home decorating

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I haven’t posted anything to the blog in quite a while. I’m not sure how that happened. School started. And September birthdays and Halloween and November birthdays and Christmas holidays and somehow it’s February. I have been making things and doing things and even taking some pictures. At first I wanted to go back and post things in chronological order, then I thought maybe I should just do a summary with a bunch of pictures. But I guess it really doesn’t matter.

So here is the decorative shower curtain that I started about two years ago. Seems like an appropriate project to break my break. I have a bad habit of getting stuck on a project and putting it into time-out for a while. I work on other things, hope that a solution will come to me and eventually it will come back around. I’m trying to get myself out of that cycle and just make myself work through whatever difficulties arise instead of waiting months or years in between. When we moved into this house, the little bathroom was bright, shiny and completely white. I wanted to do something fun and seized on this cute fish fabric as my inspiration.

Heather Ross mendocino fish blue orange shower curtain

The feature fabric is Mendocino Swim Class in the Pacific colorway by Heather Ross. I loved this fabric so much I used it previously as an accent in a dress for the girl along with the seahorse fabric from the same line. This time I paired it with a solid Kona cotton coordinated to the tiniest fish and a little bit of navy blue piping left over from this project. I started this so long ago I don’t remember why I had to try the curved piecing. I see that it’s not obvious in the photo but the line between the two fabrics is gently curving.

I lined the shower curtain with extra wide white muslin and that is where the trouble began. For some reason I had a horrible time getting everything square and lined up nicely. You can probably still see crease marks in the fabric from where I wadded it up and threw it in the corner. My other difficulty was that I had my heart set on orange grommets. Dritz does make some colored plastic grommets but they were a tad expensive for my taste. And large. Don’t get me wrong, I like orange. It is probably my favorite color now. (Yes this is strange because I spent the first half of my life hating orange.) But a little orange goes a long way. So I bought the plain little silver colored grommets and dipped them in orange tinted Plasti-Dip. Easy-peasy. I have all kinds of other ideas for this weird but cool hardware store crafting find.

Heather Ross mendocino pacific orange blue navy shower curtain

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I have had a nice but rather large spice rack for some time. I recently traded with someone who had this cute vintage black spice rack that I intended to give to the girl. But when it arrived, well, I decided to keep it for its intended purpose. Good thing I didn’t tell her. It guilted me into finding her a bigger, more suitable shelf for her little stuffies that we already had in the basement anyway.

Before and after pictures. Just cleaned up the new (old) rack and put only the most used spices on it. It looked immediately at home in our c. 1952 kitchen. Not sure how I’ll use the little drawer but it will easily hold 4×6 or probably even 5×7 recipe cards. Now if I could just clean up the rest of that counter . . .

large wood spice rack vintage painted black wooden spice rack

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and everything in its place. I don’t know who originally said that but I am certainly finding wisdom in it.

I’ve been working here and there on organizing parts of the house and trying to find a home for everything, whether that is in our house or in someone else’s. I’m hoping that we can keep what is really needful and dear to us and let go of everything else. So far this is working best in the kids’ room. But I did make a little addition to the kitchen today.

There is often a piece of fruit or two out on the counter in the way and I decided that this odd corner under an upper cabinet was a good place to hang this wire basket. It’s collapsible and has two handles on it that when held together cause the top of the basket to close almost completely around the contents. I’m sure it has some distinct purpose but I can’t even remember where I got it or why. The girl and I strung some wire through the rim, screwed a hook into the underside of the cabinet and hung our new fruit basket. It looks quite at home already.

collapsible mesh basket with fruit

Earlier in the week or was it last week? I did some serious work with the miter saw. The girl donned a favorite outfit to help me with the sanding and assembly of a ladder for the bunkbeds. See her hammer there?

sanding and assembling ladder

I just have to include this picture of her outfit, don’t you love her style? Vintage ’70s brown floral (originally made by my mother for me) with the leopard pants from her Halloween costume. She makes me smile. I would never have worn anything half so fun.

vintage '70s brown floral dress with new leopard pants

bunkbed ladder

I recently found out that this is actually the third generation to sleep in these bunkbeds. Everyone else has done just fine without a ladder but this allows me to use the space at the foot of the bed for the organizer that holds all the dress-up accessories. It’s not pretty but it’s functional and the kids like it. Maybe it will get painted as well if we get around to painting the walls.

