for being to dark. 

The reject shades. Still pretty, but they would be the darkest in the house. I'm going for soft shades with undertones of grey to keep the house consistent and MLW and I agreed that these would be to much of an exclamation point. 

The new shades wet, the left is the CC apps pick "Spring Break" and the right is my pick "Van Alen Green."

And dry. This room gets most of its light in the morning and this was taken at mid-afternoon. I'm excited to see what they look like in better sun! 

After holding the pillow up against them, MLW and I are torn. I think I'm leaning towards Van Alen and MLW just wants to be on Spring Break.  Spring Break is still pretty dark to me so I'm not convinced just yet. I don't know if we are quite ready to paint again just yet so I might sit with these two samples and see how I feel about them in a few days. They are definitely muuuch better than the original 3 shades though. 

Oh yeah, then I found this book while taking MLW birthday bookshop shopping. Seriously. I needed this book. It was nice that a lot of the colors I picked are in here though. And its fun to flip through so the book came home. One day we will look back and reminisce about picking paint colors, right? 

Love ya'll! 

X Bench Redo

I've got another DYI for ya'll. This time we moved it into the master bed room. Our master is huuuuge, and our queen size bed looked like it was floating in the middle of the room. I've been obsessed with a good x-bench for a long time and figured that a pair would be perfect at the foot of the bed. But once again, the benches I loved came at a hefty price. Then I found this on SMP living. How perfect! I checked stock at my local Target and they had two, so first thing the next day I went and swooped them up. One was a little janky so I asked the cashier for a discount and *poof* 15% off.
They have been sitting around patiently waiting for their turn in the dyi circuit and last night I decided it was time.

So here are the benches in all their pleather glory. But, at about $80 bucks each, they were way less expensive than any other x bench option I could find.

The tools of the trade. I'm all about a no-sew project. I can't cut a straight line to save my life, so the batting was there to help me clean up my edges. 

SMP has a great tutorial on their page, but I wanted to prove that even us average girls can conquer this project. The first step was to remove the screws that attached the seat to the "x" part of the bench. 

Ernie, thought this part was really cool. 

Like the SMP redo, I wanted to add more height to the original bench seat. I got a 2 inch foam at Hancock's Fabric and traced around it with an exacto knife. I got really lucky as only one side of the foam needed a trim. 

Ernie helped me by removing the excess. 

And proceeded to tear it into shreds while Maybe watched.

I next sprayed a good coat of spray adhesive onto the foam. Definitely take this step outside as the surrounding area can get very tacky. 

I cut my batting to size and stapled it around the seat making sure the batting was smooth and tight all the way around. 

Flip it over and viola! Starting to look like a fluffier cushion. 

My fabric of choice. Everything in the room is looking a little blue, but we are about to switch over to our white winter bedding and that will break the color up. 

Repeat the stapling step the same as with the batting and there you go! 

Next step was to reattach the x part and things were starting to look good. The SMP called for spray painting the legs, but the jury is still out on that. The legs actually match our closet doors and other furniture pretty darn perfect so I think I will leave them for now. Who knows though. I'm currently having a love affair with gold spray paint so they could head that direction too. 

The finished bench and original side by side. I really like the added height of the seat cushion. Gives the bench a little more umph and weight in such a large room. 

Of course this project was not without its hiccups. I ran out of fabric. Yep, thats right. I got one bench done and realized I didn't have enough to cover all the sides. One emergency phone call to my Mom later though and I think I've secured another yard of fabric. Woo! Project Saved. 

I'm hoping to get both done soon though. MLW and I seem to be doing projects about 60% and then moving on to something else. It is making our house a little bit of a disaster zone, so I'm really looking forward to checking some projects off as 100%. 

Anyone else have a DYI project they only made it halfway through? 

Happy Fall!