Shelfie Series

Today I am kicking off a series called — Shelfies — showing you how I styled my shelves recently.  The first room is my ladies lounge.  It’s the front room when you walk into my house.  I think it was probably used as the dining room by the previous owner, but I’ve used it as a sitting area.  It’s the perfect room for ladies to talk while the men are in the family room.  I also like to use it as a quiet reading room, while Mr. Bee is watching his war movies.

I cleared everything off and dusted each shelf so I could start with a blank canvas.   There is no right or wrong way to style your shelves.  It’s personal preference.  I do a little at a time, step back and look at it, and do a continuous edit throughout the process.  I set aside an entire Saturday to do this.  I worked a little at a time, walked away when I felt overwhelmed and came back later to start again.  Be creative with your book placement. The books don’t have to be all stacked up like a book store.

A simple trick is to style by color scheme.  You will see on the bottom shelf in the photo below I put mostly blue and green books together, with a dish of small, green apples and a large green glass vase.  By taking off the covers to your books, you can find some beautiful color schemes to work with.  Put the covers away in a safe place if you want to put them back on your books later.  To balance the bottom self, I repeated the green a few shelves above it, then again with the light green photo album propped up on the second shelf.

In this photo, I wanted to highlight the colors of the conch shells — corals, pinks, oranges (the missing book..Mr. Bee is reading cover-to-cover Mastering Art of French Cooking).  Use artwork on your shelves too, propped up as a backdrop.  I made the shadow box of butterflies which are actually push pins.

Overall, I was trying to achieve a look that when you see the shelf at first glance, your eyes travels in a nature curve downward — not stopping at any one point on the shelf.  Each shelf is balanced starting with the orange vase on shelf one, spiraling down to the silver bowl of shells on shelf two, and skimming through the clear vase on shelf three, to the silver grouping on shelf four, down to the green vase on the bottom shelf.  I like “white” space so your eye has time to rest.

You want your shelves to tell a story.  Many of these things are what remind me of Earnie.  Seashells, butterflies, the cross, my little white Bible I received in nursing school, her photo with Daddy.  The best part, I didn’t go out and buy anything.  I just used what I had around the house.

What do your shelves say about you?