At Home Helps You Get Ready to Celebrate the Arrival of Summer

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At Home is a specialty retailer of home decor products with over 50,000 unique items, including furniture, garden, home textiles, housewares, patio, rugs, seasonal decor, tabletop décor, and wall decor. This means they specialize in pretty much everything you need for your home decor or party planning projects.

I’d never heard of At Home until recently, when a store opened in my area. When they say they’re a superstore, they’re not kidding! I easily spent two hours in the store on my first trip and I feel like I only saw half the store. I need to go back for a better look sometime when I have a babysitter for the day.

My goal for my first trip was to purchase items to use during the summer months. I wanted to have family and friends over to visit outside on my patio, which my husband and I are slowly trying to fix up.

If your patio furniture needs an update, At Home has an amazing selection of outdoor cushions and pillows, as well as patio umbrellas to provide shade. Mixing and matching the patterns is such a fun way to give my plain metal furniture a new look. They’re a little more money than what I was expecting, but the overall quality can’t be beat. When I invited friends over to visit outside, I couldn’t believe how comfy my old furniture was with the new cushions. We easily could have sat outside all day, had it not started raining and forced us inside! (I grabbed the watercolor flower pillows to take inside, since they’re nicer than my current couch pillows.)

My favorite thing I purchased during my trip was a metal folding side table with a pretty scroll pattern (shown in the second and third pictures on the bottom row of the above collage). It’s intended for outdoor use, but actually blends fairly well with my inside decor too. This is a great table for entertaining because it’s just the right size for storing snacks or games and activities. If you need baskets to keep everything organized, the white plastic basket shown on the tray table was just over $5 and is very sturdy.

At Home has a several oversized drink dispensers to choose from. These are very handy when you have lots of kids in your home, since you don’t need to worry about children spilling heavy jugs of juice or bottles of soda when they try to pour themselves a drink. I wanted one for entertaining, but I like it so much that I’m using it everyday now. (I fill it up with lemonade or fruit infused water and leave it in the refrigerator.)

Visit the At Home website to review their online merchandise selection and to find a store in your area.

Disclaimer: A gift card was provided by the manufacturer for the purpose of preparing this review.

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I have not done a lot of big cross stitch projects, but sometimes even with small projects it can be hard to decide exactly where to begin and how to work through the chart if you’re working with multiple colors. The general categories for the possible methods are known as cross country and parking.

Cross country means that you’re working one color at a time, moving around the chart (or the section of the chart you’re working on) until you’re done with that color. Parking means you’re working in a smaller section and doing all the colors in that area, “parking” the threads by leaving them attached to the canvas but out of the way while you finish each section.

Royal Rows is a specific way of parking named by Alison Royal, which is explored in detail on a post on Stitching Daily.

The idea is that you’re working one “tower” of stitches at a time (she uses a section of 10 stitches across by 20 down, but you can do whatever makes sense to you). You work all the stitches of a color at a time, starting at the top left and working your way down. When you’re done with a color you can park it where needed in the section below your current tower (known as the dungeon) or in the “east tower,” which is the section to the right.

There’s also a specific way of dealing with thread ends when you’re done with a color. This is a super simplified version (head to the blog post at Stitching Daily to get all the details) but the basic idea is that you’re working from left to right and top to bottom across the work, parking the threads in the next section when you’re done with them and systematically choosing which color to work with next.

The whole idea of parking is kind of overwhelming to me though I will admit that it makes a lot of sense. I guess I need to try it on a smallish big project and see how it goes. Do you use the parking method of cross stitch? I’d love to hear about it!

[Photo via Stitching Daily]

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