She Sells Sea Shells...

I have always loved beach-themed bedrooms and bathrooms - they are so calm and relaxing.   

My husband's sister has a beach house in Mexico, right on the Sea of Cortez, and we were lucky enough to be able to spend Thanksgiving there.  It was so beautiful and so much fun!

We came home with sunburns and waaay too many shells! Haha :)  I had to come up with some clever ways to display them, or they would just end up sitting in a box somewhere.

I am in the process of redoing my guest bathroom and wanted some beachy items in there.  However, there is not much room for shelves or anything. (It's basically a closet with a toilet.)  So I made this shell wreath:

I LOVE it because a) it was super easy and b) it shows tons of shells all in one place without taking up much room.

All I did was get one of those styrofoam wreaths that is basically cut in half, so one side lays flat against the wall.  Then, I just hot-glued the shells all over it randomly starting with the big flat ones first, and then tucking in the small ones to fill in any spaces.  The starfish was one we bought somewhere and I think it just added that extra something it needed.

My next favorite thing is my basket of sand dollars - Love them!!

I think I like them more because we had to work so hard to get them, and then bring them all home and wash them in bleach water. (They still kind of stink by the way.)

Actually they were all over the beach just waiting to be picked up, but you had to go to a special area, at a certain time of night, only after a big storm, wearing a trench coat and dark glasses.  Okay, I threw that last part in, but apparently it's quite the elaborate scheme to get these babies.  I only wish I'd had more people with me, since I ended up carrying most of them in my sweatshirt.

All the other shells we collected were readily available everywhere you stepped.  I wanted to fill a jar with those little tiny spiral shells, so I would gather like crazy, but then got really bored with it, so I only mostly filled my jar.  I know - I'm a slacker...*sigh*

I filled the rest with the pretty white spirals.  By the way, there are a LOT more than it looks!  Those things were tiny!

I also have this fish bowl looking thing that I got and filled with sand.  I had this on a shelf above the toilet, but I don't think I'll put it back up after we paint. 

Any other great or amazing shells that caught my eye went in this jar.  I got this jar at Tai Pan Trading, along with the iron basket that my sand dollars are in.  I love them because they look so perfect with the shells.  I might end up putting my sand and candle in this jar instead of the fish bowl thing.  I don't know. 

Right now, the sand dollars are in the center of my table, and the two jars filled with shells are on my hutch.  The wreath will go in my bathroom, along with some black and white beach prints on canvas that I'm working on right now. 

Here is the wreath hanging in my bathroom - the lighting is horrible, sorry.

I love the beach! Why do I live in Idaho again?  Ugh.  Oh well - someday.  Haha :)