Last year, to kick off 2016, we made some bold and prescient predictions about the future of the blogging world.

Since we know that you all went out and spent a ton of money to decorate your homes according to our advice, we figure that we owe you all a recap of what we got right and what we got wrong, as well as some advice for next year.

We were clearly pretty on the money, since we summed up our thoughts with this statement:

2016 will clearly be a good year

– Us, in a more carefree time

Let’s just say that we’re counting on 2017 to turn things around.

What we got right about 2016

Most disturbingly, we were right on target with one of our most outlandish predictions, that the sheepskin craze and Pantone’s baby-room-pastel color of the year pairing would combine to make this the trendy living room of 2016:

Being right has never felt so wrong.  Even our good friends, the Tiny Bloggers, have picked up this trend.

We also predicted that rose gold would be popular in 2016 – and we were so totally right.  It was big in jewelry, weddings, technology, makeup, and even hair color.  Vogue named it one of the Biggest Home Decor Trends of 2016 and New York Magazine called it A New Classic.  We can only assume that they are big followers of Plaster & Disaster.

We were also right about another thing – we did, in fact, put animals on things in 2016. Granted, this was a pretty safe prediction, but we can assure you that the ongoing trend of making things more “bae” (did we use that slang right?  we’re old) by putting animal faces on them is alive and well.

Further, our prediction that the adorable fox (which was the favorite of 2015) would be replaced by the rabid trash eating even more adorable raccoon was correct. Sure, other animals got airtime as well, but the raccoon was popping up everywhere.  We put raccoons on stuff, and others did as well.

A raccoon even got its own Instagram account.

Finally, we were spot on about the use of bokeh.  Bloggers are still taking pictures with a lot of bokeh. Bloggers are still posting bokeh pictures on instagram.  Bloggers love bokeh.  Still and always. (No collage on this one, just go to your DIY blog of choice and you are guaranteed to see copious examples.)

What we got wrong about 2016

As hard as it is to believe, we’re not perfect.  We made bold predictions and so not all of them were bound to be successful.  What can I say, we live on the edge of fashion.

Unfortunately, one of our trend predictions that we actually wanted to come true didn’t – that dala horses would be a thing.  In late 2015 we were seeing a couple dala horse projects pop-up and a few offerings on Etsy, and we got excited.

They’re pretty cool, and we figured that because they’re Scandinavian, they could get pretty popular. (Confirmed fact: Bloggers love Scandinavian stuff.)  Unfortunately, they did not.

But we haven’t given up yet — Sage has (jokingly?) promised Naomi a paint-your-own-dala-horse birthday present — and we WILL make fetch the dala horse trend happen. After all, we blow through Scandinavian trends at a startling rate — did you know that late 2016’s “hygge” is already so over and we’re now on to “lagom” (which seems to have something to do with drinking the right fattiness of milk)? Maybe as soon as we get sick of lagom we can finally move on to dala horses.

We were also wrong that the tuxedo kitchen trend of 2015 would combine with Canadian tuxedos to create a new trend of blue jean kitchens in 2016.  To be honest, we’re not too cut up about being wrong on this one. (Though Sage did paint her kitchen cabinets dark blue, so if you squint you can imagine they’re made of denim. Please don’t, though.)

2017 Blogging Trend Predictions

So that puts us at 66% correct for 2016 – pretty good if you consider the fact that we predicted that the 2016 living rooms would be modeled on The Lorax. With your confidence in our trendiness now affirmed, here are our blogging trend predictions for 2017:

Trend Prediction #1: Lips are the New Eyes

Eyes have long dominated the blogger world as far as parts of the face goes.  We’ve been pretty into them for a while now.  We think they’re whimsical.

However, no decor eye-con (see what we did there?) can last forever.  Just ask the owl.  And this is the year that the eye will move over for a new part part of the face to come into its own on the blogger scene: lips.

As you can see, eyes were the most popular part of the face by a long-shot in 2016.  However, our sophisticated model predicts that they’ll fall by more than half in 2017 to only account for about 30% of blogger projects.  By contrast, the popularity of lips will more than double, accounting for a solid 55% of projects.  They will totally dominate the market.

Interestingly, the forehead – a long neglected face part in DIY projects – will also have an unexpected surge in 2017.  We’re not quite sure what to make of that, but hey, numbers don’t lie.

Trend Prediction #2: Balloons are the New Donuts

We never would have expected donuts to become such a major trend in the home decorating world, but with such DIY heavyweights as A Beautiful Mess and Plaster & Disaster’s very own Tiny Bloggers leading the charge, 2016 truly was The Year of the Donut.

But all good/strange things must come to an end (donuts are meant to be eaten, people), and we are predicting that in 2017 we will fulfill our need for fake youthful whimsy via colorful round decor with the simple balloon. Not just for kids’ birthday parties and animated curmudgeons and their Wilderness Explorer tag-alongs anymore, balloons can bring an air (HA!) of sophistication to any gathering and are sure to leave your guests feeling insecure. After all, if you have this much time to decorate for a party, you must really have your shit together. (Also, those things could pop at any moment, so stay on your toes.)

