Living Room Stencil?

I've been playing with my stencil files again. I don't know for sure if I can cut them out with my Cricut, but if I can't, I suspect I have at least one friend with a laser cutter. (I'm hoping, anyway.)

I've spent like four days playing with images trying to come up with a stencil that I like but I don't really know what I want and I keep changing my mind. The downstairs rooms are more difficult to choose colors because we can't use light paint colors because they will get lost in the wall paint color.

I think I maybe have settled on this first one but this one will be a lot more difficult to fudge corners and add extra bits to fill space.

Sherwin Williams 41 from their 1910 catalog

I also prepped the files for this stencil, but I'm worried with all that orange it won't look good over the green wall paint. It does have the advantage of being stencil-able in one pass.

Blue Label 1559 from the 1900 catalog

This third option was the one I picked to do several years ago but now I've mostly abandoned it because I'm not convinced it will look good over the green paint.

Alabastine 305 from their 1920 catalog

I am experimenting with adding a large painted field below the flower but that may not work well because the stencil area is so large. 

One of the main reasons for this post is because I wanted to mention a new-to-me program I found that is super helpful for making stencils. I was trying to use my Cricut Design Space software and it was super frustrating because it just wouldn't do what I wanted it to. It's possible it would work better if I paid them the $15/month subscription, but I only use it a few times a year and have no use for any of their art files.

Anyway, when I clicked on one of my svg files it came up with Curve software. What? I don't even remember downloading that, but I must have. Anyway, its long name is Linearity Curve Graphic Design and the starter version (which is what I've been using) is available for free. I just uploaded my stencil clip art file, asked it to trace it, and it was super easy to remove the background and make changes. I have only used it for a few hours and I'm already a fan.

Update later: I spoke too soon on the free Curve program. I made the HUGE mistake of letting it update and now it's practically worthless unless you pay them. Sigh.

New-to-Us Rug

I've had a saved search in craigslist for a hand-knotted rug for quite a while now. I was looking to replace the dining room rug which we had bought on Overstock back in late-2011. While I had liked the rug, it proved to not be very durable. Shasta started licking it nervously when we had a friend live with us for a month, and made holes in it.

The rug we're getting rid of

My craigslist search brought this up last Friday. 

I excitedly made arrangements to go out and see the rug. Now, I would quibble with the seller that the rug was in excellent condition; it has some non-trivial damage. But it was a hand-knotted rug made by Nature's Loom and the colors were perfect for our dining room and the price was right so we brought it home with us.

Dog approved.

Halloween Preparations

Halloween used to be a big holiday for us. We would have big parties and invite lots of our friends and cook LOTS of weird foods. But it's been more than a decade since our last party (2005, I think) since we had uprooted to California then retreated back to Oregon.

We are dipping our toe in again to see if it's still our thing. We're having a smaller gathering where we'll feature our weird foods and probably play some games.

Decorating this old house has proved to be a bit of a challenge, as our primary requirement is we cannot damage the woodwork or plaster and our plan to hang lights with picture rail hooks has proven to be a no go; they just keep popping off the rail—it's been super frustrating. (I think we'll likely just end up taping them up with painter's masking tape and pull them down immediately after the holiday.)

Jeff is actually working this week with his friend Eric, so I'll be spending my time trying to finish up Jeff's and my costume and cleaning house. In the evenings, we'll both be working on whatever food prep can be done ahead of time.

We will offer photos of the food after the party, but here are some examples of the kinds of food we used to make:

Brain Jello on left, Kitty Litter box cake on right.

Brain Jello

Not a great picture, but the brain is a crab dip with chips. In the background is eyeball deviled eggs.

Sorry for the crummy quality photos. It guess it's been long enough that the best pictures have all been lost or are residing only on ancient backup drives. Sadly, I'm too lazy to go looking.

This year, we'll be replacing the kitty litter box with a graveyard cake. We have too many friends with cats, and they didn't want to eat it; it looked too close to the real thing. LOL

Update: Here are the pix for the food this year on our food blog. There is a separate post about the graveyard cake, which we were happy with how it turned out.

Rug Shuffle

Jeff and I finally managed to shuffle the rugs in the living room. I love the new rug!

The smaller rug was moved into the library area.

We're still working on putting the rooms back together, but I got the wall painted and the wood stained.

Oh, and the tile we glazed is all ready for installation.

