Pro Braided
Pro Braided
Several Easy Steps to Decorating Your Home Like a Pro
You’ve moved into your new home, unpacked the boxes, arranged and rearranged the furniture, hung a few things on the walls. Hmmm. You know, or think you know how you want your rooms to feel but can’t get from the builder white walls and your old stuff to that wonderful comfy inviting look you got when you were in the model of the home you purchased?
Before you panic and true anxiety sets in know there are more easy solutions at your fingertips than ever before. There are decorator magazines, home decorating shows, web sites, retailers, great books with very good instructions. Visiting model homes again will help. “Okay, ” you say, “I see them, I buy them, I visit them, I like them, but how do I do it? I don’t know where to begin.”
Start with one room you love in a magazine or model home. We’ll call it your dream room. If you can go to the model home to feel and study the space or the room you will get the best results. Ask if you may take pictures in the models too. This will help when you get home and when you shop. Take a tape measure and a spiral notebook with you to make notes and draw sketches. I like the ones with plastic tabs and pockets inside.
Let’s start decorating by seeing what we like.
Are all the walls the same color and the ceiling too? What color(s) is the room? Write this down. Is there a chair rail or decorative molding at the ceiling, wall covering or faux painting? What is on the floor? Is there tile, wood, carpet, area rugs? What color and texture and pattern? Is the area rug braided or a Persian rug or a contemporary design diagonally placed partly under one of the chairs and sofa?
What style is the furniture? Is it all a matching set? Do all the woods match? Maybe the sofa and club chairs are the same style and wood finish but the chairs have a patterned upholstery and the sofa is a solid or striped fabric. Write this down.
How is the furniture arranged? Does the sofa sit in the middle of the room separating the conversation area from the game table, or is all the furniture pushed up against the walls? Draw a little floor plan so you don’t forget when you get home.
The windows. Are there blinds, shutters, a valence or draperies? Are the rods large or small, wood or metal with huge finials? Make a note of it. If there are panels at each side of the window, do they go all the way to the floor? What color are they? Do they match the walls or are they the same fabric as the toss pillows on the sofa? Is it the drapery hold back that catches your eye? You will have to consider the exposure and privacy out your own windows when you make your final window treatment selection.
The pizzazz is the accessories. This is often what many people love most about the model homes or magazine pictures that inspire them. The details, the little things we all love to collect and buy when we shop. This is what pulls the room together and gives it your personality. In the room you love, what kind of lamps are there? Is there a place to store the things you will need to put away? Are there several things grouped on the coffee table? What sizes are they? Is there something pretty tall, a large round platter set on a stand and a box all grouped together? If there are photographs on the end tables, how big are they and how does the frame style work with everything else in the room?
What is on the walls? Is there one large picture over the sofa or is there an arrangement of black and white photos in different size frames? What color is the matting and how much space from the photo to the frame? Details, details, details. Draw a sketch of the picture arrangement and the sizes in your notebook.
Congratulations. You have just completed the first step to decorating your own home.
You know what you want, how it goes together and what it will look like. You don’t have to break the bank now to create your room. You probably already have the furniture pieces and accessories. You may already have the lamps and area rug as well. You may just have to recreate and rearrange.
Get started. Go to the paint store and select the paint chips you think best match your dream room. Grab several samples, color can be deceiving and they can look different depending on the light. Take them back to the model home and see which ones match the best. Buy the paint and paint the room.
Your window treatment. If you copy your dream room exactly make sure you have the right privacy and exposure considerations covered. This is where a lot of people go astray. They think they like shutters and buy them. Then they don’t like them and also wonder how their dream room went wrong. Your dream room may have been more airy with a shade and drapery panels on large wood poles. The wrong blinds, shutters or draperies and hardware can be a costly mistake that you probably won’t change.
Arrange your furniture for conversation, TV watching, family fun, reading, eating or homework keeping in mind your dream room. Was all the furniture lined up on one side of the room? Your sofa may be the wrong color and your chairs may need to be redone. That doesn’t mean you have to buy all new; consider slipcovers. You can buy them or make them. Be sure your accessories are things you want around you and are of a grand enough scale for your space. Voila! You’re on your way to decorating confidence and living in the home that makes you and your family happy.