Trend Prediction #3: Giant Cacti

Move over succulents of 2014 – 2015 and mini-cacti of 2016.  You are stuck in the past! We predict that in 2017, our insatiable desire for prickly plants of increasingly farther-from-life sizes will lead to its inevitable conclusion with a saguaro cactus outside every home.

Just be sure you getting to planting as soon as the spring rolls around, because these things can take up to 200 years to grow to their maximum height of 70 feet, and you don’t want to be behind this trend for too long.

Can’t wait that long?  We predict that our short-attention-span culture will manifest itself in this trend with a corresponding dramatic increase in plastic, wood, paper, and otherwise man-made cactus and succulent substitutes of mammoth size.  In other words, someone is going to make a giant cactus out of plywood and hang it on their wall.  We promise you.

Trend Prediction #4: Gold is the New Gold (And Brass, and Copper, and Rose Gold…)

We can feel it: this is the year when our never-ending cycling through metal finishes finally brings us back around to gold. Obviously 2016’s “rose gold” was just the stepping stone from 2015’s “copper” that the world needed to prepare us for straight up gold. Gold is already starting to sweep through the design world:

Also as much as we hate to think about it, nothing proves that 2017 is the year of gold more than the fact that we’re about to inaugurate a president who lives in a gold palace.

Sure we might argue that gold-plated walls clash with his orange pallor (and with decency, fiscal responsibility, and the ability to understand the needs of average Americans). But while he’s not on the right side of history socially/economically/morally, we can’t deny that Donald Trump sure is on-trend when it comes to home decor.

Though spoiler alert: we think it’s unlikely to last given the blogging world’s propensity to move through finishes at a speed totally out of sync with how expensive it is to replace all the metals in one’s home. (Finish prediction for 2018: concrete. We’re going to be seeing it on floors, walls, ceilings, doors, and even rudimentary beds as we all make the transition to underground bunkers in the post-nuclear apocalypse era. You heard it hear first.)

Trend Prediction #5: Animals. On. Things.

Okay this one is kind of cheating. Obviously we will still be putting animals on things in 2017. Birds, foxes, raccoons, whatever. When in doubt, stick an animal on it and call it a day. Double bonus, when we’re living in our underground bunkers and the natural world has been destroyed, we can remember animals by looking at our throw pillows and tote bags (no more wall art, drilling into concrete walls is tough!).

However, we’ll make our prediction specific by naming the animal of the year in the way that we predicted raccoons for 2016.  Some might look around and say that hedgehogs have a shot at the title for 2017 – but they are so late 2016, amiright?  The sun is already setting on the hedgehog empire.

So what will be be — octopus?  polar bear? pikachu? All are reasonable guesses.

Here at Plaster & Disaster, we predict it will be the deer. It is already starting to hit all of the indicators of popularity, appearing as overly cute prints, on pillows, on mason-jars, and as strange furniture with MCM legs.

Boring trend?  Maybe, but bloggers are boring.  Basically, as a population, we are obsessed with being original AND with woodland creatures.  We’ve cycled through the owl, the fox, the porcupine (which we can’t really tell apart from hedgehogs), and now the raccoon.  The deer has to be next.  I mean, what else would we pick, the squirrel?  Get real.

Besides, we have a lot of empathy as we’re feeling a little deer-in-the-headlights after how disastrous 2016 was.

Trend Prediction #6: Actual greenery instead of “greenery”

And lastly, we obviously couldn’t do a 2017 trends prediction post without some discussion of Pantone’s new color of the year. It’s pretty clear at this point that either Pantone has horrible taste in colors or they’re doing a Stanford Prison Experiment thing to see how many of us will give in to their authority no matter what they throw our way.

This year’s “greenery” is no exception, and it has the design world searching for a loophole — how can we avoid putting this hideous color in our homes without upending current power structures and finally declaring that Pantone has no idea what its doing?

One strategy currently being advocated by both Domino and Apartment Therapy is an appeasement approach — let’s jump on the green bandwagon but with literally any other shade of green. Maybe this will be enough to placate Pantone.

There’s also the “willful misunderstanding” approach, which we think is more likely to dominate (more of a Cuban Missile Crisis strategy, if you need to think in historical terms). Under this scenario, we all throw our energy behind actual greenery in our homes, pretending we didn’t understand that greenery is a paint color that Pantone wants us to put on our walls and furnishings.

The one big challenge we all face in this scenario is that we can no longer rely on the fiddle leaf fig for this purpose. Long a darling of the blogging world, the fiddle leaf fig finally reached peak trendiness in early 2016 and has started to decline ever since. We have yet to agree on a new hard-to-keep-alive-yet-much-coveted indoor plant, though ferns are making a strong play.

Given this coalescence of factors, we predict that 2017 homes may take a Jumanji-esque turn, crammed full of houseplants to satiate Pantone and yet without any curatorial voice to guide us.

Just watch out for rhinos.

So those are our trend predictions for 2017! We look forward to watching this year unfold and to undoubtedly seeing our prescience come true!