By Belinda Crouse

Celestial sun wall decor will make an upbeat, festive splash in your casual living areas: sun room, patio, family room; even a bathroom or kitchen. You will discover dozens of ideas for sun decor in your home.

The inside entrance to your home is a great place to set a welcoming upbeat tone for your home. Let's start with a metal sun wall decor piece. Hang the sun on the wall high enough to hang a functional coat rack below it. If you have a large enough wall here, accent with smaller moon and/or stars for the "whole" look. Select the style, color and size that is appealing to you and a style that compliments your home overall.

The family room or casual living area is a fun area to decorate with celestial sun moon wall decor. Because of the size, this would be a great room to include the popular star wall decor as an accent. Either above the mantel or behind the sofa--whichever you would like to be your main focal point, you can hang a large, classy sun wall hanging. Accent it with wall pockets or metal wall candle sconces. Use a pair of star shaped wall pockets and fill with artificial greenery and/or bright, sunny flowers. Sunflowers are really popular right now. Candle sconces, with a leaf or star motif, incorporated in the design will help carry your look. For a more upscale sun wall decor look, you may want to try a more abstract sun look--one with no face or a piece that just has a sunburst, ray look.

Continue your sun wall decor to the smaller wall spaces in your room with a grouping of stars or stars and moon. Including a mirror or wall clock in the grouping, when enough space is available, adds an extra touch to the room. Just make sure the home decor accessories have the same style and feel...whether casual, country, traditional...

One room we have found to be quite popular for sun wall decor, is the bathroom. In most baths, you will need to find smaller sun decor. One suggestion, would be to hang decorative sun stepping stones. Most of the decorative stones, on the market, have hangers on the back just for this purpose. The stepping stones are a good size and resistant to the humidity and moisture found in bathroom areas. The bathroom is a fun room to hang a small, "sunny" windchime. Finish it off with a small artificial flower pot with bright daisies or sunflowers. A small sun plant poke would make a nice finishing touch.

I think you will agree that just about anything goes in the kitchen today. Sun decor will be great to brighten up a small, wall starved kitchen. It would be extra fun if you are lucky enough to have a breakfast nook. The normally limited wall space in a kitchen is broken into small, odd shaped areas. So, lets go on a search for some smaller, unique sun wall decor. Keep your eyes open for a small moon or stars to accent and mix and match with the sun decor. Hang your favorite sun wall decor piece above the kitchen sink or on a wall space at the end of your cupboards. Hang the smaller accent, celestial pieces on the narrow wall area between your wall cabinets and the counter tops.

This area, I would recommend, that you focus a grouping in one area to create a focal point. Then above the cabinets, if you have a wall area, decorate with small sun, moon star decor, interspersed with kitchen and family word art. If you have a ledge above your cabinets, place a sun on a pedestal--you may be able to use short plant pokes. Give a back drop and "fluff" the area with artificial greenery, sunflowers and vases--they are all a great look with sun decor. In the breakfast nook, it would be fun to include a rooster with the sun theme. Mixing and matching is very popular, fun and easy--if you like it, go for it! Sun kitchen home decor can also be worked in with an Italian kitchen theme, just use more of the rich, deep coloring associated with the look.

Lets step outside now--first, lets consider the screened in, 3- seasons porch. This area will come to life with a bright sun wall hanging right next to your windows. Consider a sun themed water fountain on a tabletop. Add wall pockets and vases with silk grasses and flowering sunflower bushes--or your favorite flower. Hang a sun windchime in the corner and add celestial plant pokes to your vases. Get the idea...have fun. You could change your wall pocket fillers with each season.

Now step out onto your outdoor patio. A large metal sun will be perfect on the exterior wall, near the door, leading into the house. Depending on the wall area available, you may also accent with the moon and stars. Add a celestial looking bird feeder. Fill large pots with live or artificial flower bushes and silk or live grasses. A sun wall trellis is a unique piece that is a great addition on the deck or in a nearby flower bed.

Sun wall decor is a trendy home decorating theme that you will find fits in the interior of your home or out on the deck. It is a cheery, fun look, that brings the great outdoors to life. Have fun decorating. Homedecoratingstudio.com has lots of great pieces to help with your decorating.

This article is provided to you by Belinda Crouse, owner of
http://www.homedecoratingstudio.com and Cotton Seed Studio. I have a BS
degree from South Dakota State University in Textiles and Clothing-
Retail. I have been the owner of a gift, craft and home decor business
since 1983. I opened Cotton Seed Studio, a home decor, personal
product, gift and coffee bar shop, in January 2006. I also do custom
design projects, specialty boutiques and have started doing home staging
for local realtors. Early in 2007, we introduced our on line home
decor catalog: http://www.homedecoratingstudio.com

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By Peter Mueller

You love flowers? You want a bright wedding theme? You like the sun? Then why don't you use sunflowers for your main wedding theme. The sunflower is a symbol of happiness, prosperity, and peace. What more can you wish for your marriage? If you want to have a bright-yellow sunflower wedding, be aware that the best time to get real sunflowers is July to September. But in case you have no problem to use silk sunflowers for the decoration, you can have this kind of a wedding around the whole year.

Colors
The colors you use for the decoration and the dresses should be light colors like yellow, orange and crème. Colors that reflect the summer season and create a sunny, warm and easy feeling. You can use some red and brown dabs to loosen up the theme a bit.

