Forced Sabbatical

What began as a fun evening out with our granddaughter - to celebrate her 8th birthday - ended with a trip to the emergency room and a very clumsy splint on my arm.  Water on a stained concrete floor in a darkened mall combined with fast past walking and high heel boots is nothing less than a recipe for disaster.  The fact that I am able to type is a miracle.

The preliminary diagnosis is a severely sprained left wrist.  Tomorrow, after a follow-up visit to an orthopedic doctor, I will know if it is more than that.  More importantly I will know how long I will have to wait before I can knit or crochet.  My need for constant creativity is forcing me in another direction.  Actually, I am going in reverse, back to one of my pre-yarn passions: home decor and collecting vintage items that speak of a time gone by.

Several life events caused me to suspend the decorating and nurturing of our home.  Those events are not important now, what is important is that I have a renewed interest and passion for nesting.  The first step will be to build an addition on our house so that our daughter and her children will have a space of their own.  Then, I can reclaim our house as our own.

I am fortunate enough to have inherited many beautiful pieces of furniture and decorative accents.  Most of these I have put away to protect them from three small children.  I feel like I have had a breath of new life has filled me as I anticipate this new phase of our life.

I have found many new and wonderfully inspirational blogs to follow.  Through these blogs I am reminded how much I love things that are used, white, chipped, and worn.  Things that tell a story.

Intellectually, I love things from so many eras - 1940's post war bright and cheery, mid century cool, as well as modern traditional comfort.  I like to look at them, but they don't move my soul.  The look that generates a visceral reaction is the visually complex layers and textures of the Victorian shabby chic genre.  My version is pared down with interesting vignettes, soft neutral colors with accents of black and aqua.  This is the direction I plan on taking my living room.  A large "great room" popular among home builders of the 1980's.  There will be a formal side and a more casual side unified by color.  A neutral black, cream and gold will be accented with aqua on the casual side and aqua with a touch of pink on the formal side.





Sound bizarre?  I think it will be a challenge to pull it off, but have the foundation of some beautiful furnishings and a pair of Art Deco style lamps from the 40's.  These were my mother-in-laws and I loved them from the moment I first saw them.  Now they, along with her Duncan Phyfe sofa are the cornerstone of my vision.




There are other pieces of furniture and other rooms, but that is for another day.

Until we meet again...

Sheryl

Passages

We had a new front door installed on our home this week.  This was a decision years in the making and the final choices were agonized over and made very carefully.  We will be looking at this door for the rest of our lives.  It needed to be right.

I'm not sure when it happened.  If I press myself to remember I would say that it started many years ago while driving in the country; I needed to clear my head and make sense of a very emotional situation. 


I love to get into the car and drive, stopping to take pictures - artsy pictures as my husband calls them.  Looking through the lens of the camera I can create a reality that is all my own.  No one else will ever view the scene in exactly the same way that I do.  It is mine and mine alone.

To enter or not to enter, that is the question.

At some point, on one of those drives I became enamored with doors.  Oh, the stories they could tell.  Doors allow people in, keep the weather out, and give clues about the people inside.  Doors can be utilitarian or decorative.  But, the one thing that all doors have in common is that they provide passage.  Passage in and passage out.

Very old building (1600's) in Montpellier France.

There are doors we all walk through as we pass from one phase of our life to another.  Some of those doors are beautiful and others are not.  There have been some deceptively beautiful doors in my life that I wish I had never opened.  I often wonder, what was behind those doors I ignored?  I'll never know - this side of heaven anyway. 

Never being a risk taker,  I have I probably walked past more doors I was to have opened, than going where I didn't belong.  These days I try to choose my doors wisely, asking and trusting God to guide me according to His plans for me and my life.  All I can hope is that I listen and trust in what I can't see more than I believe in what is visible.