09 April, 2013

Crafty reading: Sense of style. Colour

I'm moving to a new appartment in a few months time and as it happens I'm going to have figure out how to decorate lot more space than I've ever had for just myself. This has resulted into lot of reading decorating books and magazines, googling a ton of sofas and pinning my ass of all things decorating and furniture. Laiter you'll probably get to see some parts of that kinda big decorating project I'll be overtaking, but for now you'll probably just get some reviews of decorating books and things like that. Like this one.

Don't worry, this blog won't be just about decorating now and there will be posts about other things too. This is just something that is an important thing in my life right now.



Sense of Style. Colour

Author: Shannon Fricke
Publisher: Murdoch Books (2006)

Finnish edition: Väreillä kodikasta
Publisher: WSOY (2010)

What is it about:

 If I needed to condense this book to one centence, I'd say it's a book to teach you how to use color intuitively in decorating. To elaborate more, Shannon Fricke has written a practical yet not rule and colorchart based book that helps you to find inspiration for finding the right colorpalet for your own decorating projects.

Fricke's aproach is rather philosophical and she does start the book by instructing how to concentrate and draw color inspiration from anything you see around you. From here she continues to by going through many different colors, how they have inspired her, how different shades of each color work, how to combine them and where each color fits best.

In the last part of the book Fricke gives more practical instructions on how to actually work the color into your personal home design. She goes through furniture, textiles and ornaments and how to use color in all of them. And yes, in the end she does also briefly go through the more traditional way of working with color, the color circle.

Fricke gives instructions how you can draw inspiration from all kinds of things, including fashion.

What I liked:

This was a really nice book to read. Fricke had a nice flow in her writing and even tough I wasn't reading this during an active decorating project, it gave good base to start figuring out what kind of color palet I'd live to have in my new home. I also think that a very important part of the book was the fact that Fricke did stress through out the book that choosing the colors and designing the home is a proces and you can't and shouldn't try to do it all at once.

Oh, and I absolutely loved the illustrations in this book. It was great that they weren't just pictures of different interiors but many of them (mainly in the color section of the book) were inspiration boards and gave a good idea how you can drow color ideas from objects that are not nesessarely related to decorating.


What I didn't like: 

Here and there the text was slightly too vague for my taste. I liked how Fricke wrote about her own learning experiences but here and there I did miss a slightly more bread aproach to things.

The one thing I didn't quite like about the layout were captions. It was rather frustrating to be forced to flip the book sideways on almost every opening to read them. They were rather interesting captions too, so I think it would have been way more reader friendly to put them horisontal and not vertical.

I might be biased as a green lover, but this page on the right is my absolute favorite in the whole book and the lower right corner asian picture something from which I'm plannign to pull colors from to my new home.

Final verdict: 

This it a nice book to help you (or me) on the way to finding the color palet that works for you and your space. It doesn't give straight answers but pushes you to figure things out on your own and to develope your personal sence of color. So this book is definitely not for quick answers but a nice tool to have helping you along the way to better decoration.


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Olen muuttamassa uuteen kotiin parin kuukauden päästä ja koska uudessa kodissa on paljon enemmän tilaa, kuin yhdessäkään aikaisemmassa kodissa, niin paljon on tarvetta suunnitella ja ideoida uutta lehtien, kirjojen ja Pinterestin avulla. Siksipä täällä blogissakin näkyy nyt ennen muuttoa joitakin inspiraation hakuun liittyviä juttuja ja sitten muuton jälkeen varmasti ainakin joitain sisustusjuttuja. Vaan pelko pois, ei tästä pelkkä sisustusblogi ole tulossa.

Väri-inspiraatiota hain kirjastosta lainatusta kirjasta Väreillä kodikasta, jonka on kirjoittanut Shannon Fricke. Kirjassa Fricke on filosofisella otteella neuvoo, miten erilaisista asioista voidan hakea inspiraatiota sisustuksen värimaailmaan. Eri väreistä esitellään erilaisia sävyjä sekä sitä, miten ja missä tiloissa niitä voidaan toimivimmin käyttää. Lisäksi Fricke opastaa, miten kodin sisustusta on hyvä lähteä rakentamaan kerroksittain erityisesti värejä silmällä pitäen.

Pidin kirjasta kovasti ja sitä oli mukava lukea ihan vaan lukemisen vuoksi. Ainakin minusta sekä teksti että kuvat olivat inspiroivia ja hauskaa oli, etteivät kuvat olleet ainoastaan kuvia erilaisista sisustuksista. Tämä kirja toimisi varmasti mainiona tukena koko sisustusprosessin aijan.

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