Workin' On the Guest Room

I live my life on lay-away,  doin' a little at a time, and that's how I'm re-doing the guest bedroom. I don't have before pictures, one result of doing things so haphazardly, and I'm not finished, which is another result. But here are some pics of where I am at the moment.

I wanted to add hits of white, without painting furniture, which I neither like to do nor do well.

These pics are of the hub's family, previously framed in some wooden frames I didn't want to paint. So I found some cheap ones at Walmart, painted them up with Annie Sloan chalk paint and covered some mats in old wallpaper graphics from Graphics Fairy. (The bear was part of a gift from the hub in the early eighties. His paws are clips and they held a gold chain. I think I like the bear every bit as much as I do the gold chain. The bit of tatting around his neck is something I picked up long ago in a box of old linens.)

I made the bedskirt of medium weight linen from Dharma Trading. Need I say I did it in bits, and it took forever? For quite a while I had only the end and one side finished--and on the bed. I ran out of linen and had to order more, and then couldn't remember what weight I'd used and wound up mis-ordering twice before I finally got the right weight. Which just gives me gobs more linen to use in sewing.

I go the easy route on making bedskirts, constructing them as if they were an actual skirt with fabric gathered onto a "waistband," which is  upholstery-pinned to the mattress. Then I can change them out easily without removing the mattress.

Another Graphics Fairy image, Citra-solve transferred to a linen/cotton blend  from Dharma Trading (one of the mis-orders). The first time I ever did the Citra-solve method, it smudged a little at the top, but I won't tell if you don't.

This is a vignette I'm not yet happy with yet. (Aside from the fact that it's messy. I read in this room, hence the reading glasses I usually corral in the pottery.) The doll was a gift from my baby sister a few years back, and I'd been displaying itr in a sewing machine drawer I didn't want to paint. So, instead, I painted up an old clementine box, added some corkboard in the back to hide some staining from clementines gone bad, and used the Mod Podge method to transfer another Graphics Fairy image. (Like Graphics Fairy much? Yes, I do!) The books are covered with wallpaper images, also from Graphics Fairy. One of the things I still plan to do is tie them up with twine, instead of the lace, and add a number tag.

I have no good reason to show this side of the bed, except for what I consider my ingenuity. A couple of years ago, I bought a bedside table that was equal to the height of the mattress, which this table is not. The top on the new one was messed up where someone had scratched a name into the finish. I bought it anyway, thinking I could use the furniture/refinisher stuff to even out the finish. Didn't work, so the hub started sanding. The top is now beautifully sanded, but the rest needs to be done--it has two drawers. So the table has been sitting in his workshop ever since. It's too hot to work on it in the summer, which we have a lot of here in Texas, and when it's not summer, we've both forgotten about it. So this was my "temporary" fix. I stacked books up to reach the height of the bed and added a tray across the back to set the lamp on. The table in the shop may or may not ever get finished, but this is working so I'm not complaining.

I'll be sharing this post with The Graphics Fairy Brag Monday. Check it out--there's some really clever people out there in blog-land. Also sharing at Chic on a Shoestring's Flaunt it Friday.