Staging the Mantle

One of my least favorite things to do around the house is staging shelves – bookshelves, mantles, kitchen cabinets/counters.  I am drawn to a lot of inspiration for this type of staging, but in my own home it always feels disingenuous or sometimes cluttered to me.  We have one fireplace and the mantle is quite large.  I started by finding some inspiration pictures online and then shopping my stash of decor sitting in the basement.  Some of the inspiration I found can be seen here and here – pairing overlapping frames with glass and natural elements, and here – oversized blue glass jars.

I pulled in a couple of Ribba frames for a layered effect, then added a couple of ‘mercury glass’ items.  The ‘hello’ sign was a GroopDealz find.  Bradley saved some aesthetically pleasing branches during a recent yard cleanup, so I popped a few pieces into the hurricane vase to fill everything out.  It’s much better than it was (meaning I had just set a few things up there as we were moving in), but I still don’t know how I feel about it.