Aunt Stephanie's Room

I've been working on the guest room, otherwise known as Aunt Stephanie's room.  (Stephanie was my college roommate, is honorary and beloved "aunt" to my kids and is my favorite and most frequent houseguest, hence the room is named for her.) The walls are a creamy yellow that look more or less intense depending on the light. I hung simple white shades in the window for nighttime privacy, then made slim curtains with tie-backs so they don't obscure the view. I love the crazy orange bird print, which is Pretty Bird Spice by Michael Miller.

The rocking chair was a thrift store find, $12.00, and it was your basic old wooden rocker with an awful, dusty cushion. I ditched the cushion, painted the rocker black to tie in the picture frames and curtain rods, and free-handed some orange flowers on the top. I love the way it now looks like it was made for the room.

For most of the rooms in the house I've chosen a group of favorite fabrics as a starting point and this room was no different. The Michale Miller Pretty Bird fabrics appear on the lamp shade, the pillows (here and more to come), the bedding (stay tuned), and the curtains. Gluing homemade bias tape on lamp shades is slightly addictive because it's so fast and it looks good.  Now I've got my mother doing it too. The funky candy dish was a vintage eBay piece because I just had to--how could I do a room in orange but not have something made out of that crazy fiery retro glass? Other bits of this room are still in progress and will be done soon--so if you're thinking of visiting me and staying in my guest room, pick a date!

The living room

More house progress!  Removing the living room wallpaper was a serious pain in the ass. My mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, daughter and husband all worked with me (and in the case of my mother, much more than me) to get the wallpaper off this wall.  There was a thin liner underneath the regular wallpaper that had to be steamed and scraped away shreds at a time.  Ouch.  But now it's off!  Mom and I primed the newly-bare walls, which had never been painted in their 71 years, then painted them a perky green called spring cactus. I made the curtains from fabric I found online and posted about previously, from Heather Bailey's Pop Garden collection. This is a room we needed some furniture for when we moved into this house.  I fell in love with the Eames-inspired tulip chair from an online discount store, and we bought the light fixture and white sofa (below) from IKEA. This room is meant to house my collection of hobnail milk glass, and the bumpy white lamp and chair are really just accessories to my beloved dishes.  I have a less-is-more attitude toward some things, but dishes are just not one of them. I love dishes.  I have way too many.  But hey, better dishes than drugs and booze, right?

After I hung the new curtains this weekend  Dorothy came into the room.  She immediately noticed the curtains and rushed over to the windows to admire.  "Wow!  These new curtains are so pretty!  They are going to look beautiful at my birthday party."  My husband came home an hour or so later and his reaction was not as satisfying.  I had to drag him into the room to see the curtains, which I doubt he'd have noticed on his own.  He glanced and said, "oh, those look nice."  He might have said the same thing if I'd hung paper bags in the window.  If I hadn't prompted him he might never have noticed they were there. This is why I'm so grateful to have a daughter.  :)

My over-the-sofa art is going to be supplied by my children.  I purchased artists canvases at a craft store and covered them with more of the Pop Garden fabric using a staple gun. I have a can of low-tack spray adhesive that I'm going to use to adhere a rotating collection of the kids' art to the screens.  This felt like a formal but fun way to honor their artwork. I have admired framed child art in other people's homes, but I'm thinking this will be easier to peel off or stick up art as their talents and interests change.

Now all I have to do to finish this room is patch and paint the ceiling, paint all the trim, mop off the bits of wallpaper that seem to have stuck to the floor, buy a coffee table, sew throw-pillows, buy a coordinating shade for the milk glass lamp (not shown), sew a Pop Garden scarf for the piano, find or make an entry-way rug, paint or replace the plant stand that doesn't seem to match, and find the rest of my milk glass in a box downstairs.  It's a good thing my baby sleeps through the night and I have nothing else to do all day, right?  Oh wait...

And today is my daughter's actual birthday.  She gets to bring a treat to school to share with her classmates, so we made cupcakes with lavender icing at her request. I love this recipe for vanilla cupcakes and have made it several times, even though the method of adding the butter to the batter seems rather unorthodox. The cupcakes don't turn golden-brown until they are over baked--you have to do the toothpick test to get them out in time--but they come out really moist and they hold their shape nicely so you can eat them without having most of your cupcake dissolve into crumbs all over your lap.  According to Dorothy's birthday wish the cupcakes needed to have her classmates names on them, so we did that too.  I printed the names onto a sheet of card stock and we just cut, glued and folded the little tags onto toothpicks. Hopefully the birthday girl will feel like she got all her birthday wishes granted today. She woke up pretty excited!

Bird curtains for the bathroom

Dorothy and I both spent some time today sewing.  Worth spent some time today being a nuisance.  I think we've officially ended the sweet baby stage and entered the terrible toddler era.  He's not walking yet, but his combination of seal-hop crawling and cruising gets him around quite well, and his toddler-esque curiosity is proving to be a menace to his health and the safety of everything in his path.  Here is a cute picture of Dorothy trying to sew (before you get too impressed with my preschooler's skills, let me casually observe that there doesn't seem to be any thread in the machine) while her brother hovers annoyingly around her, using a thread cone as a megaphone and trying to figure out the best way to get his fingers poked with a needle.

And the very first befores and afters of the new house!  Here is my downstairs bathroom before a paint job and new curtains...

and here is after.  I wouldn't call the room "done," because I'm still going to sew a coordinating bathtub mat, commission some frame-able bird art from my resident young artist, and find some sort of tray to coral toiletries on the back of the toilet, but the painting is done and the curtains are hung.  I used this fabric for the body of the curtains, and this for the scalloped edge, which I made using the very fancy (ahem) technique of tracing around a jar bottom.  The paint was left over from Dorothy's old bedroom in our old house, and is Pastel Sage by Glidden.  I love how much fresher a room can feel after a new coat of paint!  Now when I get discouraged about the in-progress state of the rest of the house, at least I have one room I can visit to view progress.

The fun stuff

All over my house are signs of progress!  Or actually there are taped-up fabric "samples" I've printed off the internet and swathes of paint choices.  Here are some Heather Bailey prints I like for curtains and pillows in the living room, and we like the top shade of green.

The dining room, in which I'll make curtains from this awesome old tablecloth.  Rob and I are both loving the bright shade of blue on the top, although we'd not expected to choose something with that much intensity.  He did ask if I was trying to bring the camper look indoors.  (I'm not, I'm just enjoying bright shades of blue right now!)

And the family room, which will be the same buttery yellow we've grown attached to in our last two houses.  I like the fabric print I had taped up here but we decided on a different one for the curtains, one that brings in punches of brown and black to tie in our mish-mash of furniture.  It's very large-scale (think plate-sized flowers) and tropical, but this huge back room needs something big, bold, and warm. 

A friend of mine has a theory about interior house colors corresponding to the colors a woman likes to wear, but my history of using mostly fall colors inside (and on me) seems to be giving over to a new era of springs and summers in this house.  I'm excited about all the bright happiness, and I'm glad that all these choices are easy to change if we tire of them.  If we reach a day when we decide we simply can't eat dinner in a robin's egg blue room one more time, at least no wallpaper removal will be involved!