Guest Room Update: Art & an Etsy coupon code!

How was your weekend? Mine was a little nuts. Apologies to anyone who tried to access www.hiddenacressc.com and got an error message. I think we're all fixed now. (I hope!) I have added domains and subdomains to this site before, but for some reason this weekend I struggled. After a frantic call to GoDaddy and hours on the computer, I think we're up and running.

Fowarding www.ecollinswriter.com is still giving me trouble, but bear with me Fixed! Oh Internet, you wild, crazy place.

Anyway, I'm super excited for this post. I posted a few pictures right after we got the furniture moved in, but the walls were still bare, so I wanted to share some of the things we hung on the walls.

Our goal for the guest room was to create a retreat where we could be surrounded by some of our favorite things. So, of course, our favorite art made it's way onto the newly painted Worldly Gray walls.

I know these pictures are super dark - this room doesn't get a lot of light on a good day, and it's been raining all week. Great for the garden - not so great for pictures. Just pretend you stopped in on a rainy afternoon, and I gave you tea before showing you around.

We like to buy a piece of art from everywhere we vacation.  We have art from St. Augustine, FL, Hawaii, Charleston, SC, Hilton Head, SC, Santa Rosa Beach FL, (we obviously have a thing for beach vacations). We have sprung for original art a few times, but for the most part we tend to buy quality art prints.

Matt's favorite painting is this one we bought in Santa Rosa, FL to celebrate the sale of our townhouse (hallelujah!). It is oil with sand and sea glass. We love how it is a painting of the ocean without being a seascape. It hangs to the left of our bed - "Matt's side."

We do try not to hang anything in direct sunlight. Since the windows of this room (guest room? master bedroom? our room...) look out onto the covered patio and face south, this room doesn't get any direct sunlight at all.

On the right of the bed, is the print of the same picture in the header for this blog. I had wanted some illustration art of Matt and I for a long time, so I ordered this illustration art for for Matt for Christmas last year from The Modern Brush on Etsy (OK, OK, it was really for me). The price includes a print as well as the digital rights which I used for our Christmas cards.

The artist is temporarily closed to catch up on orders, but you can request to get an email from Etsy when he reopens. Hopefully it will be in time to place Christmas orders!

This painting we bought in Hilton Head is probably my favorite. We were in there for just the weekend, and happened to see an art show in a parking lot. We walked around for a little bit, and this piece caught our eye. The artist, and older French gentleman, and his wife talked us through all his paintings. We liked them all, but kept coming back to this one. There is something so soothing about that ship heading towards the patch of blue sky.

Our pastor did a series on I Corinthians that landed us at chapter 13 right as we were doing our remodeling project. The sermons were so helpful and healing for me, that I listened to them over and over as I pulled nails out of bare studs. I knew that I wanted the famous love passage on the wall (if we ever got it up) and searched Etsy for the perfect print-out.

Etsy print-outs are great because they don't cost very much and can be customized to the size you want. I used them before in the You've Got Mail bridal shower I threw for my friend Beth. Etsy seems to have a hundred options for just about anything you want to print out!

In the end, I settled on this one. The artist has lots of different interesting prints, so be sure to check out her shop. The 8x10 frame comes from Pottery Barn (looks like it's on sale as of this posting!).

If you want to listen to those messages on 1 Corinthians 13, you can find them here, here, here, and here.

This final piece was suggested by Etsy algorithms (oh, Etsy, you crafty devil). I fell head over heels over it and gave it to myself as a "You Finished the Guest Room!" present.  The 11x11 frame came from Amazon.

The house in the background is a 'saltbox' house just like ours, and the woman is surrounded by sheep - something I can relate to. When we first moved out here, I felt isolated from our friends in town. I was accustomed to people gathering at our house, and suddenly we were thirty minutes from everyone, looking for a new church, and struggling to figure out the new pattern of our lives.

I was looking for ways to show love to others from our farm in spite of the geographical inconvenience. This picture captured that feeling. And where better to hang it than next to the 1 Corinthians 13 print?

The artist's name is Deborah Gregg and her shop Chicory Skies is full of beautiful prints. I, of course, am especially fond of those with sheep.

And guess what! Deborah Gregg is offering readers of Hidden Acres a special 5% off coupon code on any of her prints. It is good through September 5, so go on over to Chicory Skies Folk Art  and check it out. To save 5% enter the code hiddenacres1 at checkout.

What is hanging on your walls? Family pictures? Finger paintings? Tell us all about it in the comments!

Chicory Skies 5% discount code: hiddenacres1
Good through September 5, 2016