Flashback Friday: The Tree

Okay, so I'm kind of going off-script here. I don't have an actual picture of the room I'm flashing back to, though I wish I did. Instead, I have the picture that made me go flashing back in the first place.

[Elle Decor]

Gorgeous, right?

My senior year in college, I lived off campus in the bottom floor of an old Victorian house. there was a kitchen and a bathroom, and the original living and dining rooms were the two bedrooms. To close off the archway between these two rooms, the owner had installed two tall panels--maybe sheetrock? on either side, and installed a door in the middle. The panels were in my room, and one of them tucked nicely behind a carved teakwood screen I had picked up at a yard sale to close off the "closet". But the other panel was an eyesore. I knew I couldn't hide it, so I would have to embrace it--make it into something.

I had studied Japanese art and the Japanese influence in late 19th and early 20th century European art the previous semester, so off I went to the library to look up some of the gorgeous Art Nouveau ineriors I remembered so well.

Based on my reference, I painted the panel a plum color, using a drag technique. Then used silver metallic paint to create a swaying tree trunk and long graceful branches, and a set of hand made potato stamp--so high tech!--to make the cherry blossoms from white and two shades of pink paint. While it certainly did not have the craftsmanship of the screen in the Elle Deco spread above, it had a similar effect.

I was so proud of that mural. I was a writing major and even wrote it into the apartment of a character in one of my stories. I wonder if it's still there, or who chose to paint over it.

Do you have fond memories of early ventures in DIY? Any projects that bring you back to a place and time? I'd love to hear about them.

Or, if you want to spend a lot of money on handmade paper art

You could buy it from West Elm.

Theirs is lovely, and the intricacy does make it seem expensive, but for $179, I think I'd stick to the $6.00 ones from the art supply store (my favorite, here) and a good old Ikea frame, and use the leftover cash to procure a ping pong table from craiglist. Because that's how big the price difference is.

Actually, my husband just did buy a ping pong table, after first getting all heartbroken when he missed out on a few--those things move fast. My little brother came over last night to help get the thing downstairs, and for a minute there it didn't look like it was going to make it through the door. And I had visions of this in the dining room:

[photo: Jessica Antola for the Wall Street Journal. See entire slide show here.]

But without an eat in kitchen, we actually need to use that space for, you know, eating. And unlike Jonathan Adler's partner Simon Doonan, I don't think MY husband would allow me to wallpaper or otherwise recover the ping pong table that he just bought. Luckily, with only a handful of power tools, the table made its way into our huge unfinished basement, which is now somehow all full up.

I see a search in my browser's google search bar that says "best beginner ping pong paddles." So that's sweet. And then I suppose we could use some his-and-hers needlepoint ping pong paddle covers, courtesy of Mr. Adler himself.

[special edition available at Kirna Zabete]

[Jonathan Adler]

But then, since the pink and orange one is $176 all by itself, that would bring us full circle on the whole saving money on art store paper thing, wouldn't it.

Paper as Art: logistics and more ideas

A loyal reader (okay, it's my mom) went out and bought some hand-made paper to hang in her vacation house in Arizona, but wanted to know how, exactly, I handled the framing of mine, in my dining room. Oh, details.

I bought these Ikea Ribba frames for $25 a piece. They happen to be the perfect size and proportion for the large-scale paper I bought.

I took the backs off the frames and put the mattes, front side up, on a large surface. I centered the paper ON TOP of the mattes to float them--losing the uneven edges would lose the hand-made quality to the paper, which would be a shame.

I attached the paper with double-sided tape at the four corners and in the middle of each side. The paper is uneven and doesn't lie 100% flat, but I liked the slight rippled effect and just used small pieces of tape so I wouldn't fight the natural edge.

When you go to put the frames back together, two things to note:

-- the plexi has a thin coating, kind of like saran wrap, on BOTH sides. You can pull it up from a corner, but you definitely need to remove both sides.

-- these frames are cheap for a reason. There are teeny tiny little screws that come with the wire kit, and you MUST use these in the little metal brackets on each side of the frame. Otherwise, when you go to hang them, the plexi will pop out of the frame. No good.

Want some more ideas? Here are some other paper options.


This type is smaller, comes in many colors this red was my favorite, but the peacock blue was not far behind), and I love the very fine quality of the line. I would use this somewhere more intimate, a smaller space like a bathroom, and frame just one of them in gold with black mattes. A single one would feel like something special brought back from a trip overseas.


