For today we’ll go over the only room in the entire house that is actually finished. From curtains to carpet. This room is almost exactly how I want it. It’s still not quite perfect, I’d really love to replace the mirrored sliding closet doors, but considering that it’s actually painted, furnished, and has things hanging on the walls, it’s miles ahead of any place else around here.
I had the absolute hardest time getting any accurate pictures of the colors in this room. The color is a really pale orange. It’s not at all pastel, but it’s also not yellow. I had such a specific color in my head that I actually ended up painting this room twice because the first time didn’t quite cut it.
Obviously the theme I was going off of was the alphabet, but I didn’t want it to look like I’d just thrown up everything that had a letter on it, so I went to one of the best quilt shops in the world, which just happens to be down the street from the hospital, and picked out a bunch of gorgeous civil war reproduction fabrics in the color palette of the room. You can see those fabrics making up the letters on the quilt, the letters and circles on the bumper, the curtains, etc. I think they really brought the room together without getting into alphabet overkill.
Here’s the curtains:
I used the repro fabrics to make a striped valance, and then I used a cream fabric with a tone on tone alphabet print as the sheers. There is no space for a proper curtain rod in this corner, so I had to rig up a big contraption out of a 2×2 I covered in fabric, screwed into the wall, and then velcroed the valance to. Then I used screw hooks in the bottom of the 2×2 to hold the sheers which I inserted grommets into. It all looks just fine, but if you lift up the valance it’s pretty obvious that the whole thing is kind of MacGyver’d together.
Here’s a closeup of our reading corner with the finished quilt:
Bear picked out the dark blue fabric, it’s got kind of a denim print on it which he thought would be perfect for a little boy. I tell you, years of hard work training that man has paid off big. He comes up with great ideas all the time.
Here’s the bumper that goes with the quilt:
And now for the artwork. For years I’ve been collecting little stuffed animals that come from picture books. I’m admittedly Seuss heavy, but I also have Stellaluna and Verdi, Babar and Celeste, and one of these days I’ll track down a Paddington and Courderoy. I’d also collected a couple of Seuss prints that used to hang in our living room, but no longer fit with the new decor, so I needed a place to put this big messy collection. Pottery Barn carried the perfect solution with shelves that were 4″ deep and had a bar in the front to hold in odd sized items, but like most things at Pottery Barn they were horribly overpriced and you never know about the quality. Instead I went to etsy and used their incredible Alchemy tool to find a craftsman to make them for me. I went with woodshed and was absolutely thrilled with the results.
On the opposite wall I have framed pages from picture books. I thought long and hard about which books to choose, and once we found out Atti was a boy I had to start thinking all over again. I wanted stories that were iconic and instantly recognizable, with a boy protagonist, preferably a human boy protagonist. I’m really happy with what I ended up using.
There’s a page from Where the Wild Things Are, one from Harold and the Purple Crayon, and the last one is Gerald McBoing Boing. Huge thanks to my dear friend Shutterbug for her help with this project. By the way, that picture is probably the closest example of the actual paint color.
Tomorrow we’ll focus on individual projects…