Top Tip - be your own stylist

Some people really are gifted with an eye that allows them to put things together in a way that simply works. All those little corners of the El Cabo house are put together just "right", aren't they? Of course, as with everything, practise improves your skills, and looking closely at the way in which things are styled in photographs will help to develop "the eye". Try some styling of your own things, using a digital camera, and you'll start looking at your little collections differently.

I always enjoy the way that Denise of the Freshly Found blog constantly uses the things around her to make lovely compositions in her Durban home. Look at what she's done with the autumn leaves picked up in her garden.

Try being your own stylist this weekend - look at the corners of your own home through a camera lens, and surprise yourself.

Top Tip - book colour

Neil Stemmet's use of the vibrant colour of National Geographics (see previous post) is such a simple and effective way to use a bookshelf as more than just a support structure.

A quick whip around the Web found me another example, this time from the Flickr page of dcfox...

...and this let me to hunt down a couple more clever ways to use books in your decor.

Happy Mundane posted about using the gold leaved pages of a book as decoration - something he spotted in an issue of Elle Decor last year.

His post about facing spines in rather than out attracted quite a lot of comment, so check it out, and see what you think.

And, of course, everyone's arranging their books according to the colours of rainbow these days. Here's the freshly-hued bookshelf of OneGoodBumblebee...

... and this is in the house of Chotda.
I imagine there's some smart lighting going on here, to make those colours stand out so brightly.

The pic below is not really decor, but it's so pretty, I just couldn't resist. Marcus Ramberg took a pic of the shelves of a printing company, where you can choose the colour of your book cover before printing.

There are heaps more of these at the Rainbow Bookshelf Flickr group, as well as an inspiring article on the subject at Colourlovers. I just wish we'd used this system when I was a school librarian - so much more fun than that pesky Dewey method.