French Ethereal

Welcome to this month’s Pinterest Challenge, friends! Cindy of Country Road 407 has gathered us all together once again to celebrate the arrival of summer with a challenge using Patriotic Colors! (Don’t you just love our national flag’s red, white and blue?!!) If you are just coming over from My Family Thyme with Lynne, welcome!

OMGosh, I can’t wait to get to know Lynne!! Her style is wonderfully warm and welcoming, plus she paints gorgeous watercolors… Lynne hails from Connecticut (Go UConn!), where my parents last lived, and my youngest brother and his family still live right next door to my mother and father’s former home in Woodbury.

Jumping into our post, our Cindy found this month’s inspiration from another blogging friend Cindy from Edith & Evelyn Vintage…

There were a ton of great photographs to choose from with lots of inspiration in Cindy’s post and I just loved this faded Old Glory she shared; it really spoke to me…

Cindy also had this incredible chair in the same inspiring post:

I loooove this chair and it is really a stunner with the Americana theme boldly proclaimed in its fabric choices! Plus it’s a French chair! (What’s not to love?) So I guess I could have gone soft or bold in my color choices this time. 😉

But my personal penchant is to use the softer versions of these colors this year.

Like what’s-blooming-in-my-garden-right-now-colors…

I haven’t been writing much lately because I have been working hard in the garden. I do have an upcoming post with what’s happened since the last time I shared the garden. I’ve been planting and digging a lot on the weekends, plus visiting with my mother-in-law at her new home. She is really enjoying her new garden. We will take a trip over there this summer so you can see it, too!

Back to our patriotic basket

The past couple of years I went with our country’s bold colors in my Pinterest Challenge posts, like this outdoor patio patriotic decor post.

And this one where I created fun placemats using old jeans as the base for the placemats and pretty pockets became holders for silverware..

I do tend to hop back and forth between soft patriotic colors then bold, then right back! Here in this post, I gathered a number of patriotic ideas together, if you’d like to check them out:

Which leads me back to today’s project ~ making a softly colored Patriotic Basket to hang on your front door, set on a table as part of a tabletop display, or to hang on your garden shed like I’ve done here. 🙂

For this mont’s Pinterest Challenge, we have the freedom to create anything patriotic we want, so I thought about bringing out my French style basket and filling it with faux flowers!

Making this basket is simple:

• Add spagnum sheet moss to the bottom and sides of the wire basket.
• Place a piece of floral foam inside (or bunched up chicken wire) to support floral stems.
• Poke in soft pink faux hydrangea blossoms, along with daisy stems and lavender and cornflower-blue larkspur wands.
• Tuck in more moss, like this spring green reindeer moss, to fill up the empty spaces after you’ve added your flowers and foam.

Hang up and enjoy!

And that’s all there is to creating this basket. 🙂

I spent $0.00 on this project… right up until I needed more moss… The reindeer moss I found at our local Calloway’s Garden Center this past weekend and it cost $16.99 for a large box, which is still quite full. I will get a lot of use out of it for the price!

To make this basket more patriotic, just tuck in some little American flags! When the holiday is over, just pull the flags back out for a casual summertime door basket display.

Thanks for stopping by on the tour today! Next we swing back up to Cindy from County Road 407 and I know you will love all of her patriotic decorating ideas!! Do stop by and check out all the wonderful decor pieces our friends have put together for you.

Happy almost summertime!

Barb 🙂