Choose Your Ugly {A simple and cheap way to tie miss-matched furnishings together}

Alright, I thought I'd just take a moment and apologize for the LONG absence we took from our blog. Aside from all petty excuses (moving twice for me, Michelle loosing her camera... etc) we do realize that we made it pretty close to a YEAR of no posts on our blog. And that is why we have this blog more for fun than for business. Just to share the moments we get to craft and beautify amidst our busy mommying days.
Forgive us? Good. Because we're back and ready to blog away on some fun things we've been doing/ making.

>>Anyway
We got a few furniture items from people to help us out when we got married and when we moved. And since this isn't the time in our lives to be buying expensive new furniture, we took what we could get!
Red couch from Craigslist= $30.00 gift from my parents:

A turquoise recliner from my parent's neighbors who were getting rid of it:

And some throw pillows that we got from our wedding:

Then there was this rug we bought with a bonus from work for like $70.00 from Walmart. It was tan with green and brown leafs on it.

And as you can see they were all pretty mismatched and had nothing to do with each other. Except maybe that the rug and pillows both had leafs on them.
So what came to my mind was something I learned in my first sewing class in college:

I don't know if that's an official term, but that's what my teacher called it. It's where you choose the colors you want to use for a project (like the picture above has some bright green, yellow, blue, and pink squares. and then it has a piece of fabric that has all those colors together to tie them in. Like choosing two fabrics you love and then one that ties them together that might not be the best fabric by itself, but looks great in a small quantity for the purpose of making the end product look great :)
So I applied it to my situation. Here I had all these different colors and patterns to work with that would go in my living room and I had the challenge to bring them together with one great piece. I chose pillows. I'd make pillow covers for the red pillows that would have every color in it (Red, tan/ brown, and turquoise). And this is what I found:

I followed the pillow slip cover tutorial that Michelle posted at the beginning of our blog, and this is what the pillows looked like in our living room:

It worked ok, except my husband complained about the fabric all the time ("it's grandma fabric") and the leaf pillows ended up looking better in our room on our bed, AND we got a new rug because of a sale ($30.00 for an area rug, hall runner and door mat). The rug became our new "ugly" as it tied everything together even better than the pillow cover.

(camera changes colors a bit...)
And the pillow covers I made went away because they clashed with the rug (too busy looking)

So I made some new pillow covers that were plainer and just helped the rug fit in that much more. It was a off white pattered fabric and I used a different Tutorial for make the slip cover this time (Five minuet cushion). (I'll do another post on that later).
And this was the end result of our living room :)

I'm going to frame that mirror and post about that sometime too.

Plus we recieved some tan and turquoise curtains that helped the overall look as well. So you don't have to buy brand new furniture sets and fancy decorations to make a room have a beautiful color scheme, Use the quilting trick and save some money!