Paging Martha Stewart

We're having a lot of fun fixing up the guest room and getting ready for Naplover and Bean to visit. Unfortunately, I am only heterozygous for the Martha Steward gene--I like arranging things and making them look pretty, but I am not so big on cleaning. So, while I arrange the orchids, the dust bunnies are roaming freely under the furniture (Sorry, no picture of the dust bunnies, they're kind of shy.)

We have a slightly Japanese theme going on, but we didn't feel like we could justify a new set of bedding when we have three complete sets for this bed alone! (We don't really have any sets of bedding for our own bed, the queen-sized one.) So, unless Target has a nice bed-in-a-bag (or, even cuter, the WHOLE room-in-a-bag, with curtains and sometimes even little throw pillows) on sale sometime soon, this is what the bed will look like.



We discovered that we have an amazing quantity of Japanese (or at least Orientalist) knick-knacks.

Despite four college degrees between us, it still took us over an hour to put up the blinds. The instructions were pretty poor, and they were only in English, so we couldn't even check the other languages for clarification (Does anyone else do this? Sometimes the German or French instructions have DIFFERENT mistakes, so you can glean more information from them. I bet if I could read Japanese many directions would become much clearer.) I think these directions were written in Lolcatese, the language of the Laughing Out Loud Cats. I am sure the cats would have been laughing if they could have seen us, especially when Derek fell off the ladder (he's fine, and he even managed to avoid falling on the blinds.) Stupid humans. Cat's are so much more coordinated!

Once we moved all of the junk out and still-full boxes out of the room, we realized it looked a little bare. Since priceless Japanese art was not in the budget, we tried to improvise some wall decorations.



These two "prints" are actually framed furoshikis, which wrapped up gifts that my brother and his sweet Japanese American girlfriend sent us. Here is a picture of the two of them:

Then I went to the local scrapbooking store, Bloomin' Scrapbooks, to look for pretty paper. (Unfortunately, the Bloomingtonaut was not able to join me in my quest, since she is slaving away on the last few tiny revisions to her dissertation. Hurray for the Doctors Bloomingtonaut!) Here is what I found, for less than a dollar each: