The Symbiosis of Needlepoint and Writing

This is a Beth Russell needlepoint kit based on a William Morris design.  He was a leader of the Arts and Crafts movement at the end of the 19th century and his many designs for fabric and wallpaper are still much in use today.

I love to write during the daylight hours, and have been spending lots of hours lately--as most of you know--transcribing those World War II letters of my father.  I'm now on letter #198, have transcribed 116,354 words of my father's purple prose to my mother, and have about 70 more letters to go. 

I wonder if these letters used up his entire lifetime quota of words.  For the rest of his life, he was such a quiet person.

Anyway, with so much writing work ahead, I find myself wanting to take a break in the evenings.

Seven More "Mom" Chairs Emerge From the Attic: Aha! More Architectural Antiques

One of a pair. As if one were not enough.

I've been eyeing two chairs my sister found in the attic a month ago--two of seven she brought down this time during an exploratory climb during her visit. My mother bought lots of chairs at garage sales during her lifetime, with the idea that she would "re-do" them at some point. We've found more than a couple of dozen so far. Some of them--some of the earliest she bought--are really lovely. Anyway, she never got around to the re-do part.

Some of the later ones were more than a little iffy. It is possible, at a certain point, not wearing her glasses may have impacted her taste.

I've re-covered several of the best of them, and they look great--a real tribute to her artistic perception. But two of the ones that came down recently were especially peculiar. (See photo above) I don't think different fabric would have helped.

I've been eyeing them for the two carved pieces on the back. Machine carved, I think, and then glued in place--but that part of the chair is at least a little bit interesting. And from a distance ... Well, today I took out my little hammer.



The chairs were just pegged together so the work went quickly. Pretty soon, I had those "architectural" pieces safely removed.

They could use a little polish, but that part is easy.

I have these two spots over the closets in one of my bedrooms and the more I've stared at them, the more they look like they need a little something up there. And I'm thinking of putting up those two carved pieces.



I've done it before with the backs of two chairs from Mom's collection. The chairs had no seats, so we couldn't even give them away at the garage sale. They've made for interesting decor in the country kitchen.



So as far as the bedroom goes--you'll have to stay tuned. I'm in the middle of polishing my architectural antiques. I hope my sister doesn't mind about the chairs.

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Retreating to the Frivolous

A new/old rug I ordered, made in the Caucasus in the 1920s arrived this morning. The guest room is getting so nice, I may have to move in there myself.

With so much of import happening in the world--the brave Nobel Prize winner in Burma, finally released from house arrest, the 90-day freeze on settlements in the West Bank, our elected bozos--I mean representatives--gathering in Washington to face tax and spend issues--I feel a bit overwhelmed by how little impact I am having on the large issues of today.

So, I retreat into decorating my house: the one space in this world over which I temporarily have totalitarian control.

After my first very positive experience with Bukhara-Carpets.com, the company in Europe that is exporting rugs from the former Soviet Republics in the Silk Road region, I gathered up my courage to make a second purchase. Their prices are so reasonable and this rug took less than a week to arrive. Fedex from Luxembourg goes faster than a letter does across the US.

I have to confess: with all the terrorism shipping issues of recent days, I was glad this rug came to me via Luxembourg. But it still didn't escape the relentless gaze of U.S. Security.

The only hitch is that since the rugs come from Moslem regions of the world, originally--I had to fill out a special customs form for them, which probably will put me on a terrorism watch list for the rest of my life. Oh well.

While I was waiting for the rug to arrive, I took an old friend of mine--a needlepoint I had completed back in the 1980s, that I had retired for the past decade--and stripped it of its old fabric and took it to the needlepoint store for a re-do with some white damask I had lying around. It arrived on Saturday and it really does seem like an auld acquaintance come home again.

I forget the name of the painting this is from. If you know--shoot me an email.

The cat is a tiny piece of a famous American primitive painting that is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. She used to be a feature of my home in Bethesda, Maryland and has now found a new place on the four-poster-I-found-in-the-rafters. I still have to add a piece of cranberry piping to the edge of the pillow to give it a little zing. But it is nice to see her again.



And, one more treat: after looking at several thousand toile patterns I found one I really liked that is like a joke within a joke. It is a toile fabric that shows peasants on it making toile fabric! Funnier still: this French pattern comes from an American company, Fabriccut. I think it is a wonderful fabric, and if I can afford it, I've just about decided to use it on the drapes in the guest room. The color is more cranberry than red, and there is lots of white space, which I think helps to makes a toile more durable, in terms of living with it over time. Fabric that is too busy can grow tiresome.

The toile-de-toile-de-toile. I like this because it shows people working. So many toiles are full of cherubs and silly bucolic scenes.

