Decorating for July Fourth

We live just a couple of blocks off the Evanston parade route so we love to dress up the front of our house and make it a little patriotic. While I was in PR for 15 years and certainly planned my share of events, I must admit, in my own life, I’m not much of a theme decorator (unfortunately, it’ll be a stretch for me to implement even one of Amy’s ideas from yesterday for my party!) I’m all about easy for holiday decor, so anything we do for the house has to be super simple. Plus, as my husband reminds me, he’s the American one so the 4th is really his holiday not mine.

This year we decided to go with a very traditional bunting. I ended up buying the cheapest ones I could find on Amazon–under $10 a piece and polyester, but they’re actually perfect, hang nicely and can be washed.

Of course in typical fashion, I didn’t measure all sections of our porch and our two sections on the right are longer than the one on the left of the stairs. So, the bunting wouldn’t fit on that side. To balance out the holiday spirit, I painted our porch swing white (which is on the left side of the stairs) and added added some red, white and blue pillows from World Market. Ok, so I didn’t paint the swing just for the holiday, but I made sure it was done before our annual fourth party!

Here’s what the porch swing looked like last week (as it was in the process of coming down)

And here’s what it looks like today with the new July 4 pillows–all from Cost Plus World Market–I love the one that’s blue and white in a very subtle ikat print. Now the swing helps tie in the rest of my porch with the red, white and blue of the bunting.

Happy July 4th!