{House}: Add a little color...

We love our new(ish) kitchen. When I was planning it in my head, one of the things I HAD to have was those hanging bars from IKEA. In my head, that was critical to my overall polished look.

Just as a reminder, a little glimpse of what we started with here in the kitchen - stove circa 1950, original linoleum, and old cabinets with sweet hardware. Plus a little J towel to class the place up:

Here are my new IKEA bars, mounted in the kitchen right after we finished. Bad lighting but you can see how dorky the bars look without anything on them:

Here's the bars with these white ceramic hanging pots I bought from IKEA (I can't find them online now):

I bought the white planters thinking I could put herbs in them but soon realized that apparently living plants need sunlight to grow. What's up with that? So there they sat, dorky and empty.

Now, two years after planning, I finally have come up with a semi-viable purpose for those oh so cute hanging bars. For a bit now I've been on the search for the perfect thing to put in these white hanging planters.

As I have been making other little updates to our kitchen, I was keeping my eyes out for the right thing. I wanted some sort of pop of color and really would have liked a succulent or flower but knew that wasn't going to work.

The colors in the kitchen are coming forward to be mostly red, turquoise, and yellow:

And so the other day when I was at Michael's, I checked out their floral section. I'm not a fake flower kinda gal at all but I loved the look of these fake hydrangeas. I got three of them at $2.99 a piece and took the "flower" and "leaf" part off the "stem" and stuffed them into the white planters:

And for $9, my kitchen is one step closer to being complete. I'm really liking the fake flowers and may decide that they are allowed in certain situations. 

So here's to cost-effective solutions for kitchen decoration!

In coming to accept fake flowers,