Olive green recup'

While we were still in the process of  buying our house, the vendors generously allowed us in to start some decorating - sounds crazy, but it worked, given the drawn-out French system. Ben and I chose pale cream walls throughout, as the house is dark in the traditional heat-reducing way, but we did decide to paint the walls of the brighter bedrooms in actual colours - hence our bedroom has pale green walls, which was pretty much Ben's choice.

When we moved our furniture in I put all our old blue-themed bedroom accessories into the green bedroom, and spent the next few years disappointed with the room: nothing seemed right, and I felt cross that I hadn't stood up for blue. A few years later, I decided that the answer was to give up on blue and buy (yes, buy) some green duvet covers and use all our other green accessories - I have adored the room ever since!

To me, the two duvet covers I bought back in 2008 are still 'new', and I am still very fond of them as they set me off on the discovery that this house was going to work well for us. This one is partly bamboo fibre, too, so it's green in two senses, and very comfortable. However, it suffered a mishap this summer when some guests got a peroxide-containing product onto the pillowcases and the lower half of the duvet itself, so it's been out of action while I hunted for green cold water dye in enough quantity. As you may be able to see, I dyed the pillow cases solid colours, and dip-dyed the duvet cover so that the intact top part retained its pleasant two-tone stripe, while the bleached lower part gets increasingly olive, neatly covering up the pale patches.

It's all worked swimmingly, and the olive green goes ever so nicely with the walls and the two édredons whose enormous, feather-filled weight are keeping us warm this winter.

This bed owes a lot to blogging friends - the lavender heart in the first photo was made by Dandelion Beck in Australia, the French-ticking heart bag on the bed head is a Lululiz creation and the way to tuck in a French duvet was taught to me by Penny at Violet White!

I told you about the eiderdowns the very day I got them, but here's a find I haven't shared with you before - last year I was lucky enough to find two embroidered draw-string bags, one in France, the other in Edinburgh.

This is the Edinbrough one, and, as it contains green, it's allowed in the bedroom and is now holding my handkerchiefs from the handle of my bedside drawer. Although green is Ben's favourite colour, not mine, I now find our green bedroom incredibly refreshing and peaceful. I had to make my peace with what we had (green) and not try to force it into something we didn't have (blue). A valuable lesson!

 

What Son 2 and I have to make peace with today is that we are both ill. I've just taken some ibuprofen to go with this morning's paracetamol and I'm feeling rather better now! What a relief - but it's a day of racking coughs and tissues thrown onto the fire, and I'm grateful for a cosy house and good medical care, and a warm dog snuggled up next to one, or both, of us.



Vintage roadside find...

We interrupt the continuous hen broadcasts to bring you:

the fish-tail mirror on the right, found this morning in a damp plastic bag next to the glass recycling bins at our supermarket! It's battered and chipped, and the silvering was already going bare in places, so I took advantage of this freebie to try out a bit of upcycling I'd seen in Homes and Antiques last year. To be honest I rather prefer it in this original photo, to what I've done with it since:

Oh dear, have I ruined it? The thing is, it was already ruined, and sitting on the pavement next to a recycling bin. So why am I just a tad traumatised by what I've done to it? Eeek!

Dead T-Shirt Make Do and Mend

Here's a boy (number 2 in our family) in a boy's fleece. When I bought it this afternoon, though (1€50 special offer on fleeces at Veti Relais, the charity shop)...

it was a girl's fleece. Eew!

Double eew!

Thanks to a tiny T-shirt that Son 2 outgrew years ago, but which he'd begged me to keep because one day I might do something with it, he now has a fleece with his favourite glow-in-the-dark Puerto Rican frog on it again!

j

I'm quite pleased with the results of an hour's blanket-stitching. His response when he saw his frog ride again? "Cool!"

j

PS - DS allowed as it's Friday night, in case you were wondering about my relaxation of the 'no video games on week nights' rule!

j

PPS I'm going to take my week's break now. I won't be looking at your blog or mine until next Friday, now. Have a lovely week, friends.

On-tro-po-lo-jee...

