Two new things

We spent part of our vacation in a place which has notably better salvage opportunities than our suburban neighborhood does. I did a lot of walking around and looking at things and considering possibilities. I was mostly looking for a replacement for my string art piece.

I knew that I wanted a more or less oval shape, and a rather large one. I figured that whatever I found, I could clean up and paint white.

I saw no ovals, but a lot of circles. Our school room already has enough circular shapes in it, and most of the ones I found were either far too heavy to quickly hang up on the wall, or too lacking in character.

I've learned that when I'm hunting through clutter for potential treasures, I should go back through and look a second or even a third time; I just can't visually take everything in all at once.

It was on the third or fourth time past one particular pile, when I found an accent window, probably from an RV. The shape is sort of arabesque, with two rounded corners and two pointy ones.  The window itself is dark, curved plastic imitating smoked glass, and is intact. I felt like it wanted to be rescued and used.

I brought it home, washed it, and have been working on painting its aluminum frame. I found that plain white is too cold for the room, which has mostly warm colors, so I mixed a little yellow into the leftover paint, and gave it another coat. I need to look at it again in daylight to see if I like it or not; it may be too yellow now.

The window is on the wall now, but needs to be hung lower. I thought at first that I would hang it vertically, but it looks much better hung the other way, as it probably was placed originally in the RV. It is smaller than what I had planned, so I am going to look at how its scale works in the room also.

The other thing I picked up on vacation was a light armchair that I already owned, which has been in storage at my parents' house. This is for our living room, which was the first room that I did the Cozy Minimalism technique on. I had that room all done, but then I stole one of the rockers out of it for the school room. One of our director's chairs stood in temporarily, but it is not really durable enough to be there, and the children like to pull the fabric back off and let the arms flop down, and use it as a pretend airplane.

This armchair rocks a little bit. The base was still off from the last time I moved it, so I had no trouble fitting it into the back of our vehicle. I was happy to see that I had been smart enough twenty years ago to bag up the screws and tie the bag to the chair's arm.

The upholstery is very worn on the back, and will soon be worn on the front, but the frame and the springs are in good shape, and the stuffing is good enough for now. I still have the seat cushion that my grandma made me for it.

The chair did need some cleaning, starting with vacuuming, and it took me a ridiculous amount of effort to get the screws back in--working against the spring mechanisms, which needed to be wedged open, and for some reason one screw just wouldn't engage with the nut insert that it was supposed to screw into. The screw is into the wood far enough, but it will probably work itself back out now and then.