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Admittedly, this photo is about a month old but I just realized I’d never shared it. The boy in the leaf pile. We had a great time that day, jumping in, playing leaf monster, piling on dad, etc. There’s some other things I’ve missed as well but I’m just going to offer some random favorite photos here until I get myself reorganized.

sleeping cats

Lila and Duke, curled up on the couch, just about every evening. Sometimes they let us sit with them too.

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The girl, as Rudolph, with her ballet teacher, as the Nutcracker, after her very first performance. She was thrilled to be on a real stage although she did say more than once that she would have preferred to be Clara so that she could dance with her teacher. And of course she was quite enamored with all the beautiful costumes. The Maine State Ballet has a cute tradition of Father Christmas and his reindeer (the youngest ballet class) pulling the sleigh with Clara in it off the stage at the end of the ballet. It has nothing to do with the story and they are only on the stage for about 20 seconds but everyone loves it. Her brother and a special friend attended with us and all three of them sat in rapt attention through the performance. Tchaikovsky has such a universal appeal.

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The girl cleared the top shelf of her bookcase of all its usual oddments and carefully arranged this sweet vignette. I had to snap a picture of it. The rose her daddy gave her after her performance in the Nutcracker, her well-loved kitty, given to her by her Nana, and Abby, her little Lego girl that I handpicked the pieces for and assembled to look like her.

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As I alluded to in the previous post, this past week has been rather a haze. And unfortunately not all of us completely well yet. But it would seem that if I don’t share these now, they’ll lose their newsworthiness.

I love to carve pumpkins with out of the ordinary designs. Over the years we’ve done the Bat signal (Batman), maybe more than once, spiders and Jiji the cat from Kiki’s Delivery Service. This was the first year the kids were really into actually helping with the design. The girl was quite particular about her pumpkin having a “bumpy” smile. So we split up into teams and this is what we came up with. The carving on the girl’s pumpkin is a combination of me following what she actually drew on the pumpkin and copying from her earlier drawing on paper. The boys were much more scientific and drew their pattern on the computer first.

bumpy smile jack-o-lantern traditional jack-o-lantern pumpkin

One day this week I managed to make pancakes with a seasonal twist. I used tiny alphabet cookie cutters given to me by my friend Jan to quickly shape the eyes and mouth. Homemade apple syrup from Grandmom drizzled on top for a yummy treat.

jack-o-lantern cut out pumpkin

I didn’t realize this until we moved up here but New Englanders really get into Halloween in a big way. Maybe that’s because it actually feels and looks like Halloween in the movies or maybe because it’s a lot easier to decorate your house for a holiday that isn’t covered in snow and ice! In any case, people go all out and we thought we’d join in to this neighborly occasion with some sort of big decoration. We tossed around a few things and I came up with this idea of painting a big cat to fit the opening in the screen door. I looked online for tall silhouettes of black cats and chose one as reference. I unrolled paper and cut it to size and then sketched the cat on the paper. The kids did a lot of the painting. I had intended to do an all black cat but they wanted it to look like Lila, our tuxedo cat so I modified to accomodate. Not quite as scaring but still mysterious. On Halloween night we turned out all the interior house lights and strung a bulb up behind the cat’s face which illuminated the whole painting well. The large brushstrokes reminded Rich of Van Gogh’s style. An unexpected benefit. The kids were awed by their creation and I really enjoyed working together with them. It was difficult to photograph so here is my attempt at a Photoshop combination that simulates what it looks like in real life.

backlit painted Halloween cat

with flash: painted cat

And I did finish sewing those costumes despite my foggy head. But because the camera batteries were dying I only have this one photo of Mr. Mario and the leopard. We took a quick trip around the neighborhood and were rewarded with treats from the neighbors and a surprise scare from Mr. R. across the street sporting a scary ghost mask that made the girl cry.
Mr. R’s wife scolded him and he couldn’t take that mask off fast enough!