I didn't know I pronounced it the French way (as above) until I hear myself whispering the name in awe when I saw it on wooden hoardings in George Street this April. I came very close to getting inside it this June, but it opened the day after my flying visit to my dad ended. So it wasn't until this Tuesday that I entered its hallowed gates: Anthropologie, Edinburgh.Of course, as a blogger, the shop has been on my radar for a very long time. I'm aware of it as a shop that has a great eye for displaying the quirky, the found, the handmade, the recup'...So I was very keen to see it with my own eyes! When I got in out of the rain, it took a while for my eyes to actually see. I was a bit overwhelmed, and it took some time for me to settle down. Spotting two of my favourite books:
was a help.
The shop assistant I asked was very happy for me to take photos (I guess if you're going to stun people with your displays you do want people to study and share them) and, with my camera in hand, I began to focus enough to take things in.
Secretly, I'm waiting for the day that mis-matched chairs aren't the In Thing. Much as I like them, it is clear that they're only a trend, and style writers don't seem to realise that... But yes, I love that little table-setting!
Super hand-painted plates.
j
And then on, past the work of a local artist, down the stairs...
This is very much to my liking. The plates have been cleverly covered with real canvasses. I won't be doing it, but the overall effect, and the clever idea, are great.
I have a real aversion to the chinaware (on the left, below) that slopes and slants and doesn't follow the rules, however. I felt my mother tutting along with me at that moment...
But I can see myself doing something with old books, old cutlery and string.
Minus the candles - I'd be constantly wanting to pick the dripped wax off.
Watch this space...
Always looking for ideas with mirrors - this is very successful, I think!
And chairs too - when I taught the Infant Class in a tiny Cumbrian school I got very used to chairs like this, although very few of the wooden ones were left. Theywere mostly grey-blue plastic, if I remember rightly...
So I found Anthropologie inspirational, nostalgic, fascinating and, fortunately for my budget, totally un-tempting on this occasion. But I will be back!

Lichen and moss - happy colours

I've been thinking about the little things that make me happy. The big things are obvious, but the other night I wrote down in my gratitude journal:

"Thank you for the moss and lichen colours on Frodo and Sam and the rocks." (We'd been watching The Two Towers, obviously.)

But when I set out today with the aim of collecting some Nature to decorate the house,

I had no particular intention of the Nature being licheny.

But lichen on fallen twigs is what came home with me and the dog.

Getting a few looks from other walkers, inevitably...

I arranged the twigs in glass jars and my enamel pitchers, returning the usual old hurricane lamps to the mantelpiece,

because all that Nature seemed to require a civilising influence once I'd got it in the house...

And there was my display, finished...

... until we shut the shutters and turned on the lights!

Then a whole new aspect of the twigs became apparent...

... for every twig, there is a shadow.

I am enjoying the colours by day and the shadows by night!

Vintage Shelf Makeover - FINALLY!

Way back in the summer, I showed you these shelves which I was beginning to strip before painting... .. and then it all went pear-shaped. Ben took an interest in the shelves, gave me terrifying and seemingly endless instructions on how to paint them properly, took them apart to facilitate proper painting, and generally left me exhausted and traumatised at the very THOUGHT of all that work (which I would certainly have done badly). I just wanted them looking a bit distressed...

But Ben likes things to look GOOD, as I mentioned in my Advent post, and somehow, possibly realising what he'd done to me, but possibly because he knew I'd do it in a way he wouldn't like, he took over the work.

Wow - I couldn't have handed over a job better if I'd tried!

And as you can see, the results are very pleasing. He chose the paint ('moutarde') and I wasn't sure about it, but I really like it now. The idea was to hang the shelves over our sideboard, to relieve the incredible pressure on the sideboard storage, and to paint them in a colour that complimented but didn't attempt to match the oak buffet itself (which we bought in a troc shop shortly after moving in).

The big shelves are mainly practical, giving us space to store glasses in regular use, but I have been able to indulge in a bit of display on the top. Ben put a little bar along the front of each shelf to stop things dropping off, but he put a bar nearer the back of the top one too. I've used it to prop up the lovely shepherd plate my friend Ellie brought me from Germany whenshe was at university there, and also a blue Denbyware plate Ben and I bought around the same time in Windsor, and a hand-decorated bowl given to me by Ben's mum. The vase on the right came from Ele at Bit of Heaven, in our bird-themed swap. Do you note the number of Eleanors amongst those kind donors?

The little shelves have quite a lot of Portmerion on them - I really do like Portmerion when it's mixed up with other things. The Turkish cofee cups on the middle shelf were given to us by my mum earlier this year - Ben has always wanted a proper coffee set!

So there are my shelves, although perhaps now Ben and I are going to have to call them our shelves, don't you think?

These candid photos show a little bit of our pre-Christmas clutter (only a little bit of it!) There are three fabric-wrapped presents ready to go to my sister and her husband, and, if you look closely, a lovely needlecase and a fabric pen which give away a few clues about my Christmas projects.

Sea Life

Hello! This cheery little hermit crab is an image I've adored since childhood - it was in a book I had about sea life. I showed it to Ben when we were trying to create some sea life stencils, and Ben came up with this fantastic stencilled version. The stencils were for this:

Son 1 was born when we lived in a tiny little rented flat, and we couldn't 'do up a bedroom' for the baby, so we decided to 'do up' a chest of drawers instead!

I drew the starfish - Ben did all the other stencils. His ability to visualise and then produce things still really freaks me out...

See my little friend on the top of the chest, too? I am also crazy about Ben's sea horses, which I think he based on a metal seahorse hook we owned at the time. I wonder where that went?

The reason I'm thinking back 13 and a half years to all this preparation is that we've just moved Son 1 into a room of his own. He and his brother love their new spaces, although the rest of the house is in chaos as I sort through all the junk that was in the spare room which is now a bedroom!

Son 1 seems to have inherited his dad's skills:

I found this example of sea life in the sand pit yesterday!