Artful and Productive
I think Brad and I switched weekends. Usually he is home with his family working on projects for their impending move, and I'm usually out and about with my friends- shopping, hanging out, watching movies and having fun.
This weekend there was hanging out and fun, but I was also really productive around the house. Caryn is coming to visit at the end of the month, and that has been good incentive to finally finish getting my room the way I want it. All my framed art has been leaning against a wall in the corner for over a year. So Dee came over on Sunday and we hung stuff, turning my massive expanses of blank white wall into something pretty.
I could have just hung them myself, but I also wanted to put up shelves, and Dee has a makita. And thank goodness Dee knows about this stuff- I'm one of those "put a nail in the wall and hang a picture on it" people- she took me to home depot and we got drywall screws and photo hangers and all kinds of stuff. Good thing I don't plan to move my pictures around much. Part of what took me so long to get them hung is that it takes me a long time to decide what I like, and once I decide, it goes up and stays there. In my old place, my living room was done in B&W photography, but some of those belonged to my roommate. My bedroom was done in brightly colored flower posters,like this one, which I decided I wasn't wild about anymore.
I had collected a couple of new pieces, a gorgeous red piece and a black and white of a ballerina mid-leap. The ballerina didn't fit with the rest of the art because of its shape and the frame, which was fine because I decided I wanted that somewhere else anyway. Dee came up with a great concept, since I love black and white, and had the really cool monocrome red piece. We went to Michaels in search of a couple of new B&Ws and ended up finding a gorgeous blue piece that went with my room and the concept we had come up with for the wall. Ironically enough, the blue piece is an enlargement of a piece of one of the old flower studies I didn't like anymore.
Once the shopping was complete we went back to my house and tackled the project. We've all been complaining about the cold spring we've had, and then Sunday was gorgeous. My room is the warmest room in the house, so we had all the windows open and the window fan going. We tackled the main room first as it had the most to be done. There was much measuring and drilling and hammering, and my bed got covered in carboard boxes and shrink wrap and various detritus, but I am so happy with the result.
Then we moved on to where I wanted to hang the ballerina- over the mirror in the bathroom. You can't completely tell from the pictures, but the east wall of my room is about 16 feet high. Those shelves in the above pic are above door level- the pictures are hung even with the top of the doorframe, and you can see how much wall is still above the shelves. So the bathroom wall is that high too.
The frame for the ballerina gave her some trouble- it's from IKEA so why am I not surprised? This is probably my favorite pic from sunday:
She's crouching on the top of the vanity trying to fix the corner where the backing had popped out. We ended up reinforcing the frame's brackets with brads that wouldn't give way when the wire was pulled up against it. I love how it looks.
There are some smaller pieces scattered around, and I'm looking for a couple more big pieces to fill in some holes, but I love how my room turned out. It's what I have been wanting to do with it for a long time, but never got around to doing it. All the pieces but one have been around the house, they just never got put together. I'm glad that it's done and that I can stop thinking about it now.