Decoration
The best decoration for a sunflower wedding consists of -of course- more sunflowers. You can have sunflower candles, sunflowers printed on table cloths and napkins, sunflower lights, flower arrangements made of sunflowers (best complemented by other bright colored flowers like white roses) and much more. But there is also no real reason to stop with the decoration. Why not use sunflower tie holders for the groom or sunflower hair pins for the bride and the bridesmaids? Or sunflower ornaments on the dresses? You have a lot of options here, so be creative.

Flowers
Usually each of the bridesmaids carries a single sunflower. The bride has a bouquet of sunflowers, often complemented by roses or chamomiles. Ask your local florist for more ideas. He knows best what flowers he can use at the time of the year you celebrate your wedding. If you are on a budget ask him about silk flowers for the complementary flowers of your bouquet and decoration, too.

Wedding Favors
You can use your decoration for wedding favors, too. Give some extra candles like the ones you used for your table centerpieces as favors. Or give your guests real sunflowers for their homes. A very nice wedding favor is a custom bagged sunflower seeds with your names and the wedding date on the bag. Your guests can plant the seeds next spring in their garden and will think about your wonderful special day every time they see the grown sunflower in the summer.

You see how easy it is to build the decoration of your wedding reception around these beautiful plant? So if you are looking for a fresh, sunny and warm floral theme for your wedding, be sure to consider sunflowers.

You are looking for more ideas and tips for your theme wedding? Then check out http://www.dreamofawedding.com

Or in case you're interested in some unique wedding ideas to make your special day perfect take a look at http://www.squidoo.com/uniqueweddingideas

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The sunflower was found by Francisco Pizarro in Tahuantinsuyo, Peru.  The sunflower was worshipped by the natives Incas as a symbol of the sun god. At the beginning of the 16th century, the sunflower seeds and gold figures of the flower were brought to Europe.

The sunflower is native to the Americas. Evidence indicates that the sunflower was first domesticated in Mexico around 2600 BC.  It may have been domesticated a second time in the middle Mississippi Valley.  It may also have been introduced there from Mexico at an early date.

The earliest known examples of a fully domesticated sunflower north of Mexico are in Tennessee around 2300 BC. The sunflower was used by many indigenous American peoples as the symbol of the sun deity, including the Aztecs and the Otomi of Mexico and the Incas in South America.

During the 18th Century, the use of sunflower oil became very popular in Europe, particularly with members of the Russian Orthodox Church because sunflower oil was one of the few oils that was not prohibited during Lent.

By Elizabeth Harding

Vincent's Sunflowers

"The sunflower is mine in a way." –Vincent van Gogh

Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" are among his most famous paintings, but few people realize he did many sunflower pictures, not just the most famous "Vase with Twelve Sunflowers" and "Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers." These were canvases he made to decorate the Yellow House in Arles in anticipation of his friend Paul Gauguin's visit, and in the hope that other artists would follow and form a Utopian art community. Some of Vincent's sunflower paintings are all but indistinguishable, with only tiny differences to prove one reproduction is different from the next. During his stay in Paris, he painted cut sunflowers in different stages of being, from fresh to wilted to dry.

He appears to have brought his passion for sunflowers with him from his homeland in Holland wherever he roamed, and indeed, they make the kind of dramatic subject he loved. Around the world today, the sunflower is synonymous with Vincent's work, immediately recognizable and every bit as much his own as the water lilies belonging to Monet.

Vincent's "Sunflowers No. 2," the most famous sunflower still life, yellow on yellow, possesses the same universal appeal and impact of all his most beloved pictures. So widespread is the appeal of his sunflowers, in fact, that in 1987, a Japanese company paid a record of the equivalent of almost 40 million dollars for "Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers" at an auction. Van Gogh's many sunflower canvases are flung all over the world in testimony to his mastery, now residing in art galleries in Europe, London and Tokyo, to name a few.

During his stay in Paris, Vincent hobnobbed with some of the greatest Impressionist painters of the period. The artists all had a great effect on one another, including van Gogh, who was recognized as a formidable genius by "Les Vingt," Monet and Toulouse Lautrec, among others. One can readily discern the Paris sunflowers from the ones Vincent painted later, in the Yellow House at Arles, since they are cut flowers without vases. These cut sunflowers are depicted in various stages of wilting, but Vincent's final bright and bold color palette is evident at this point in his artistic development, permeating the pictures with life and joy.

The master's influence on western art and artists cannot be overstated. His work bridged impressionism, expressionism, cubism and more with a unique language understood by all lovers of beauty and truth. The enormous popularity of a simple vase of sunflowers attests to his power and sincerity.

Though Vincent was plagued by a serious mental imbalance and eventually took his own life, he left a body of over 2,000 canvases, painted in about a decade, as a living legacy. Whether they represent his portrayals of living fields of wheat or swirling stars, tender and thoughtful portraits of the peasants he loved or starkly vivid flowers in a simple vase, his works all bear his own stylistic imprint. Seen as a superb form of communication of the spirit, his work succeeded beyond his wildest dreams to comfort and console humanity through art. It is through his paintings, not his over-romanticized, beleaguered life, that he should be judged as the poet, prophet and master artist he was.

Visit the Life of Van Gogh website for more information on Van Gogh paintings, or to get out own Biography of Vincent Van Gogh.

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