"An Art", or two

The phrase "an art" is from McMansion Hell.

I made it to the Cozy Minimalism phase of putting art and things up on the walls. The method emphasizes using fewer, larger, more meaningful pieces, rather than a horde of smaller things with little individual presence.

So I grabbed a big framed Ikea print from the garage; my husband picked it up by the side of the road a while back, and he has a plan for re-using it. But for now, it can be on the wall; the pattern and colors actually fit in well with the rest of the room. It took three tries for me to figure out exactly where to put the nail in the wall, but small nail holes in drywall are easy to fill, with a little spackle.

In some lights it acts more like a mirror, but the reflections are not unwelcome. That wall has always been poorly-lit and overly dark.

For the other big empty space, over the fireplace, I did a Wary Meyers sort of visual brainstorming; you can read about the method here.  Turning the paper sideways works wonderfully for sketching little concept drawings by the dozen, and that was what I did.

Eventually I figured out that for something to be meaningful, there would have to be some sort of connection to our pasts or family history. From there, it was a short step to remember the kinds of doilies that my grandmother used to crochet. With some research, and some math, and some experimenting, I was able to come up with a scaled-up crochet pattern that I could crochet in cotton string for that wall space.

I'll go into much more detail in a future post, but as of now it is done and up on the wall, and it is quite striking.

I was careful to proportion it so that its width was not more than two-thirds of the width of the fireplace opening.

I also found that it was better to not exactly duplicate my grandmother's crochet pattern, but to do a somewhat modernized interpretation of it...so that it could evoke the past without looking like one of her doilies resurrected itself, somehow found its way into my house, and then climbed up onto my wall when I wasn't looking. The things you learn, when you actually go and do things.