Mailbag: How I Decorate, Purge, & Stay Organized

I got some fun questions last week from Jenny over on Facebook:

Woo, that's a lot to cover! Ha! I get variations on all these questions every year after my House Tour, though, so since I'm feeling chatty, how 'bout I tackle some? I'll even sprinkle in photos from around the house to keep it interesting.

Let's start with:

Clutter vs Display

I admit it: I love clutter. I love surrounding myself with STUFF. I like the hominess and warmth of personal collections, and I like having areas filled with treasures for people to discover as they roam the house.

I also love antiquing. YEAH I SAID IT.

So. How do you keep all your beloved stuff from devolving into thrift store madness? A few tips:

- Start by putting everything you want to display on the dining room table. Yes, everything! You need to see what you've got to work with. Then clear off all the surfaces you want to decorate, so you can start with a blank slate.

I do this every year for Christmas decorations. Packing my everyday decor away for 4-6 weeks helps me see it with fresh eyes again come January.

- Work in vignettes. Don't tackle the whole room at once; start with a table top. A mantle. A book shelf. Select one or two "big" things from your cache on the table - things you really love and want to display- then build up around them with smaller, more generic items (candles, plants, etc).

- Collections need a theme. "Stuff I like"is NOT a theme. Arrange things by color, type, material, etc. Don't scatter all your Pop figures around the room, put them in one place! Have a favorite color? Arrange a table in it like I did here, using all golds and brass:

- Odd numbers are key. Always group things in 3s and 5s. Don't ask me why, it just looks better.

- Remember your height and (visual) weight. When I'm stuck, I look at the heights of what's in front of me. Mix 'em up. Add some highs and lows! And if you have a high skinny thing on one side, put a short squat thing on the other side to balance it out:

So I Tried One Of Those Cheap Lens Kits For Your Phone...

Ever since I realized my iPhone 6 can rival my Canon 7D in picture quality, I've been leaving the Canon home more and more. And since I lurrrve fish-eye photos, I decided to try one of those snap-on lens kits for your phone:

This is the set I bought about 6 months ago, though my clips look different - I guess they've already updated them? Anyway, it's less than $15 over on Amazon. Like I said: CHEAP. It has 3 lenses: fisheye, wide-angle, and a macro, but for me the fisheye is the fun one.

Embarrassingly enough, I actually have a nice fisheye lens for my real camera, but I can't for the life of me figure it out. The settings are hard, all my compositions feel wrong, and overall I just felt like an idiot with it, so I gave up.

But a phone is easy. No settings to worry about, easy to experiment with, and for less than $15, why not, right?

So I've been putting this dinky little fisheye through its paces out at Disney and Universal over the past few months, and having a blast. Here's a sampling of some of my favorite shots, all taken with the lens on my iPhone:

It doesn't have the extreme fisheye distortion you can get with a "real" lens, but this is still enough to give the same feel. For best results, get your phone right on top of something in the foreground, to really warp and stretch the composition.

If you stand back, you'll get something more like this:

Which is really more of a wide-angle, very little distortion.

That can be awesome sometimes, though, like with the dragon:

Thanks to the fisheye I can get the buildings leaning into frame, which looks awesome!

You can also get so much more of these incredible ceilings in the shot: