decor

so the new house, should I end up owning it, has a small breakfasting area in between the living room (there is no hall, you walk straight into the living room) and the kitchen (which runs across the back of the ground floor space, which is weird for a London Town house to have a kitchen running across the width of the house and thus no view of the people who back onto you) (however, this arrangement creates the small but private courtyard garden in between the kitchen, across the back, and the living room at the front, and the small breakfasting area to the side)

and in the breakfasting area there is a wall upon which I thought would be the near perfect place to hang my Hopper print

I have a "thing", you know one of those "things" that you have have*, about lighthouses and beaches and sand and sandcastles and mermaids and the sea and oceans and waves and seaweed and fish and flotsam and jetsam (*and this is only one of my "things", but I'll spare you the rest) (for the moment) and as such over the years I have found and purchased items of this nature and friends who know me well have bought me things of the same theme - you know, the usual girly stuff: a jug with an underwater scene, a mirror made of "found items" from the beach, a beautiful book about mermaids, a photo of an enormous wave crashing over a lighthouse, a ceramic lighthouse spaghetti holder (sounds horrible, but is gorgeous - made by someone who lives in Brighton) and my framed Hopper poster

anyhow, the other day I was thinking about how fed up I was with living in a house painted magnolia (rented houses are always painted magnolia and people always paint their houses magnolia before they sell them, so we had painted the last-house-but-one magnolia when we wanted to sell it, we never redid the paint in the old house after we moved in, which the previous owners had painted magnolia in order to sell it, so I've been living with magnolia for almost five years now) and how when the children were little, and living in the last-house-but-one, they loved the fact it was colourful

when we moved in I had painted the downstairs living space in the colourwash style that was so popular ten years ago and most of the kitchen was aqua, with one yellow wall and one pale brick red wall - and I thought in the new house, rather than painting the wall in the breakfast space blue and hanging the Hopper on it, I should paint the whole wall like the image on the print!

what do you think?

I'd have the detail in the bottom left hand corner of the wall (on the left as you walk thru) but make the sky much much bigger in proportion thus most of the wall space would be the colourwash sky, with a few of those streaky clouds - and the reason it would work is cos the breakfast area opens onto the courtyard garden (window and door to the right as you walk in from the main room) and the courtyard garden faces southeast - so the light shining in would be the right angle to light up the detail in the image - just as it does in the original!

:-)

and!!! I found this really cool site on the net which sells decals which you just paste up, so rather than doing fancy paintjobs on other walls or bothering with wall paper, I am going to purchase some weird and amusing shapes to stick to the walls. . .

and rather than invest in fancy lamps, I thought I'd do this!

anyhow, I'm sure you have more important things to do with your day, so I shall take my decorating thoughts back to the drawing board and let you get on with the slightly more important stuff of your life

have a good one!
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post script for some reason
"decor" has won an award chez Australian David. . .
thanks David!

whether the weather

be sunny or cloudy

one of the things on my kitchen windowsill is a little Swiss chalet, akin to the above - there is some kind of mechanism inside it which determines air pressure. . .

. . .the little woman pops out when there is high pressure (supposedly blue skies and sunshine) and the little man when there is low pressure (supposedly rain, or at least grey clouds and a certain inclemency)

oh! how I am longing for sunshine. . .

we had a day last week when the skies were clear and the sun shone - it wasn't very warm, and out of the sun in the shade it was decidedly nippy, but how I loved seeing the sun again

ever since it's been grey - not even raining, but just heavy skies and a certain dullness which does nothing for my spirit; I digress

there are all sorts of other things on the windowsill. . .

a carved wooden apple, which if I recall correctly came from Northern Ontario; a hand soap in the shape of a mermaid (you recall I "have a bit of a thing", one of those things that one "has", about mermaids); a pot of yellow primulas and miniature daffodils, in a blue and white stripey vintage Cornishware bowl, the flowers are on their last legs; a little kissing couple (they have magnets in their mouths which hold them in their embrace); a miniature pair of red wooden clogs; an xmas decoration from a Noah's Ark Christmas collection I once made sets and sets of to sell to people who didn't make their own Christmas decorations but desired "homemade" - this one is a large polar bear (cut with a polar bear shaped cookie cutter, out of rolled flat fymo) who is painted white and has a covering of white sparkling glitter, with claw details and an eye and a nose painted on in fine silver, he had a piece of curved wire as a hanging device, stuck with two buttons onto the reverse and on the arc of the curve above his head is a small red flat fymo heart. . .

there is also a tiny red wooden grandfather clock which I found at a jumble sale when I was about eight years old: it never worked because the key had been lost, but if one had the key there is a little hole on the clock face where one would put it in - if you peek inside the mechanism (visible from underneath where the pendulum* used to hang) (*now lost**) (**not surprising, after more than 35 years, I guess, in the bigger scheme of things) you can see the coiled metal spring which presumably would coil further if one had the key with which to wind the clock

I wish I had a key to wind forward the weather and bring on the spring. . .

. . .something else to be patient about I guess!

whatever the weather,
I hope you are enjoying your day

(-:

and I did a lot of thinking when I was in the Head Hospital

and I made list after list of all the things that I still like. . .

. . .like the views!

and mermaids, and lighthouses, and sunset, and stars, and music, and art

there was a poster on the wall in one of the corridors of a Hepworth sketch that made me so sad because it reminded me of all the photos I'd lost when I destroyed my laptop and some of the binding designs I'd made last year; but it also made me happy - which was bittersweet - because I loved looking at it (it was the only good thing in the whole corridor)

and it made me think

because what was interesting about the sketch was not the lines or the fact she had put lines where she had put them - but the spaces between the lines that the lines made you focus on

the gaps

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I don't mean the clothes store or the Tube BTW

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the holes

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nothing hiding here, honest

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the empty sections

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no, there is nothing here!

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and that is when it occurred to me, that of all the stories I know - I only know the parts of the stories that I know, I don't know the bits that I don't know

and I started to think about some of the things that I don't know: the parts that have never occurred to me before - were their happy times in my parents' marriage? could I replace the images and photos I have lost with new ones? can I research Hepworth and find out more about her thinking

that sort of thing

and those thoughts were more interesting than the one thought I had gone into hospital with

and so, after five days of silence and refusing to speak or be spoken to, I picked up a pen and did some writing and then some charcoal and did some sketching and I also wrote down the soundtrack that I'd been assembling in my head and I started listening to some music again