I think I'm probably doing a little fighting off of the holiday blues this year with my decorating. Last year at this time, Mom was still at home--in this home I'm living in now--and Dad was his delightfully goofy self up the hill in nursing care. Mom died on December 11th of last year, just between Thanksgiving and Christmas and just after that my niece got married. We're now expecting a new family member for the New Year. So life goes on. Not easily, nor without sorrow: but spiced with little bits of joy here and there that help to keep us all holding out hope for the future. Objects can fill a home with beauty. But it is the memories we hold of those we love that truly bring us joy.

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Old Baluch, New Decor, Lawrence of Arabia and Homeland Security

The new antique Baluch rug in the old bedroom with the new paint.

I have wanted a couple of antique rugs for the bedroom I just painted, the one which uses the four-poster bed I found up in the rafters of the garage at my parents' home. Mom was a pack rat, bless her heart.

And since I am a firm believer in using your pocketbook to vote your principles, I decided I didn't want anything from Iran in the room, even though those rugs are often the loveliest. They are also the most expensive, as they have become the most chic. So thrift was a second motive for my search beyond Iran.

When the deep purple falls, over sleepy garden walls ... the first photo of the room was taken in the bright light of morning, this in the afternoon as the room takes on a different aspect.

My niece served in Afghanistan with the military and also in Uzbekistan with the Peace Corps (she's eclectic in her service) and thus, I decided on trying to find a vintage Silk Road rug for the room. A Silk Road rug would be one from what I call the Stans: Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan and the other Stans that were once part of the Soviet Union or their sphere of influence.

Somebody else had thought of this before I did, and has an Internet business importing vintage rugs from these parts of the world. You can still get them there for nothing and sell them at a tidy profit--all to the benefit of this impoverish part of the world as well as the importer and the shopper. They have a great web site at: Bukhara-Carpets.com, and they are based in Luxembourg. I perused their vintage and antique pieces and found one at a great price (under $1000 ) and decided to buy it as a test of how this might work. I used my USAA credit card and Pay-Pal so I could cancel the payment if the business was not legit.

The rug I ordered, took just a week to get here and it is gorgeous!



Made in about 1900, it is a red Baluch rug, probably made in Afghanistan. I have good company in my taste for this style, which I learned watching a show about T.E. Lawrence as I waited for my rug to arrive. T.E. Lawrence, known as Lawrence of Arabia, took part in a somewhat nasty raid on a Turkish train during his time with the Arab revolt and on September 24, 1917, wrote a friend about the adventure: "The Turks then nearly cut us off as we looted the train, and I lost some baggage and nearly myself. My loot was a superfine red Baluchi prayer-rug".

T.E. Lawrence's natural father was Sir Thomas Chapman, so perhaps I inherited this taste for red Eastern rugs via my DNA. Being connected to this crazy genius is one of my fantasies so please indulge me in this. (His grandfather was named William Chapman and so was my great grandfather.)

The rug was well depicted on the Internet site and is worn as I expected it would be, but well-made and beautiful. Rich of color, it seems to change depending upon the light that hits. it.

The old red Baluch, worn but lovely.

The only hang-up came when Fedex called from Memphis and said they had to email me a U.S. Customs form to fill out and sign as the rug's "importer." Turned out it was a form generated by the Department of Homeland Security. So now I'm on their tracking list as some kind of suspicious character with activities involving Muslim rugs and will probably pay for this with further hastles the next time I'm going shoeless through the security line. Thus we live with the aftermath of 9/11. ( "But officer, the rugs came to me via Luxembourg!")

But, it only held up the Baluch for about 24 hours and I was, frankly, surprised the thing actually got here at all, not to mention looking as beautiful as I had hoped. I'm not inclined to think that Al Gore invented the Internet. It couldn't possibly work this well if he had.

BTW: I got this idea from my friend Polly, who had a living room strewn with red, antique Persian rugs and they made her home look gorgeous, no matter how she arranged the furniture. I get all my best decorating ideas from stealing. Thank you Polly!

Gotta go. I'm going to order another Silk Road rug before the rest of you buy out the best ones.

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More Found Art at Fort Chapman

After our garage sale a few months ago, I was looking up in the rafters of the garage and saw something quite remarkable. I called my sister. "It looks like there is a four-poster bed up there in the eaves. Do you have any idea where that came from?" I asked her.

She said she thought our mother had cut down the posts on several other beds and what I was looking at was the residue.

I couldn't stand not to know so I had my friend and neighbor Mickey climb up on my ladder and hand all the pieces down to me. It was not residue after all. It was a lovely four-poster in cherry or walnut (I'm guessing), stained a nice rich mahogany. Just in time for me to use it in the bedroom I'm re-doing!



Living on Echo Drive is like having a furniture and knickknack store at one's disposal at all times. My cup overfloweth.

Where the heck this bed came from I can only speculate. At one point in my youth my mother bought an old set of furniture from a neighbor up the street and used some of it in the room my sister and I shared. Did it include this bed, and was this bed up in the eaves for half a century? We will never know. But it is a lovely find and I intend to use it in the guest room, now to be dubbed the Four Poster Room.

