Accent blankets and pillows

I know it's been awhile.  When I last left off, I was telling you, dear readers, about how my husband's family had come to visit and stay with us.

I think I mentioned about how I did some preparations before their arrival. We have 3 bedrooms in our house, our master bedroom + 2 guest rooms.

As mentioned in an earlier post, we've painted each of the bedrooms.  Our master bedroom is green with black furniture. One guest room is blue with black furniture.  And the second guest room (which used to be an office-slash-guestroom) is light purple with black furniture.

Part of the preparations I did before my husband's family arrived was to buy some accent blankets to kind of play up the colors in each room.  The blankets that I ended up buying weren't exact matches, but they were pretty darn close!

But the blankets were just a small stepping stone in getting the rooms ready for our family's arrival.  I don't know if I've ever told you guys, but I tend to spend a lot of time on Esty.  I'm always browsing and shopping for one custom thing or another.  (Don't even get me started talking about my latest custom Etsy project!)

Several months ago, when my husband's family first started making plans to come visit, I started thinking about how I could make our home more special and "homey" to make them feel welcome.

And then I stumbled upon some awesome decorative pillows that people put on their beds.  I looked at so many of them over and over again and spent a lot of time hemming and hawing about if any of them would work and look nice with our other decorations.  I became hooked on several different styles that said "love" and "good night," but I was still stuck on how to make mine...special.

So I consulted my favorite Urdu resource -- my husband -- and asked him if there are any special phrases that people say at bedtime.

And then I went back to several Etsy sellers to see if they could do anything custom for me.  To be quite honest, I think I'm probably the worst person for an Etsy seller to deal with.  (Actually, I hope I'm not.)  But I do change my mind a lot.  And I overcommunicate.  And I have a lot of fantastical ideas that, in some cases, are not so easy to bring to reality.  Sometimes I feel like that annoying mosquito that just does not go away.

Thankfully, I found a great gal, Jodi at Cedar Street Creations, who was very patient and helpful. (She  also happens to be from Iowa, just like me!)

Even though the pillows that I'd originally liked were all different styles and colors, in the end, I chose to have Jodi do all 3 pillows (but in different fonts and font colors) because I felt that was the best way to keep this custom project on budget and to not go overboard (which is not to say I still didn't go overboard--haha).  And, actually, Jodi only did the pillowcases (which saved me some cost in shipping, if nothing else).  I got the pillows at Jo-Ann fabrics and was able to use coupons each time (usually 50% off) so got the pillows themselves for super cheap (yay me!).

So what I ended up with was this:

• For the master bedroom, "pyar" which translates to "love"
• For the first guest room, "shab bakhair" which roughly translates -- not literal translation -- to "sweet dreams"
• For the second guest room, "so jao" which translates to "go to sleep"

Here's some pictures of the pillows in each room, along with the matchy-matchy blankets that I bought.

"pyar" pillow in master bedroom
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"shab bakhair" in first guest bedroom
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"so jao" in second guest bedroom
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So, what do you guys think?  Did I succeed in bringing a little bit of "home" (from south Asia) into our home...?