Before or After?

When does a trend go from interesting to just plain silly? 

With another three inches of snow having fallen this morning on top of about one to two inches every day for the last week, I'm feeling more and more cabin bound and spending more and more time on the internet looking at blogs. 

I'd never looked at a blog until about a year ago.  I was working full time and didn't even have a working computer at home and certainly didn't have time at my job as an on-site community manager of a large homeowners association in Scottsdale, Arizona, to spend any time on the internet, let alone blogging.  But, as a retiree, and once I got a replacement computer at the Salvation Army in Boulder last April, I started exploring. 

Like many women, I'm drawn to any web site or blog related to interior design or decorating.  There are several trends in decorating right now that women (there may be men doing this, but I've not run across any of their blogs) seem to be just blindly following to the extreme.  One is painted furniture.  When I first started noticing it, I kind of liked it.  Some women providing tutorials on their blogs seem to do it well, but others, who seem to be extremely proud of their results, are just ruining nice pieces of furniture and, in some cases, entire rooms of gorgeous paneling.  I often have to look twice to make sure which is the "before" shot and which the "after," since the "after" looks so dreadful.

I don't know if this started with Rachel Ashwell's original Shabby Chic look, which used lots of white and pale pastels, but it seems to have been taken to the extreme in Belgium and/or France.  There are entire magazines devoted to what I'm calling the "White Movement."  In some cases it appears that homeowners have simply taken a spray gun and white paint and painted everything in their home white, not just the walls and ceilings and furniture, but all the accessories.  It really looks goofy.  There are some magazines, blogs and web sites, emulating the trend, in which everything is so pale you can't even read the type.

Another trend is numbering household decor.  I haven't picked up on the source of this, but many of these ideas seem to start with items found at French flea markets, called brocantes, if you aren't a follower.  I don't know why the actual vintage European items are numbered.  When it first started, a little bit of it was cute.  Now people are willy-nilly painting numbers on everything in the house without much thought to the font used or the style of the furniture.

Then there's the feed sack and burlap thing.  Lordy!  Again, it was cute when it first appeared and I think the use of burlap is probably a result of the current economy because it's cheap.  But, there seem to be different grades of burlap and the cheap kind many people are using bears no resemblance to some of the more eye-catching examples I'm seeing on line.  Having grown up on a farm, I can tell you that snuggling up to pillows wrapped in real burlap bags would not be fun.  The use of imported linen feed sacks for throw pillows and table runners is rampant and still cute, although I'm not fond of either the common red or blue stripes, but if they are real vintage European feed sacks they are not cheap.  I had been thinking of using burlap to enclose my bunk area in the cabin and perhaps even using it to help weatherproof the south wall of the cabin, but I'm having second thoughts.

Then there's the skirting thing.  People are removing cabinet doors in perfectly new, beautiful kitchen cabinets and replacing them with gathered fabric skirts to get that vintage look.  Again, sometimes it's done in a way that looks natural, but then more and more people hop on the band wagon and do it poorly and even if you had considered doing it (because the doors on a cupboard in this old cabin are so warped they won't stay shut), you start backing off.

As a tie-in to this rant, it appears to me that in blogland protocol, if you can't be a real "Go, girl," rah rah supporter--"It's really ugly, but you tried"--you're probably not supposed to say anything at all, hence no "credits" and no pictures in this blog.   However, I have been wondering if I might be able to use one of the latest on-line fads, Pinterest.  Pin your interests, get it?  You start an account and every time you see a photo of something that catches your eye, you pin it or post it so everyone can see what catches your eye as if anyone cared what catches your eye.  So far, I haven't seen anyone pinning things they disliked.  I wonder if I could start a new trend?  Teddee