Crochet Ball Chain

My house is looking really plain now that the decorations are down. Here in the north of the UK, there is generally not much light in the winter so a few pops of colour to cheer us up work well.

I've very happy with the new blankets. Not sure where they will end up, but they are on a chair beside the fireplace today.

Here are the little crochet balls, threaded on a piece of wool, with a crochet chain at each end to tie on. They are quite fiddly to make, so this week, I have only made a little chain, but I like how they cheer up the fireplace.

Homemakerstales asked me whether I used Farrow and Ball paint. I've used "Blackened" for the fireplace , which was previously orange pine, and "Pavillion Gray" for the cupboard in the top picture. I've yet to use F and B wall paints but look forward to choosing some when I'm ready to paint the walls.

I Spy a Wooden Floor

Now, my dad should know better by now: "Don't dare rip up that good carpet!", he said.
Hmmm. He would have been better saying "That carpet is disgusting - old fashioned and dirty - get it ripped out immediately!" I never do what I'm told.

Now look away if you have a sensitive disposition - here is my old carpet. Perfectly nice when installed sometime in the 1980's around the time of the first Royal Wedding.



I spy under the carpet a rather nice wooden floor.



So, here I am decorating the livingroom. Stripping wallpaper is evil work, especially when the paper was vinyl, and it is essentially a top layer of stretchy plastic. It seems to create a very gloopy sticky papier mache. You can tell what I've decided to do with the carpet by the fact there are no dust-sheets down.

Sunday: No Cost Conservatory Makeover

On Sunday, we interspersed playing in the garden in the heat, with a no-cost makeover of my mum's conservatory using things we found in the house and shed.

Previously it contained heavy, flowery, rather dated 1980's style curtains, green painted furniture, and a lot of boot room/porch junk, like scarves, hats, coats, vases, etc. Although it is on the side of the house, my mum's house like lots of Scottish houses faces its back to the wind and rain, and you have to go round the back to get in the front door, if you know what I mean. So people tend to come in the side conservatory, and leave their coats and things there.
So, here's what we did: "Mum?", I said tactfully, "Do those curtains have white linings? Maybe they'd be nice hung up on their own. They'd look like white cotton curtains". And after bleaching, they seem to be quite nice. Here they are:

Just outside the window, sheltering from the inevitable rain we had later, in the woodpile, you can spy a little white chair. These were previously green. I painted them with some white paint, and I think they look nice now. The old pine in the picture is a bench at the table, which is actually an old church pew.

Here are the chairs perched out in the woodpile. I had to paint them with gloss, because that is all that was available, and it is quite a smelly paint, so we left the chairs outside for a couple of days.

Then, while the paint was drying and the curtains were bleaching, we took some photos around the garden:

and put them in old clip frames to hang on the conservatory wall

above an old blue plant pot, waiting for a new plant to fill it,

above an old cupboard, that used to belong to my gran. She probably bought it in the 1930's. It wasn't an expensive piece of furniture, so we painted it a nice soft cream, using emulsion. It will need an eggshell top coat eventually, but we were 30 miles from the nearest paint shop, and trying not to spend any money. The little cupboard now contains all the hats, scarves etc that were lying around.
The little label is a wooden sign of my mum's saying something like "leave room for the angels to dance in your garden".