Quizness Bizness: Defining Your Style

Today I completed Challenge #2 from Vintage Revivals' Fearlessly Finding Awesome club. If you missed them, you can also check out my posts about Challenge #5 (my DIY uniform - it involves a feral kitten) and Challenge #1 (how I want my home to feel - in a word, "quelegant").

Challenge #2 was pretty simple. Mandi Gubler directed us to visit the HomeGoods website to take a 10-question Stylescope Quiz. I don't often take online quizzes, though I used to be a big devotee of them in Seventeen and YM a few years back. Okay, maybe more than a few years back, but who's counting? I'm not, because I've lost count. Lost count of the gray hairs infiltrating my temples, that is. So, yeah, more than a few years back I used to love to take personality quizzes. It was actually pretty fun to take one again, especially because this one was quick and easy and had fun visual questions. After selecting my answers, the HomeGoods quiz gods gave me my style results:

Lisa, You Are A DRAMATIC MODERN

You keep up with culture, style, and trends, but have a classical appreciation for beautiful forms and well-made, functional objects. You are inspired by good design and quality craftsmanship, but have a sense of the theatrical and the fun. You liven things up and infuse personality into your rooms. You like how something ornate mixes with modern, or how daring flourishes, like bold color or a wild pattern, can inject some humor and contrast to the serious, straight lines of modern pieces. You are a style leader, and your friends look to you for advice. You are not afraid of glamour. Because you embrace color, art, and elegance, your home makes a happy impact.

You value creativity. You are stylish and fun loving, and can be an inspiration to others. You have a natural sense of drama, and you know you have to be willing to take risks—whether with colors, finishes, furniture choices, or ideas—for your home to stand out. Your home can be happy and lively and the place all of your friends want to be.

I think that was pretty spot on in a flattering sort of way, like any good quiz or horoscope. It definitely described what I want my home to be. There were a couple useful extra tidbits:

1. Your Design Challenge: UNIFYThe good news is, you probably have many things you love and have collected, and no one would ever say your home is boring! You've done the hard part; now you just need to pull it all together. If your furniture seems like a mish-mash, unify it through similar upholsters or slipcovers. When grouping objects, try to find something they have in common. If they share a shape, color or material, they will look like a collection. A tray is every decorator's secret weapon for making groups of small objects look purposeful and sculptural. If your accessories are all over the map, try subduing the upholstery or wall color, so your small items are the stars.

Yep. Unifying my look is definitely my big challenge, like I talked about when I made up the lovely word quelegant. Hey, it's better than elegirky, right? And:

Putting Color to Use!

Don't forget that color looks best when paired with some neutrals for a little visual relief. If you go wild on the walls or with your upholstery, pull back a little on the rugs or curtains or vice versa. Each room can definitely have its own color palette, but think of your home as a whole, with each room transitioning to the next. Some tricks: go for fairly neutral hues in hallways, or add some colors from one room into the neighboring room, even in the form of accessories or fabrics.

Pretty basic advice, but good to remember. You can head on over and take the Stylescope Quiz here. Come back and let me know what they say about you, and if you think the results are right or wrong.

Quelegant. Is that a word?

For Fearlessly Finding Awesome (FFA) Challenge #1 (yes, I''m starting over at the beginning, after completing Challenge #5 here in my pregnant-lady-in-DIY-uniform-holding-a-kitten post), Mandi from Vintage Revivals asked us to "Catch A Dream" by describing how we want our homes to feel. She pointed out it might be related to our own personality traits and the things we like about ourselves.

Before reading this challenge I had already thought quite a bit about what feeling I want my home to have, and how I would describe it. The problem is I like and appreciate a lot of different styles, and the two I like the best seem to conflict with each other. See, I want my home to be classy and elegant, but I also want it to be quirky and bright and interesting. How do I do THAT?!? My method so far is to start with a base layer (paint, flooring materials, hardware -- the permanent stuff) that is more classic or elegant, and then layer on some of my bright and quirky furniture pieces and accessories on top of that. I really don't know if it's working out. I guess it's still in progress, so we'll see.

I do know that for my own spaces I prefer light and energetic to dark and cozy. I prefer clean and sparse to crowded and detailed. And I would prefer to have a few thousand dollars to implement my vision :-) The other difficult part is that my tastes run pretty girly, and I have a husband and boys to think about here, too.

I have a hard time even finding inspiration pictures for exactly the feeling I would like to create, but here is one home I have admired for a long time. It is Summer Thornton's home, featured as a House Tour on Apartment Therapy. The kitchen, which I don't believe was pictured in the tour, was later featured in House Beautiful.

On second thought, maybe it's not such a bad thing I can't find other interiors that have what I'm going for. Maybe that's my chance to be creative and do something original. Aaaaah, sounds scary!

What feeling(s) would you like to create in your home? It's so much easier for me to say what I want my home to do than how I want it to feel. I want it to be functional. I want it to be organized. I want it to have good flow and work well for entertaining. What colors do you use in your home and how do they make you feel? I am attracted to yellow because it feels happy and energizing to me. Do you like to make up words, like quelegant? I do. Oh yes, I do.

Cat got your tongue-and-groove? My DIY Uniform

Okay, this is my post for Vintage Revivals' FFA Challenge #5, my DIY uniform.

You're supposed to be looking at the shirt, but that adorable kitten's name is Kitty Pot Pie

You might be wondering what this kitten has to do with DIY, but bear with me. It's the shirt you're supposed to notice here. I searched through all my renovation pics, and there wasn't a single one of ME. Some photographer my husband is! Seeing as my uniform is currently in the wash from recent use, I am going to have to go with an older photo that shows the main element. It's a horizontal-striped shirt that I bought when pregnant with my first child. Horizontal stripes are super-slimming on the heavily pregnant, right? I continued to wear the shirt during my second and third pregnancies, and between pregnancies as well. I'm cheap like that. I keep a fair amount of maternity clothes in my wardrobe, and refer to the state of both my closet and my body as "Permaternity" (permanent+maternity) or "Meternity" (maternity+eternity).


I was just into my third trimester with my daughter when we moved back to Utah in September 2011 and began the remodel on our townhouse, so this shirt became my go-to DIY uniform, along with some light-wash maternity jeans with the awesome stretchy Lycra tube waistband from Motherhood. I wore that outfit day in and day out for two months. I feel like this photo gives a good idea since I was heavily pregnant throughout the remodel, but the pic is actually from my first pregnancy 2007. My husband found that feral kitten for me to nurture because he felt my hormonal demands for affection too much to handle, but that's an entirely different story. Just imagine the cat replaced by a can of spray paint held lovingly to my bosom. The point here is that, nearly five years later, this shirt is all paint splotched and stretched out, and I still pull it on for DIY projects.


Has anyone else ever tried to tame a feral cat? Does anyone else wear maternity clothes when not pregnant? In my defense, I don't think this shirt originally came from the maternity section. What do you wear to DIY? Do you like my cat/DIY pun in the title? Oh, I kill me!