These gold chrysanthemums would have strength in numbers. Like, six of them in a grid. The pattern and the line is very delicate, and because it repeats (unlike the red one, which has a centered motif), the more, the better. Frames could be natural, gold bamboo, or a Chinese red lacquer, depending on the decor. I would do these in a big hallway.



Finally, this sculptural white one might be my favorite. In fact, I find myself tempted to go back and get it! I would do this in a white shadowbox frame with an ivory linen matte, with the paper floating inside the matte. It would be gorgeous over a console in an entryway, particularly on a wall with some soft color.

If you have created art from paper in your home, send me a picture!

Hope you're enjoying the weekend,

$12 dining room art (plus the frames)

Remember this big blank accent wall? And how I decided it needed not a console but a nice big piece of art?


Well, after reeling in shock at the price of oversized artist canvases (the size I needed would have been $100 during the Blick 50% off sale--that's $200 regular price!), and having cashed in all my carpentry chips with the hubs for a while, and not wanting to build out a frame myself, AND admitting to myself that that's a lot of canvas for a non-artist to have a go at, I went another way. In fact, while pricing canvases and buying a projector, I took a peek in the big flat files over at Dick Blick's at the suggestion of my artist friend Amy (she thought I would find great inspiration for the blog header). And lookie here. I found this orange and coral tie-dyed nepalese paper, all splattered up in my favorite color: gold!

At under $6 a piece, I figured it wouldn't be such a loss even if they didn't work in frames and I used them for wrapping paper or something. Two big Ikea Ribba $25 frames later, and I'm loving my dining room all over again.


62 bucks seems okay to me for tackling such a big wall. I know I could have stenciled it, but didn't want an all-over pattern, or I could have done a blow up of a print (check out this amazing Durer reproduction in Lauren's Dining Room--hers was blown up on canvas), and either would have been (arguably) cheaper as a DIY. But this? This is done! Quickly! and there's value in that. Okay, not totally done. I do still want to do grasscloth on that wall to add a layer of warmth and depth, but for now I'm so happy to have a more finished-looking room.

I love the way the paper picks up the coral and red in the rug and the tone and pattern of the wood in our farm table. (My father-in-law and HIS father built that for us back when we were in Brooklyn. Isn't it beautiful?) I wanted something abstract to play against the graphic chandelier and the traditional rug. I chose the two pieces of paper that were the most different from one another, so they would look like two individual works of art. The top one has lots of all-over gold splatter, the bottom one has larger bubbles of coral, and more black, which grounds everything nicely. (I am finding that they are quite hard to photograph, with the light from the window reflecting off the plexi. I suppose that wouldn't happen with an actual painting, but oh well.)



The scale does a nice job standing up to the armoire on the other side of the room.


And I like the way the pair repeats on the pair of portraits visible in the living room. (don't be confused by the third head: that's my 2 1/2 year old, jumping on the couch, because hey, Mom's not looking, she's taking pictures of the house again!)



Also, giving credit where it's due. This whole repurposing hand-dyed paper thing was not my idea. I totally copied it. Nick Olsen used marbelized paper to add interest to a coffee table in a Domino spread a while back.

[via Domino]

Jenny at LGN blogged about that same marbelized paper and even framed some herself, here. It's making a run for it in the backs of secretaries and other furniture, like here. But most people who come into my house won't know that. And if it looks good, who cares? Makes me think of a quote from Amanda Peet when her house was featured in Domino and she said she didn't have a ton of original ideas, she just copied what she liked. See? I'm such a good copier, I'm even copying a quote about copying. (And yes, I read the articles. And remember random stuff like that.)

So I wonder: what have you coveted and copied in your home?

Collections

I've never been much of a collector. Or a vignetter, for that matter. As an adult, I think this has come from a combination of not enough space (a dozen years in NYC will either knock the collection right out of you or drive you to it, I think) and a practical side which understands that coffee tables are for feet, and magazines, and remote controls, and toys, and, well, coffee. Not coral fans and porcelein horses, lovely as they may be.

Yet I was stopped in my tracks by this collection of black objects in a home that recently appeared in Chicago Home and Garden. Gathered together and unified by hue, I find this so very striking.


The miss, for me, is that this was curated by a designer, and while I think they did a gorgeous job, I just can't imagine giving up this much space to things that were not personally meaningful to me.

And oh, okay, I did have two collections growing up. Vintage pins (you know, brooches) in elementary school and porcelein dolls, particularly harlequins, after that. I can't believe I am admitting this. But I need to collect the dolls from my closet at my parents house, so it's about time I confronted this collection. Literally.