Embroidery Book 1909

I ran across a 1909 embroidery book by Grace Christie a while back but I guess I forgot to share it. It has a bunch of attractive color plates; I'm not including them all. If you want to download the book from archive.org, you can find it here.

A Broad Border

A Doyley (Doili)

A Cushion Cover

Interiors in Colours 1912

This 1912 book, 120 Interiors in Colours Designed by Modern Artists, was a pretty wild find. It includes some really beautiful interiors, as well as some weird ones. I took screenshots of the ones I liked the most. There were a lot of white interiors I didn't save. If any of you are interested in seeing the original book, it can be downloaded here.

Woohoo, Stencils Soon!

Just a quick post because I'm excited! I finally took the time to figure out my cutter software. The last two times I looked at it, I didn't immediately get it, and I didn't have the patience to figure it out.

I found this tile photo at flickr. It's an Art Nouveau tile from 1908. I love dragons, so the appeal to figure out how to cut this one out is obvious. I'm sure there are easier ways to get to the finished product, because my technique was tedious as hell, but I have a stencil file!!!

I haven't cut it out of mylar yet, but I think I finally have the file ready to try. If this works, it's bound to send me on quite the stencil spree this year. (It's amazing what you can get done when you're procrastinating taxes. LOL)

Update: I've been having a lot of fun making stencil patterns from period catalogs today. I'll have to go find my mylar and see about cutting these this week. :)

Rug Junky

I had a weak moment this morning and I bought another rug. Oops. Clearly I am going to need to do some pretty extreme levels of selling stuff, or maybe, think about some sort of employment. LOL

I'm a big fan of Persian Carpet's clearance rug page and I drop by too frequently. I was seriously tempted by their Tulip rug last month, but I decided there was too much green and not enough yellow. (It has since sold out.)

They've obviously been testing some new designs because they've had quite a few prototypes lately. I was tempted by this one too. (Also sold now.)

Today when I checked in they had another one-of-a-kind hand-knotted prototype rug. This design appears to be a close cousin to William Morris' "The Rose" rug design from 1897; they call it the "Essex." I've not seen this design with a green border before. I'll have to go dig thru my William Morris books and see if I can find this exact rug design.

I bought this Persian Carpet's Essex Prototype.

It's a 10x14 though, so it's going to end up in the living room which means I'll be shuffling the new Fintona rug, into the front library area. While the rug already in there is hand-knotted, the color doesn't go well with our color scheme.

The new Fintona rug.

The rug we'll now be selling off

At some point I'll be in the market for a rug for the dining room, but I better stop now. Jeff only has so much patience for shuffling furniture/rugs and I'm already pushing my luck.

Living Room Rug

The Living Room rug arrived several days ago. Here is the picture from the vendor website.

But, in reality, the burgundy and green in the actual rug are darker than the picture. I'm not sure if they changed the colors, or if they just edited the photo. I don't see how they could have gotten that light green from the rug they sent. Luckily, I still like it. The tone is correct for the rest of the house colors.

The green fabric draped on the loveseat is the fabric I'm
planning to use to recover the furniture.

Now I'm just waiting for the last of my upholstery supplies to be delivered before I can get started on the furniture.

Upholstery Research

With our super crappy weather this spring preventing further work outside and staining the bathroom windows, I think I'm ready to take on our Morris chair upholstery project.

We bought this chair nearly 4 years ago and it's too ugly in its current state to live on the main floor, so it's just been cluttering up our basement. Given how cool the carving is, that's a tragedy.

Looking back, we were way too enamored with the carvings and we spent too much money for the condition it was in. Oh well, lessons learned.

I'm quite sure this poor chair has been the victim of a bad remodel. When you take off the seat cushion you find this.

The cushion was just sitting directly on those strap springs, and the board the straps were nailed to is pulling away from the chair frame. Ugh. What a mess. I am sure the chair was not originally built like this. So, as usual, I applied myself to researching how to fix it.

New Living Room Rug

We have been having a terrible time figuring out the rug for our living room. I believe we are actually on our 4th rug (so far). We changed rugs so often, I even stopped bothering to mention it on the blog. Well, for the short version of this post, I ordered a new hand-knotted rug.

I hesitate to link this rug because then my mother will know how much I spent and I'll get a lecture. LOL

For the extended version, keep reading....

Embroidered Pillow Designs (1910)

I've been poking around some of the period texts I downloaded a couple years ago and I ran across these black and white pictures of embroidered pillows. This particular publication is called "Home Needlework Magazine" and the photos are from the Feb 1910 edition.