I have also finally found a color I am going to use on the walls of the room--a Behr Paint color called French Castle (more about the French later in this report!), that is a taupey/grayish/pinkish putty color. With spiffy white glossy woodwork it will look ab fab.

I used a similar color to this one in the living room of my cottage in Winter Park, Florida and called it British Khaki. Add fabrics of white damask, soft pink and bright raspberry to the room--with a dash of green--and it creates a look that is warm and serene, just the way I like things.

I have used the term "found art" a lot on this blog because I have found so much stuff in the caverns of this home and have used pieces of it here and there as "art." You remember the chair pieces I used on the cross beams of the kitchen, don't you?

These were part of two chair backs I found in the garage that had no seat or legs. So I took a hammer to them and put the carvings up in the kitchen. They are just the kind of quirky things that remind me of Mom.

I realize now that I have been using a slightly wrong term for these things. I was watching a program on African Art this week and the expert mentioned that the painter had used object trouvé in his work. That's French for "found art" and as you know, the best terms for everything are all disguised in French. So, object trouvé is what we have a lot of here at my house.

And I trouvéd even more of it up there in the eaves!

That's me photographing my latest object trouvé aka a mirror. I propped it against the car because it appears the mirror has gone milky and I'll need to transport it to a glass place and have a new mirror put in the lovely frame.

Up there with the four-poster, covered with a filthy, dusty plastic tarp, was this old mirror. It came attached to a swivel that one is supposed to then attach to a dresser, but I unscrewed it from that because that isn't a look I like (too faux Victorian) (faux being the French word for "false" by the by, and you have to say faux, when referring to art or style, or no one will know what you mean, as "false" sounds just too too much like you got it wrong by accident.) Once I get the glass replaced, I'm going to hang it on the wall of the Four Poster Room. I especially love the carved bow at the top of the frame.



I wish I could tell you I had reached the bottom of the object trouvé mine shaft at this house, but I have to say there is still a lot more stuff here and there that I have not yet gotten to. My father's only curse words were said when he was periodically required to climb a ladder and store this stuff out of sight against the day these things might be needed. That day has finally arrived, Dad! And all that stuff you stored for Mom? Some of it is absolutely junque, it is true. But the stuff that isn't, I am using, because it has a certain je ne sais quoi and thus, fits in perfectly with the rest of the I-don't-know-what I'm using in decorating your old and wonderful home, which will forever remind me of you.

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Decorating with Found Art

After my mother's death I discovered a box in the attic that contained nothing but the four legs of a stool. I was so disgusted, I threw them all in the woodpile. Then, I retrieved this piece to hang on the wall of the breezeway between the garage and the house, as a reminder of what can happen to one when one begins to collect things.

There is a lot of Found Art to be found around the home I've inherited from my parents.

At least I hope you can call it Found Art. Since I'm finding it, that is what I'm calling it. Some might call what I'm finding "architectural antiques." Some might want to be more frank and call it "pieces of old chairs," which I've discovered stored in numerous corners of this abode. Anyway, I'm decorating with it so I can call it Art if I want to.

I don't know what terrible thing happened to my mother when she was young. But someone must have deprived her of a chair or something. Because she developed a sort of an obsession with them, which I know I've mentioned before.

Two of the "chairs" that didn't sell at our garage sale were actually just the backs of two chairs--no front legs or seats. After the sale, I took a hammer to them, (who is the crazy person in this story?) and used them to decorate some blank spaces that had been troubling me on the beams and above the windows in the kitchen.

A carved chair back on the kitchen cross beam in the foreground and a supporting carved chair piece above the window in the background.

My sister thinks these chair pieces look like birds: I think they look like angels, though as such they remind me of no one in my own family.

A closer look at the carved chair back I put up on the cross beam in the kitchen.

Quite a bit of stuff I've found as I've cleaned out this house has been sold, tossed, or donated. But a few weeks ago I retrieved these things from a pile I'd made in the garage. For now I've placed them on the hearth.


The orchid and the Herend and Portmerion cache pots are mine: the other things are Found Art, including; the curved iron pot hangers which I'm thinking of putting up in the beams of the beamed ceiling in the living room; the copper fondue pot that holds the orchid; and the three hand-carved chair rails that once graced a gone-to-seed Mexican chair stored in our backyard shed.

You can tell me if you think this is a good idea or not. I'd love to hear from others who have used Found Art in decorating. For now I can say these positive things about decorating with this junk: if you had parents like mine, you can find it all around you, so you have no shortage of decorating inspirations; your investment in it is zero, so your risk is equally minimal; when that big earthquake comes, as it inevitably will in California, you don't have to worry that this stuff will be damaged when it falls down--it is already damaged beyond repair anyway.

And finally, the best part about it is that when you change your mind and decide it isn't really Art after all, it has a immediate second life: you can always use it for firewood come the winter.

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