Teal & Lime Mood Board

In between focusing on my dining room, I am taking an e-course called Blogging Your Way. The teachers are Holly from Decor8 and Leslie from A Creative Mint. The course has been fabulous so far!  It is really opening my eyes to how I want to blog, what I want from my blog, and most importantly what I want to deliver to my readers.

As an extra credit assignment, Holly asked us to create a mood board to visually express our blog. What a fun idea.  I love doing mood boards for my room designs, so why not for my blog design? Only catch, nothing digital!  We had to step away from our computers, phones, and tablets to create a physical mood board. I am definitely guilty of technology being a crutch.  In this exercise I really loved getting back to the basics, using my hands, and making something tactile to define what I want my readers to experience digitally.  It was also great photography practice…of course I chose difficult objects like a clear french curve and a crystal prism.

I did not purchase anything for this mood board. I simply scrounged through my stash of art, craft, sewing, and party supplies. I pulled out all the bits and bobs that I instinctively love. Then with all the pieces before me, I assembled the mood board. I did not use all of the items I gathered. I carefully edited until I got to the essence of what I want Teal & Lime to be.

With a blog named Teal & Lime, you are assuming correctly I love that color combination and that it would appear in my mood board. I used some leftover scrapbook paper from my handmade business cards to make the background of my mood board. I split it in half. The teal side represents my natural self. It has order and symmetry, the colors are safer, more subdued, it represents comfort to me. The lime side represents the areas where I am growing and evolving in my design. It has more organic shapes and patterns, it has a little glamour, the colors are bold, there is a little whimsy. Together these two halves inspire my designs. Teal & Lime is a place to showcase my inspirations and the resulting designs.

Did you notice some recurring themes besides teal & lime colors?  How about stripes?  Yes, I am a sucker for pretty striped straws and washi tapes.  These are actually from my party stash and help represent my party designs I love to share.  How about buttons?  I do not like a lot of buttons, but there is something cute about them in general and I think they represent my crafty side.  I made the fabric covered buttons on the lime side.  I even have a Martha Stewart button paper punch which I used on this magnetic doll project.  Paper buttons are extra adorable.  How about those fabrics?  I am definitely inspired by fabrics.  I love simple, bold patterns.  I have even tried my own hand at designing fabrics like my Mud Puddles design on the lime side, which I created for my son’s nursery.

A fellow classmate, Elizabeth of The Mustard Ceiling, recently wrote a post about her mood board too.  I love how she extracted the colors from her mood board to facilitate a blog redesign.  I thought about doing something similar, then I remembered I kind of already have.  My color inspirations actually preceded my blog design and blog mood board when I created my whole house colors scheme and my accent color palette.  Many of those colors make an appearance on my mood board, which I think validates that I am staying true to myself with Teal & Lime.