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Due to the popularity of this project I have uploaded pictures of how I recovered my chair (with hopefully helpful notes) to Flickr here. There is also a link to a group where you can upload pictures of your own finished project! This was really not hard, I used less than a yard of home dec fabric and it didn’t take very long either. Instant gratification, I hope you’ll try it too. I am really enjoying this personal touch to my sewing space!

recovering back rest of office chair

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plain gray office chair office chair recovered in AH Sofia black and white floral fabric

We’ve had this plain gray office chair for a while and I decided I wanted to dress it up a bit. I had bought a yard of this Alexander Henry floral called Sofia a few months ago, I didn’t know what I was going to use it for and suddenly it clicked—the chair! I haven’t done this before but it was surprisingly easy. Taking the chair apart and putting it back together was the only hard part because it required figuring out how to use the socket wrench. I’m pretty pleased with the results.

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We had some damage to the ceiling in the dining area due to an ice dam this winter. The old light fixture had to come out anyway and I decided there was no way I was putting it back up after the ceiling was fixed. It was an old two socket track light much like the one over the kitchen sink, very strange.

I hunted around for the perfect pendant light to hang here as we spend a lot of time at the table, eating and crafting. I think it was also the first major design decision we were making so that weighed on me as well. I decided I wanted to counter all the hard rectangles of the kitchen with a round light.

In my research about 1950s decorating I discovered that it was very common to mix colonial cabinetry in one area with space-age modern in another! So I decided to go for it and get a crisply modern looking drum pendant from CB2. At 20″ around it seemed huge in the box but it’s a big room so I was pretty confident it was going to look just fine.

I bought the lamp for an incredible price knowing that it was fitted with a plug so I would have to do a little work to hardwire it. What I didn’t realize was that there was a very important little piece of metal missing from the ceiling box. So after the lamp arrived, I spent about a month hunting around for that piece of metal, not wanting to buy and install a whole new ceiling box in the plaster ceiling. Finally, I had a conversation with my dad who said (of course), “Oh, I’m sure I have one of those.” Thankfully my dad keeps all those sorts of spare hardware pieces that you never know if you’ll ever need again.

Two days later I was standing on a chair with my hands in the electrical box when my loving spouse says, “I hope you know what you’re doing.” Thanks for the vote of confidence dear. Actually, he was quite helpful, and we were able to get it installed without too much trouble.

installing new pendant light

white drum shade pendant lamp

I’m quite pleased with the results. Now we’ll just have to get a new table and chairs to go with our pretty lamp!

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avocado green, light blue, white, dark brown fabric prints

I’m gearing up to decorate my “studio” and I’ve chosen a palette of colors. The walls are a very pale butter yellow which I will keep. I think I’ll be using these fabrics as accents. They have similar avocado-y green tones, light blues with a hint of aqua and dark browns. I have some dark brown and blue canvas as solids and a great deal of the trees on blue print. That one may get used for curtains. Anyway, spur of the moment I decided to use a bit of one of those remnants to make something pretty.

make your own insert for refillable tape dispenser

Here’s my “new” refillable tape dispenser. I simply removed the paper label from the inside and used it as a template to cut out cardstock-backed fabric inserts. You could also use any pretty paper you might have. It’s really quite simple but here’s a tutorial if you’d like a little more direction. I’m practicing making tutorials. :)

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vinyl carpet protector

I have a roll of heavy duty vinyl carpet protector runner. It has nubbies on one side and ridges on the other. Anyway, we don’t have any carpet in this house so I don’t need it but I haven’t been able to give it away. With mud season upon us here in New England you would think somebody would love to have this to protect a carpeted entryway!

I wasn’t particularly looking to repurpose it but I was looking for something with ridges to help with wet felting and I cut off a piece of the runner to try out the ridges. Since I was in the bathroom working on the felting, it was only a short leap to realize that nubby side up it made a great soap holder! Since you buy it by the running foot at the hardware store a small square for a soap holder costs just pennies. Looks pretty cool doesn’t it?

minimalist vinyl soap tray

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You know how your comforter is always drifting around inside the cover? I hate that. I had thought of various methods for temporarily attaching the comforter to the cover while still allowing easy removal for washing but none of them seemed likely. I finally hit on the idea of using snaps along the top edge of the comforter and the seam allowance on the inside of the top of the cover. I put about eight across and it works like a charm! No more comforter sinking towards the bottom of the bed leaving flat, empty cover at the head of the bed. I cannot express how much aggravation those few little snaps have saved me. It doesn’t show at all from the outside and it also makes it much easier to put the cover back on after washing.

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