Welcome Summer With Brighter Colors
One way to cope with hot summer days is to rid rooms of heavy, wintery decor.
For example, Metropolitan Home magazine suggests freshening your beds with summery sheets of 100 percent cotton. Blue and white sheets are popular seasonal hues since they remind us of the beach.
Other tips from Metropolitan Home:
Fill a windowbox with edible herbs and flowers, and use leaves and flowers for summer salads, freshly picked from your windowbox.
Put away heavy rugs and go barefoot indoors.
Paint one wall a summery color - lemon, mint, lavender. It’s easy enough to repaint the wall in the fall.
Use a straw hamper as a summer nightstand.
Add shells and beach stones to your bathroom decor to give it an on-the-beach flavor.
Educate yourself
Does your deck look gray and dingy in the bright June sunlight? A new booklet offers tips and plenty of how-tos for restoring deck wood to an almost-new look.
“Deck Care Fast and Easy: What to Do and What to Buy” by Glenn Haege is $4.95 (plus $2.50 postage/ handling) and available from Master Handman Press, PO Box 1498, 48068; or call toll-free (888) 426-3981.
Stand back and watch
Springs Window Fashions has come up with a new battery-operated automated blind system that takes the work out of raising and lowering blinds and pleated shades.
Called AutoVue, the system operates with a remote control along with a patented actuator that incorporates a motor and microchip. The actuator fits invisibly inside a standard head-rail and will operate for up to three years on four AA-sized batteries.
AutoVue is priced at about $50 per window over the cost of nonmotorized blinds. Multiple window coverings can be operated with a single remote control. AutoVue is available on most models of Graber and Nanik blinds, pleated shades, and vertical blinds.
Color comes to the table
Brights are the trend in today’s color schemes, and they are showing up not only in furnishings and accessories, but on the dining table as well.
Lenox, not one to miss a trick, recently introduced lavender, celadon, emerald and cobalt blue to its line of stemware. “More and more, we’re seeing people using their dinner table as an expression of personal style and dressing it up with brilliant color,” says Alice Kolator, Lenox Brands entertaining and etiquette expert.
“Bold colors are everywhere … and this thirst for color translates to the dinner table. Finding ways to brighten a table is easy. If you think of a table as a little black dress, then colored stemware becomes the jewels with which to decorate.”