Elevate Your Mood, Board
A fun and inspiring mood board adds instant interest and spontaneity to a room. Let’s dig into how a mood or inspiration board not only does wonders for you creatively but also is impactful as an art piece in your home or office.
Have you been bitten by the mood board bug yet?
I gotta say, the mood board by my desk in our home office is a great source of experimentation, planning, dreaming, imagination, and a true sort of visual brain dump for color and neutrals and things I love and things I think I might like but want to continue to percolate on for a bit. I try to be good about changing all the visuals on my board once a month but it seems some months I’m adding things often and discarding others, continually. The cool thing about it is it ebbs and flows and there are absolutely no rules and you can do a mood board in January and not change a thing until the next January if you please. For me, its very exhilarating to see something in a magazine or catalog and run to my board with the page in hand, knowing I’ll be enjoying that specific inspiration daily.
My board is to the right of my desk on a wall beside a window. Coming from the dining room through the kitchen my mood board is in the direct sight line so that’s one of the reasons I like changing it up often. The board I have is from Ballard Designs (check out a few current styles from Ballard Designs here) and its about eight or so years old. I’ve been contemplating recovering it with different fabric and adding a white or black frame around it just to give my eye a bit of refresh. Simple projects like this are easy and fun.
Along with the board itself, which you can procure in so many different looks, come the super fun push pins available to hang your chosen items on your board!!! The push pins are more exciting in my mind than the actual board!! Is that just me?? I’m currently using gold Fleur de Lis push pins, also from Ballard from a few years ago. There are so many cute and fun options available.. bees, flowers, Chinoiserie, dragonflies, rhinestones and so many more! Mix and match them for a custom look!
There are many ways to design your board ….all black and white or all color or a combo. Tons of texture or zero texture. It’s also fun to put up paint or fabric swatches like designers do to see what strikes your fancy if your mulling a room refresh. We refreshed our bedroom and living room in March and April and my mood board served as great vehicle to causally study paint colors and fabric textures as we plotted our vision for each room. I sometimes put up photos of opposite seasons gardens or fashions or food so I can lovingly anticipate and connect with what is to come, and to foster ideas about how to innovate lifestyle ideas for my business for that upcoming season. If you are in a position to do so, I encourage you to move your board to different rooms every now and then. Let it serve as a rotating art piece. Seeing your board in a new room with new eye candy applied will delight you, I promise.
If you’d like to embrace a mood/vision/inspiration board but have no idea how to get started, Pinterest has lots of great advice and photos of boards in action IRL and of course you can use your preferred search engine to research all manner of mood/vision/inspiration board questions you might have. The what’s and why’s of the content of your mood board is very personal, as it should be. Start ripping out pages and create a collection of magazine and catalog photos and mementos you can hang up…name tags from events, a napkin with a cool logo from a great restaurant you visited on your last out of town trip, newspaper articles (YES, some folks like me still love actual newspapers), and I hang up jewelry – necklaces and earrings on a card that put a twinkle in my eye. Whatever sparks your fire and can be hung up with a push pin is total goals.
So friends, If you’re in the mood and would like to peruse a few board styles, take a look at this, or this or this or this one or what about this? Hopefully you’re inspired to get a mood board going or if you have one, and say, you haven’t cycled in new stuff in a while, this post will motivate you. A mood board is the very best art as it’s the art you created yourself with things that move you, get you thinking and bring you joy. And I think we all agree we can never have enough of that.
Enjoy the everyday magic,
Laura