What do (or did) you collect? Would you live with a collection gathered by someone else? Most importantly, if anyone was or is inspired by this or a similar collection and decides to take a can of black spraypaint to a bunch of old crap they find lying around the house, please, please send me a picture!

Macrame

That's right: macrame. That bastion of 1970s craftiness. My mom was really into it back then, and I just happen to have all her old how-to books. I taught myself the basic sets of knots about a decade ago, but never really did anything with them.

Well, the other day I dug out the books for some knot pattern inspiration for a possible stencil in Oliver's nursery, and while that idea has since gone by the wayside, I am loving some of the home decor applications of macrame.

This hammock is lovely, but kind of feels like an obvious use of the art of knotting.


This x-bench, on the other hand, feels totally original with those macrame straps. It makes me want to make that cat sound while I bat my "paw," but frankly I don't know how to spell it.


My parents had a pair of sheepskin director's chairs in our house when I was a kid (would love to have those now!), and I'm loving the lacy, delicate pattern of this knotted cover.


But the one that really makes me want to learn the art of macrame (again) is this take on a deck chair.


I love that the maker used a salvaged frame. Anyone come across one, send it my way and I'll get out the yarn and the T-pins. Macrame takes lots and lots of T-pins.

Wouldn't a pair of these be fabulous in navy and white yarn, with some wood beads on the fringe? Sing it, sister.

And just for fun, a quick look at some unique macrame fashions.

I would absolutely wear this white fedora.


But I'm not so sure about this contraption: "Belt for shy hot pants wearer". Well, that would certainly be me: I do not wear shorts. Ever. But to be honest, I'm not sure this belt would help!


Sources:
Dona Z. Meilach, Macrame: Creative Design in knotting (Crown Publishers, New York, 1971)
Dona Z. Meilach, Macrame Accessories: Patterns and Ideas for Knotting (Crown Publishers, New York, 1972)
Virginia I. Harvey, Macrame: The Art of Creative Knotting (Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1967)

Art you can make: cut-paper animals

Okay, I know I'm getting a little out of hand with the cut-paper art project (and I have another one or two--maybe three--up my sleeve), but I did a little experiment over the weekend and it turned out well enough to share.

One of the pictures we ordered for Oliver's nursery is smaller than we expected, and Oliver's dad liked the idea of pairing it with another small piece--he was thinking of an owl. Now, with the recent owl trend there are PLENTY of prints out there, some as cheap as ten bucks, so not exactly a budget buster. But something about an owl's feather markings and expression kind of made me think of wood-cut block prints, which kind of made me think of the whole paper cut thing that I recently mastered. I had some green cardstock, an exacto, and a piece of cardboard, so as long as I could find an hour, why not give it a try?

(As an aside, my first major art project as a kid was a papier-mache snowy owl, probably in third grade. I was so proud of that thing--I may have even entered it for a ribbon in the Dakota County Fair--so maybe there's something nostalgic at work here.)

Anyway, I found some pictures of owls on line and printed them out the size I wanted the final product to be. Then I used the same technique that I used for the botanicals in the girls room, tracing the image and then stapling the tracing paper to the cardstock around the outside of the drawing. I used an exacto knife to cut out all the interior detail first, then cut out the shape and spray mounted it to some heavy white watercolor paper. I then cut some pieces from the green carstock to fill in some negative space--the iris in the left eye and some little feather ripples in the belly--with a scissors and spray mounted them on. The hardest part was probably getting the spray mount off my thumbnails.



Anyway, here he is. I keep thinking of him as Oscar the Owl. I should mention that I used a cardstock with a bit of sheen, which is not coming through in this scan. The owl is also a pretty green. The paper is 8x10, to give you a sense of scale.

And here he is in a simple white frame from Target.



It remains to be seen if he will find his way into the finished room--this is a serious little fellow, perhaps TOO serious for the room--but I really kind of like him.

I wonder: what other animals would make good cut-paper portraits?

More botanicals

If you liked my floral botanical tutorial, but want to shake it up a bit more, check out this modern take at designsponge.

Cool, right?

After promising a reveal last weekend, I finally made a decision about mine, and went with the more delicate, leafy ones, traced from the curtain fabric in the girls room. I chose three in different sizes to break up the symmetry of the room, and went with clean white frames.


After MUCH debate, I decided to do a simple white background instead of a color or pattern, for a full black and white look. I struggled with this because really, if color is an option I want color, but I love the way the white allows the room to breathe and highlights the lovely light blue walls. This house is reminding me that white is a color, too!