Here is a pair of arrowhead-shaped swirl earrings I made last night in my studio. After forming them from sterling silver wire, I hammered them to add texture and a reflective glint. They have a mazelike/Mayan/funky modern feel to them, do you think? Find them here.
I’m pretty excited to finally show the results of my last two weeks of work on our loft!
Our loft has doubled as an office/bedroom for the past year and a half–ever since our house was so frigid the week we returned from vacation that we pulled our bed into the loft to be a little closer to the wood stove. We liked it so much we never moved back. 🙂
I wish I had a Before picture of this room, but as far as I can see, I’ve never really photographed it–and here is probably why. David’s desk, chair, bookshelf, and everything else that made up his office were on one side, and our mattress on the other–with a tiny walkway between the bed and wall. We also somehow fit in a rocker/glider with an ottoman. It was a wee bit cluttered.
When I started work on the loft, I thought I would just paint it. Here are a couple of sample colors over the original light gray. I picked Benjamin Moore’s Iron Mountain, the slightly darker shade on the left.
If you ever paint a dark shade over a light, use their Aura line. It covers bee-yoo-ti-fully. This took scarcely two coats–really just one, with lots of touch-ups in the deeply textured areas.
Starting the stairwell. Frog tape is awesome!
Here are the finished stairs–they feel dark and closed-in, and I love them. Iron Mountain turned out to be such a great color. I drove David nuts agonizing between several very slightly different shades of gray, but it was worth it. Grays can either be a wonderful backdrop, or lifeless and ugly. This one turned out to be a great backdrop.
David painted the top peak that hangs out over the edge while Caleb held the ladder. I tried getting up there, but let’s just say it feels higher than it looks. So glad he did it for me. 🙂
To my pure delight, David offered to move his office into the upstairs room where we used to sleep. I donated the glider to Caleb and pushed our bed into the center of the loft. We bought a string of outdoor lights, a couple of rugs at World Market, and stole some furniture and plants from the living room. At this point I thought I was finished, and was quite happy with the results. (Except for the unmade bed, of course. Cash was sleeping in on his birthday.)
I have to insert kind of a funny story here. The night I moved the bed to the middle of the room, I got up at 4 am, had my morning spoonful of yogurt (sounds weird but helps me not to crash later after breakfast) and came sauntering gleefully back to bed in pitch darkness. I dove into bed and–BAM! landed on the floor.
David woke up (everyone probably did) and thought I had fallen out of bed, hehe. He looked confused when I told him about my miscalculated dive. Like, why would you DIVE into bed? Just one of those weird things I do, I guess.
So I thought the room was about finished, but THEN I decided to push my luck a little farther, and asked David to bring home some pallets while he was at the feed store. From the beginning, I had been carrying around a crumpled flyer I got in the mail from Bed Bath & Beyond that has a page showing a bed on four pallets, and a string of lights overhead. It’s the picture that inspired me to even start this room–really I should frame that crumpled mess and hang it on the wall.
So he brought them home, then had to cut them to size, he and Caleb lugging them up and down the stairs. It took a little bit of work, but in the end they looked so good. At least, I think so–but then, I’m a pallet kind of girl.
Then another idea struck me in the middle of one night. I got some shadowbox frames, dug through years worth of papers (sorting it all in the process–yay me!) and found three years worth of cards from David. I put them (mostly) in order and mounted them.
And those curtains, you ask? Weeelll….never the satisfied one (the old ones were there when we moved in), I searched around online and found these at World Market. David, ever the humoring one, drove me out to a store that had exactly two panels left. I planned to cut and hem them to fit the window frame, but hung them and loved them just like that–all long and flowy. We can’t really close them easily, but who really cares? It’s not like we shut our curtains much anyway.
Are you asking about that comforter now? Since you asked, that was my idea, too–one that made the very accommodating David nearly flip his lid. But only for a moment. Once he composed himself, we searched a few stores and found this at T.J. Maxx, for a fraction of the cost a department or home store would charge. It’s a queen size, but I like it on our king bed since it doesn’t have yards and yards of fabric draping to the floor. It also fits in the washer (big plus) and best of all, shows off my lovely pallet frame. I really like that the pattern is reminiscent of our woods out the window, and also goes so nicely with the bird curtains. Besides, after ten years you get kind of tired of the same old blue blanket.
And now, I think I’m finished–at least until another big idea hits. I’ve also done some work on my tiny bathroom on the main level, but I still have lots of plans to execute there, so I’ll save that for later.
Happy birthday to our sweet little Cash. He had a day chock-full of good things–sleeping in, opening presents (art supplies and a marble run!), a Spider-Man birthday cake and root beer floats at the park, a pinata he so tried hard to break (“I’m doing good, right?!!”), an afternoon in the creek, and–sshh, don’t tell Dadda–a very last bit of num-nums after being weaned for two whole weeks. Happy birthday, Cashy-Boy!
Yesterday we went to Aspen, Colorado for the first time!
The drive was about 3 1/2 hours long and very breathtaking. That mountain in the background above is Mount Ebert–the highest peak of the North American Rocky Mountains, and the highest point in the state of Colorado and the entire Mississippi River drainage basin. It towers 14,439 ft above sea level.
There’s Mount Ebert again, in the distance. I took this photo from up on Independence Pass, a paved road over 12.000 ft high. It followed a cutaway cliff, snaking along the very edge of the mountain–with no guardrail. It was a little hairy at times. 🙂
Staying as far from the edge as possible. Pardon our lovely bug-spattered windshield.
Indian paintbrush and other wildflowers were everywhere.
Here we are, above the treeline and the snow!
Aspen, at last.
Roberto Dutesco, the Romanian-born Canadian photographer, had an opening at a gallery in Aspen this weekend. We went because he set up an event for kids to annotate the borders of Love, his most well known photo of the Wild Horses of Sable Island. The piece will be auctioned to benefit a children’s non-profit.
After I first saw Love hanging in a house (online) I remembered it for months, and then searched until I found it again. Dutesco’s work became one of my favorites, and David got me a copy of his book last year for my birthday. This spring, I received permission to make an artist’s rendering of his work, and made an oil painting of Tenderness.
After poring over Dutesco’s work for so long, it was amazing to meet him in person and have my kids work with him on one of his own prints.
These are Zia’s drawings, around Dutesco’s signature.
And a few drawings he made with Cash’s hand.
Here we are, in front of a print of the real Tenderness. I think the price tag on it was $28,000, but he had others there for nearly twice that.
By the time the kids finished, we were starving. We walked to Brunelleschi’s Pizza for lunch, then checked out an art fair a block or so from the gallery.
Aspen was nice to visit, but different than I thought it would be. It seemed a bit out of reach and in a world of its own–not a cozy, touchable ski town like Winter Park or Breckenridge. But it was a brief visit, and I could be wrong.
Heading back home–a different route. These high canyon cliffs followed the river and then opened into an expanse of rolling hills and red dirt mountains.
We saw lots of water, both going and coming. The colors everywhere were amazing–red and yellow wildflowers, blue lakes, bright green mountain slopes, every shade of earth from white to red, and light green high-altitude foliage I’ve never seen in lower areas.
We got home after dark, were welcomed by a hungry choir of goats, and fell into bed. Hope you enjoyed this little tour of our Aspen trip!
Just posted this new item in my shop–a handmade cord burning box.
David and I made the box from unfinished pine, and I whittled the edges with a carving knife.
I finished the box by rubbing it in natural tung oil, which preserves and highlights the wood.
You can find this box in my online shop, Poco Leon Studio! Update: Box is now sold.
