Summer Time and the Decorating is Easy

I love great clearance finds at Target. With back to school season right around the corner, that means summer seasonal items are now on clearance. I love perusing Target for clearance items during these seasonal switches.

Tip: for those who are not familiar with where you can find Target clearance sales, they are sometimes found in the aisles, but they are also on the back side of the aisles. Below is a diagram of what I mean by the “back side of the aisles.”

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My latest Target clearance find is this tall teal vase. It was originally $29.99 and I bought it for $14.98.

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Sometimes you can hold out on these finds and come back a few days later when the prices are marked down even lower. However, you take the risk that the item might not be there when you return.

As soon as I saw this vase, I thought it would look great on our dining room table. I really enjoy decorating the dining room table for each season and I thought this vase would look great with some late summer decor.

I picked out the vase filler below to put in our Crate and Barrel glass vases to compliment the teal vase. The filler is a mixture of floral, greenery and seashells.

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After I added the filler, our Crate and Barrel clear glass vases looked like this:
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For the teal vase, I chose a simple flower arrangement of three sunflowers, two yellow and one white. Because the vase is so tall, if you use big thick flowers you can go simple and let the flowers lean on the edge of the vase. If you want a fuller look, you could add more sunflowers and some additional greenery or filler. You could even leave the vase empty because the color will let it stand on it’s own.

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Our completed table is bright and colorful. I’m really enjoying the color combination of teal, orange, yellow gold, white and green. I love this color combination.

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Have you ever found a great item on clearance and couldn’t wait to bring it home? What’s been your favorite find?

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Home Decor Guilty Obsession #1: Crate and Barrel

It’s hasn’t been that long since I discovered Crate and Barrel and fell in love. After living in a small town for most of my life, I never came across a Crate and Barrel store. Not even in my trips to multiple big cities. Now I live only 45 minutes from Crate and Barrel and sometimes it takes serious willpower not to drive there and spend endless amounts of money. I love their modern yet comfortable furniture and their classic homewares. We have several accessories from there including vases, coasters, glass fish and picture frames. We also have kitchenwares such as beer mugs, champagne glasses, stemless martini glasses, pitcher and ice cube trays. BJ and I can go into a Crate and Barrel and spend hours just browsing the store. One of our favorite things to do is to look at all the fun toys on the kitchen gadget wall. We also browse the furniture upstairs and sit on nearly every couch in the store! Each time we go there, we usually come home with another decor piece or kitchen gadget. I would buy nearly everything in the Crate and Barrel store and that is why they made my list for Home Decor Guilty Obsessions.

Here are a few of my favorite Crate and Barrel finds:

These beautiful champagne glasses were given to us as a gift for our wedding.

The pitcher in the middle was also a wedding gift and the dark blue stemless martini glasses we found on sale during one of our visits to Crate and Barrel!

The heart-shaped bowl below was a gift from Crate and Barrel for creating our wedding registry there!
Crate and Barrel is also a great go-to place for wedding and Christmas gifts! I love buying gifts for friends and family. They also wrap the gifts in store in their fun white boxes.
There are Crate and Barrel stores all over, but my favorite one is definitely the store on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. One year, we went to Chicago to do some Christmas shopping and several of our gifts came from this very store! (It’s also down the street from where get got engaged! We went shopping there the same day BJ popped the question!)
Keep in an eye on future posts for more of my home decor guilty obsessions!