Rachel Stuart-Haas' cheap and easy DIYs: Flickr Focus of the Week
Shreveport "artist and mama" Rachel Stuart-Haas, whose outrageously colorful homes have been the subject of Yahoo Homes' debut Flickr Focus of the Week, was kind enough to share with us a couple of cheap and easy do-it-yourself projects.
Our favorite is her copper circle wall in the mudroom ("I LOVE having a mudroom!" she says), because it gives that elegantly slapdash "oh this old thing?" look that some people pull off so effortlessly, while others among us (OK, I'm talking about myself here) just manage to achieve the look of, let's be honest, a sloppy old thing.
Here's what she told us by email:
"I really wanted wallpaper in that room, but that seemed $$ and like a big commitment.
"So I had an extra tube of this copper paint, and one day I just decided to paint circles all over to mimic wallpaper.
"I really love how it turned out. And you don't have to be a great artist to do it! The messier and imperfect the circles, the better."
Her other project is just a little bit more involved:
"I took a pic of some roses by a lake and uploaded it to my computer. I used Photoshop (but any other photo program should work) and played with the correction, light, and contrast till I got several bright images I liked. I printed them out on 11x17 paper and stuck them in a frame.
"Insta-art!"
Stay tuned tomorrow for our last Flickr Focus of the Week installment starring Rachel Stuart-Haas. We'll take a much closer look at some of her daring paint choices.
Here are our previous installments:
• Monday: Audacious color defines this artist's home
• Tuesday: Amassing a 'slow collection' of art
• Wednesday: Rachel reveals her most unusual trick for a special home (it involves friendly 'theft')
More about Yahoo Homes' new Flickr Focus of the Week feature
Each week, we're going to select one Flickr user's home, work and/or project to feature on all five weekdays. Loosely, our plan is to start with a broad slideshow on Monday, then take slightly deeper dives into specific aspects of the Flickr user's photos on the successive weekdays.
We'd love your feedback and suggestions as this work in progress evolves. You can email us at yahoohomes@yahoo-inc.com. Or, if your questions are specific to one week's focus, leave questions and suggestions at the bottom of the blog posts. Yahoo Homes promises to keep a close eye on the comments section -- and sometimes, the person whose home or work we're featuring will also participate in the comments to answer your questions, too.
For future installments, we very much welcome your submissions at http://bit.ly/yahoohomesflickr. Toot your own horn or someone else's! This would be a fantastic opportunity to spread the word about a designer, contractor (before-and-after pictures would be fabulous), home stager, blogger, even perhaps real estate agent (maybe one who specializes in period properties?) -- anyone who does creative home-related work that can be illustrated in photographs. Just go to http://bit.ly/yahoohomesflickr to join Yahoo Homes' Flickr group and share photos; that's where we pull our photos from.