About the Author
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Soap Shoes
Soap Shoes are shoes made for grinding. They were introduced by Chris Morris of Artemis Innovations Inc. with the brand name “Soap” in 1997 and simultaneously invented a new extreme sport based on Aggressive Inline Skating. They have a plastic concavity in the sole, which allows the wearer to grind on objects such as pipes, handrails, and stone ledges. The company and their product rapidly gained popularity through numerous fansites, a video game, and live demonstrations across North America and Europe soon after, but fell to legal vulnerabilities and was readministrated twice, eventually bringing the brand to Heeling Sports Limited. The act of grinding on rails and ledges specifically using soap shoes has been dubbed “soaping,” with the “soaper” being the one performing said act.
upf”>http://www.himfr.com/buy-upf_shirt/”>upf shirtSoap shoes were essentially derived from rollerblades and aggressive skating. Chris Morris, a resident of California who worked at RollerBlade in Torrance for over sixteen years, envisioned a shoe that could “grind” when designer and coworker Dave Edmond proposed a “what if” question regarding the matter. They quickly worked to customize a simple shoe that had a grind plate embedded in the sole; it was an average Nike, fitted for sliding. Morris immediately tested it upon completion, fell on his rear, and contacted his patent attorney. Next, Concept 21 (a recently founded design firm) was called upon to design a sample so that the product could be finalized. Alongside marketing partner Pat Parnell, they then formed Artemis Innovations, which would be the company the brand would be sold under for four years. In 2001, Mr. Morris lost control of the Soap license through legal problems. Activity within the company slowed down, and eventually the remaining executives sold Soap.
In-Stride, a company whose target market was primarily wrestling gear, purchased Soap. The company’s industrial focus made some believe In-Stride wouldn’t be able to properly manage Soap, and keep the brand’s focus in its original place. It is still debated whether In-Stride ever designed or released any Soap shoes, although evidence does suggest that they were responsible for a couple models that did not have grindplates. In-Stride went bankrupt in late 2002, and Soap was once again available for purchase.
Heeling Sports Limited, the company behind the shoes with a wheel in the sole known as Heelys, realized that the grindplate could be very profitable when paired with their wheel, and acquired Soap later that year. In early 2003, six new Soap shoes were released, each in multiple color schemes; simultaneously, HSL was designing hybrid shoes to sell under the Heelys brand. HSL has been criticized for releasing too many new models at a single time, and not supplying requested stock to retailers frequently enough. Since HSL’s debut play on Soap, desire for a more distinguishable variety of shoes has been expressed by the fans; five of the six models included the same fixed grindplate and had the same sole design. Two of the six were actually the same shoe, but sold in different color schemes and with different names. There is one model still in production from the first generation released by HSL, the Soap Express.
The sport never caught on to the mass market in comparison to, for instance, skateboarding, but the brand “Soap” does have a professional team mostly consisting of pro inline skaters. Soap’s heyday was in the late 90′s and early 2000′s, when competing crews from across America and Europe were releasing internet videos on a regular basis, spurring a dedicated, albeit small, online community of “Soapers”. However since then most of the crews have disbanded along with the website forums, and now there are only pockets of proponents of this marginal extreme discipline around the globe. A revival of sorts was noticed in early 2006 as more people were attracted to Soaping, and HSL responded by re-releasing their Express model in limited quantities. Soap shoes continue to sluggishly regain popularity, although not without difficulty due to Heelys using grindplates in addition to their wheels.
Soap shoes can go hand-in-hand with freestyle walking to form lines or multiple tricks strung together. An example would be landing into a royale and grinding, finishing the trick with a 360 Method out. It is one of the few land-based extreme sports that can be easily practiced in both dry and wet conditions.
There are two schools of thought for basic frontside/backside grinding with Soap Shoes; the first using the leading leg (your right foot if you are goofy and vice versa for regular) as the leg you leap off, landing with your back foot on the rail/ledge/etc. first and subsequently placing your leading foot on moments later. The second technique is to leap off your trailing leg and place your leading foot on the rail/ledge/etc. first following it with your trailing foot moments later. You can also endeavour to land both feet simultaneously on the rail.
There is little advantage from one technique to the other; leading leg first often yields more speed but this is at the expense of control, and abandoning a trick if your trail leg fails to lock onto the obstacle proves difficult without risking injury, as your leading leg will be sliding away from you. On the other hand, the trail leg first technique is much more controlled and safer in the event of poor execution, but speed is sacrificed.
The technique used is mostly based on preference due to your natural bias. e.g. a right footed person who is of regular stance (the most common combination) will find it far easier to leap off their left foot and land with their right foot on the rail first using the trailing leg technique outlined above.
Soap Shoes were featured in the videogame Sonic Adventure 2, developed by Sonic Team USA in San Francisco. This game presented many billboards, blimps, and benches advertising the shoes; also, Sonic wore a custom version of the Scorcher shoe exclusively in that game, while the darker character Shadow wears hybrid jet hoverskate/grind shoes, as grinding (or “soaping”) is an important gameplay element in the game. Grinding is now a core element of recent Sonic games, though now he sports his original trademark shoes. This is because after In-Stride bought control of Soap, no actions were taken dealing with the continuation of the partnership, and neither has HSL. However in two episodes of the anime Sonic X, Sonic’s Soap shoes are brought in to give him an advantage over his enemies.
About the Author
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