The Dining Room Gets Smaller with Each New Coat of Paint!

I mentioned, in an earlier post, that our dining room has been through a lot of changes. So I decided to chronicle some of those changes this morning. 

We bought this house in late 2004.

The color of the wall . . . . changed and then changed again!

The table changed, too....

The art on the wall changed over the years....

And the curtains went through several changes.....

The fan light will be gone in subsequent shots; watch for it!

I eventually tacked one of my quilt creations onto a huge cork board, surrounded by striped wall paper and trimmed with cording we made with a drill.....

 Ah! The ceiling fan disappeared! This was a recent addition: track lighting with pendant lights.

And of course the most important part of any decorating scheme is the people who grace the rooms....

Why, there's Ed, my dear daddio. ,making our dining room especially good! Love you, Dad.

I quit! I have had a lot of fun this morning, reliving the passage of time through our dining room.

Susan

Daisy Border

My sewing room has been through m any changes in the past seven years. After we painted the walls two-toned green - with two colors of paint in the same roller pan - I wanted a trim  between the lateral green striped effect on the top part of the wall and the scumbled green on the bottom of the wall. I was not happy with my first attempt to create a border - see photo; that's orange paint applied with a sponge cut in a rough square. At least I had some sort of border, though, right? I eventually decided I wanted a more structured design for a border/trim. So I scanned a real flower from our garden, dropped the scan into a Word Doc, then added a black border around the flower. I printed up a batch of these so I could glue them on the wall....

Trouble was, I had to cover up those ugly orange squares first. For this, I turned to my trusty old friend, brown wrapping paper. I cut the brown paper into strips, then glued it on the wall where I wanted the border to be. Then I glued the flowery squares over the brown paper.

PS: I love working with wallpaper paste; it's fun and easy to use.

Photo Display

The library in our town used to allow us to make copies for free - up to 10 copies a day for free. We lived across from the library for six years. I would drop photos into a Word Doc,  then print them at the library. Dropping them into a Word doc allowed me to re-size and crop the photos. The copier at the library only made black and white prints, but that was OK with me; I like B&W photography. 

After I found some metal picture frames at a yard sale, I tried to find a way to display photos so that I could change them out willy-nilly when I tired of a set of photos.

I painted some 1x2 boards and we arranged them on the wall so that we could trap the picture frames between the boards. This worked really well . . . . except that the frames were hard to get in and out of their positions between the boards. The interchangeable aspect of this display became a moot point, though, when we opted to put a pass-through in this wall; I never did get the opportunity to change out the initial set of photos! I would definitely try something like this again. It is an effective way to display photos. But if I tried this again, I would find an easier way to attach the photos to the wall. I'm just sayin' . . . .

For newer versions of photo displays, click on the link below. 

A huge photo display

Bible Pages On the Wall

My sewing room has gone through many metamorphoses in the past seven years. Since I don’t have a lot of time this morning I think I’ll share just one photo: This is the way the wall in my sewing room looks now; it is covered with pages from bibles. After those pages went on the wall, I thought to also add some photos I had left over from another project.

Smiley Face

When our son Bob was a wee tot he loved to draw stick figures. I'm not apt to save children's artwork, but I just had to save one of his stick men for posterity.

One day I decided to copy Bob's smiley face stick man onto canvas. This was not  hard to do: I traced the original onto a piece of paper - because I didn't want to any harm to come to the original - then traced the copy onto the canvas. 

The result was simple but stunning. I made one of these for Bob and gave it to him so he could hang it in his home, then, some time later I made one for our home, too. 

Here's a shot of Bob when he was a 'wee tot.' That smile! What a smile!!

And here is a more recent pic of Bob.