Room for the loom

I have taken over yet another room in the house, this time for the yarn stash. This is the smallest bedroom. It was sort of mustard and baby poop brown, which made the room feel very small and close. I painted it Secret Scent by Behr, with a white ceiling. It's a gentle lavender and I love it.

Tapestry, like quilting, requires a bit of a stash. Getting a gradation of values with yarn can be even more challenging than with fabric. But there are interesting tricks. Please check out Sarah Swett's blog post on value, Go ahead, I'll wait. Really, her post is genius and so beautifully written too.

I got to meet and take a workshop from Sarah almost three years ago. I was too new to spinning (and knew nothing about tapestry) to fully appreciate how lucky I was to spend time with her. The class was on mixing colors and values in wool for spinning, but it covered so much more. This was my first ever selfie, taken with Sarah at the workshop.

The class was very meaningful to me, in a lot of ways. I was wrestling with the decision to curtail my teaching travel and dealing with creative burn out. I learned a lot in a few days, and about way more than how to blend wool.

When deciding how to set up a room I often start by checking out what will be seen first. Does anyone else do that? I consider what little vignette will be seen when passing by the door. I'd like it to be intriguing, welcoming, to pull us into the room and then see that there is more to discover.

There's more to do, clearly, but setting up the loom room meant unpacking six more boxes. We're getting there. I'm on the fence about bringing up the floor loom, it will fill up the room fast, but I'm sure not going to use it in the basement. We're still waiting for the old house to choose its new family. There's been a lot of interest in the last couple of weeks, we're hoping for good news soon.

The paint goes on

I think I may have mentioned how much the previous owners liked brown. Almost every room was brown, from the color of a Hershey bar wrapper in the living room to a mustardy baby-poop brown in the smallest bedroom. The living room was painted a soft green (Behr Chinese Jade) before the furniture arrived and the studio now glows in Blushing Apricot.

It took me a while to find just the right shade of blue for the master bedroom. I wanted sky blue, actually I wanted haint blue, as in the southern term for ghosts blue, the proper color for porch ceilings in the south. I finally settled on Clear Blue Sky by Glidden and Kent painted while I recovered from strep throat. (Four days of fever spent on the couch in front of the tv, I am now an expert on building log cabins in Alaska.)

The mirror in the master bath has a silver frame. The fixtures are brushed nickle. The tile is a warm brown with very dark tones, and, as you can see, the counter top is black with brown bits. The black vessel sink is the dumbest thing ever, every spot shows.

I wanted to use these seed packet prints that came with us from Saginaw, but the frames were antique gold and just didn't look right with the silver mirror. A small bottle of black acrylic paint and a tube of Rub'n Buff in silver changed them right over.

The hardest part was waiting for the paint to dry! They look terrific with the mirror, exactly the same finish, and I really like how the brown tones in the pictures play so well with the counter top. I'm not sure about the silver with all the brown (which isn't going anywhere any time soon), but I love it with the blue.