Decorating My Space

Decorating my home is telling a story about who I am and where I've been. I usually don't do theme rooms. I prefer to think of my style as Shipwrecked, as in, I was washed up on a South Seas island, and my belongings are all the things I've rescued from the waves. I guess you could call it eclectic, and I find a lot of joy in decorating with my finds.

My former daughter-in-law paid big bucks for decorators to decorate for her. Her home was impressive and beautiful, but I never thought it said anything about her, except that she had the money to buy whatever was in style.

Anyway, cabin fever finally got the better of me last week, and I decided my bedroom and master bath walls had to be painted! They were a deep taupe and a great color to sell in a house. Buyers like neutral walls, but I decided they were depressing, and I was craving color and light! I had spent some time thinking about color, and then I happened to find 4 blue and yellow, cloth-covered boxes at Tuesday Morning, and the colors in those boxes were exactly what I wanted for my walls. If I'd pressed the issue, Jim probably would have agreed to find a painter to do the work, but I wanted it done yesterday, so I came home from Home Depot, paint buckets and paint rollers in hand, and told him I would do all the work, knowing full well that he'd help some. I also said I wouldn't be in a hurry, might even take a month to do it, but once I got things dismantled and strewn about, I was in a rush to get it finished; it took 3 very full days.

Our rooms have some interesting angles and insets, and I wanted to accent them, so I decided to paint most of the walls Behr Ultra Moonlit Yellow, which is pale, soft, and lemony. For a couple of insets in both rooms I picked Behr Ultra Spring Bluebell, a soft shade that looks lavender in some lights and blue in others. They're happy colors.

I spent half the time masking off woodwork with that wretched blue tape, about 70 miles of it I think. I was on the ladder more than I was on the floor, and my body kept urging me to go look at my drivers license to prove that a gal my age doesn't belong on top of a ladder! As predicted, Jim couldn't stand to see me doing it all, and he took time away from helping the shop builder and did some of the edging for me. Do I know my guy or what?

The blue covered flawlessly, in one coat; the yellow was another story. It took 3 coats, and in some places twice that many. It's not a perfect paint job, but as I painted, I saw errors in the original paint; after it's up, people only see the whole picture.

Painting walls is a gamble; you can't be sure you'll like a whole room of what you see in a paint chip, but I'm so pleased with it! It's like a new blank canvas, and I'll have fun finding treasures that drift onto my shores to finish the decorating. I want to do a couple of stencils but haven't found any yet that deserve to be on my pretty new walls. I'll let you know if I find them. Oh, and don't tell Jim, but the living room is looking sort of depressing, too; it could get a color-lift any day now; he didn't suspect a thing when I bought a 48" canvas at Michael's yesterday for the new painting I have in mind that will hang over the sofa once the walls are finished.......Hope you're having a colorful day.

Fa-la-la-la-la, La-la-la-la

Christmas is almost here! And the weather has turned off wet, windy and bitterly cold......well, bitterly so for the mid-south. We don't do cold very well. With the first half-dozen fluffy snow flakes, schools close down, and Wal-Mart sells out of bread and milk, as if we expected to be snowed in for weeks. If we get any accumulation at all, it's usually gone by noon the next day. I only remember one White Christmas in my whole life, and I'll tell you about that soon. It was magical, one of those Christmases we keep in our hearts for life.

But I'm still adding little Christmasy touches around the house, haven't put up the tree yet (except for the Charlie Brown tree, a ficus hung with gold balls, the ceramic tree, 3 wire mesh trees, and 3 tiny green trees decorated with miniature ornaments on bathroom lavatories) or wrapped all the presents, but Lord willin' it will all get done. And I'm praying that this isn't a snowy or icy Christmas because we're having the family at our house this year, and it's about a 2 hour drive to get here.

Jim brought me some live mistletoe from the ranch were he hunted in Texas. He always touches my heart with the little gifts of plants, rocks or branches he brings me, and the fact that most of the leaves blew off in the back of his truck made me love the bedraggled little green clumps even more.

Decorating with Friends

Rita asked Sybil and me over to help decorate her house for Christmas. (That's them in the pics.) Amid all the goofing off, silly talk and laughter, we actually did get a lot accomplished, and then she took us out for lunch and a quick trip to a local florist (note the lovely turquoise wreath) where I stole, or uh borrowed, a few ideas and bits of inspiration. That's why God created pocket cameras, for goodness sake.

Not much to report in the way of technique, but I promised I would share photos. Behind the house is an old red barn, trimmed in white, built by Rita's grandfather, and we made a huge green wreath with a red bow for it, but then we wimped out on climbing the long wooden ladder to hang it. That's why God created husbands.

Rusty Stars

I bought this rusty star garland in Canton, Texas last summer. It's one of those decorator elements that looks interesting any time of year, and for Christmas, I added a few blue balls. It just makes me happy looking at it.

I have a friend who has lots of free time on her hands and a gorgeous, big new home that she wants to decorate herself, but she doesn't trust her own abilities or taste, and I was thinking about what it takes to create home decor, or any art for that matter. There are some professions where the licensed, trained practitioners want us to believe that what they do requires a special commission from God, and they've sold that notion to many of us. The most valuable thing I inherited from my mother was the belief that I can do anything I set my mind to. Now mind you, this bravado has taken me down some long and winding roads where I floundered and eventually decided that I wasn't committed enough to devote the time to learning that it required, so I was on to my next adventure, but I honestly don't recall ever thinking I couldn't do something.

One of my favorite quotes says, "Creativity is allowing ourselves to make mistakes; art is knowing which ones to keep." So, I s'pose that believing I can do most anything frees me to see my mistakes not as failures but as additions to my garland of things that won't work......yet another learning experience, another rusty star.

A peek inside my kitchen

I want to thank those of you who have signed up to follow my blog, especially since I don't know where we're going yet. I guess that's the problem with having so many interests; I like to take photos, do crafts, decorate my home, read, paint with traditional paints and with digital brushes, grow things, write, study any number of things like psychology and Taoism, collect things (sort of), etc., etc. So, I've decided to dabble in lots of topics here at the beginning till something "feels" right and then take that path.

Today I wanted to show you one little corner of my kitchen where the baker's rack stands. I would like to have a larger one, but the kitchen has so many windows that there's not much wall space. I'm in the process of making some decorating changes; I'll share those with you as they evolve.

My nephew, Shawn, once told me that I have so many cool things in my house, but that I need to come up with better stories than saying they came from garage sales; just between you and me, though, that wire chicken & eggs, the tassels, and most of the rolling pins were bought at garage sales for next to nothing. The idea of putting twinkle lights in the glass canisters was shamelessly borrowed from my friend, Sybil, who used to be a buyer for M.M. Cohn and has lots of good decorating ideas.

I've got some Fiestaware dishes there as well. My whole kitchen is filled with Fiesta. I don't collect it, but I have a hard time not buying it when I see it. Does that mean I'm collecting? I have 3 cabinets full of it, one in cool shades of blues and greens, another with warm colors like red, yellow & orange, and a third where some dramatic colours are gathering, like black, chocolate and lilac. Mine is mostly contemporary; I got interested late in the game, and the vintage pieces are astronomical. We saw a chipped vintage lilac dinner plate at Canton for $300.

Most silk flowers that I see around are too chintzy to decorate with, but Hobby Lobby has some fairly good ones, (of course I wait till they're 50% off) and I go with Sybil to wholesale houses where they have the really good stuff, which is where I got the ceramic vase that looks like horns and the flowers I arranged in it. And that's a little peek at some of my decorating.