My Flat in Progress, September 2018: Putting up Pictures

After hanging the first few pictures in my flat this summer (in the hallway), we finally got around to hanging a few more this autumn.

First up: adding a bit of gentle colour to my very minimal spare bedroom.

I am truly terrible at interiors blogging, because not only have I not taken any more photos of these pictures in situ (so you can better see how they look in the room as a whole) I've also not taken any close-up pics so you can actually, you know, see what the pictures themselves look like. Tsk tsk.

Here's an earlier photo of this wall looking very empty and boring. (If you're curious, you can see more pics of my spare room here).

The group over the radiator are six prints by Geninne D. Zlatkis from her collage birds series, which I bought way back in 2008 but still really like. Everyone who visits my flat seems to love them, too - I've actually had a few people tell my off for hanging them in my spare room! (Here are some old snaps of them in the kitchen/diner in my old flat in 2009, aren't they darling?).

After years of only having art up in cheap clip frames and then several more years of having all my pictures packed up in boxes while I was living with my parents, it feels BEYOND AMAZING getting things up on the wall in actual proper picture frames.

I keep changing my mind about what I'm going to hang where, though! The other picture in the spare room - a print of this wonderful illustration by Lauren Nassef (of pottery collector Edward Sylvester Morse) - I was convinced had to be hung in my living room, because I love it so much that I wanted to be able to look at it a lot instead of hiding it away in the spare room (especially as this was going to be the first time I'd ever actually had space to hang it up on a wall somewhere, after almost ten years of owning it). But once we'd hung up the birds, my dad suggested the pottery collector print would look good in the remaining space and it looked perfect... so up it went.

We made the mistake of hanging it centred in the gap between the end of the radiator and the wardrobe instead of centred between the bird pictures and the wardrobe, but it still looks okay enough that I'm happy to leave it as it is - especially as the wardrobe probably isn't going to be a permanent feature in this room, so I may have to re-hang this picture in the future anyway once I get the "final" bit of furniture for this space. Despite this niggle, I'm really happy with how these seven pictures look in the spare room and I've loved looking at them during the past few months while the spare room has been my bedroom!

In September we also put up the first few pictures in the lounge (we'd hung up my office noticeboard in the summer which has a lot of postcards etc pinned on it, but no actual framed art). On the left hand side of the chimney breast, we hung a couple of posters by Sharilyn Wright of lovelydesign: Beautiful Conifers of Canada and Beautiful Leaves of Canada.
 

These posters are another purchase from almost ten years ago (I bought a lot of art in 2008/9!) which have never been up on the wall before so, again, I am thrilled to finally have them on display. I continue to be a terrible interiors blogger with these rubbish photos, but you can get a better look at everything on those shelves here if you're curious. (I've had to shuffle some things around in the "office" end of my living room to find a new home for the little wooden drawers which previously sat on these shelves, because keeping them here would have meant the prints hanging above them would have been ridiculously high up the wall. Like my decisions about where to hang pictures, working out where all my stuff is gonna live in this flat is a slowly evolving process!)

I still need to properly mount the posters as I only just got round to getting custom mounts to perfectly fit them, but it's still fantastic having them up on the wall even if they are hanging a little wonkily right now.

On the other side of the chimney breast are a set of four Royal Mail stamp posters, from the village Post Office my grandparents used to run.

For a closer look at these posters (& to see them in their old homes in my old flat many years ago) check out this post.

Like the bird prints (and all the other art I've owned for a long time), these posters always looked great but look soooo much nicer now I've got them in some Actual Real Proper Non-Clip Frames. I love the design of these four stamp posters, and they have a lot of sentimental meaning for me as they (obviously) remind me of my grandparents but also of my childhood love of stamp collecting (I still love a nice stamp). It's wonderful having them up on the wall together, in pride of place.

I'll take some better pictures of them all in situ sometime soon, I promise! In the meantime, here's the whole room as it looked back in September (complete with stylish furniture island full of stuff displaced by the work going on in the main bedroom).

We didn't do any other DIY in September, but I did get very excited about MIRRORS.

I spent ages trying to work out what picture I could hang in the empty space at the gloomiest end of my hallway, but everything looked truly terrible (you know, because of the gloom). Everyone always goes on about how great mirrors are for adding light to a dark space, so - even though I'm not really a fan of having mirrors as decorative items in my home - I decided to have a look for cheap mirrors online, found a highly bargainous round one that looked like it might work, cut out a paper template the right size to test it out and it looked kinda awesome, sooo...

... now I have a mirror in my hallway. Do I have a photo to show you of said mirror in my hallway? Of course not. (It does look great, though! All those "put a mirror in a dark corner" articles in interiors magazines were right all along!).

Full of mirror enthusiasm, I then ordered a much fancier round mirror to hang on the chimney breast in my living room. It was the perfect size for the space and I'd oohed over it a lot when I'd seen it on Instagram but sadly, in real life, the colour was too coppery / rose gold for my taste so it went back in the box and back to the shop.

Such a shame, but one successful mirror purchase and finally getting more art up on the walls still feels like good decorating progress!

I'll share some more updates (and hopefully some better pictures) sometime soon. In the meantime, click here to catch up with my home renovation progress so far.

My Flat in Progress: May & June 2018

For the first year and a half of living in my "new" flat, I slept on a single bed in the main bedroom surrounded by boxes and furniture and general chaos while my parents and I worked on renovating the spare bedroom and the lounge.

We pressed pause last summer to focus on other important life stuff... then, almost a year to the day, picked up our tools again this May. I moved my single bed into the spare bedroom, squeezed the boxes and furniture and everything else in wherever I could find space (including under beds, on top of wardrobes and in the back of cupboards at my parents house), and we started work in the newly empty bedroom.

Just like in the previous two rooms, there was lots of filling and sanding to do to prep the walls and woodwork... and a few sections of plaster needed patching up as well.

It's a lovely big room, which will be great when I'm actually using it as a bedroom but in the meantime this just means that there's a lot of ground to cover!

We had to take up the old laminate flooring a little earlier than we'd planned, because we had to get a surveyor in to check out a possible damp problem (which thankfully turned out not to be a damp problem after all, hurrah!).

This was intitially an annoying disruption, but actually it turned out to be rather brilliant.

I'd been feeling really guilty about having taken almost a whole year off from the renovations - I knew that I'd been too busy to focus on it, but I still felt irrationally bad about it, like maybe I'd just been being lazy and I should have magically got the main bedroom finished by now. But if we'd finished the bedroom last year and had carpet fitted and bought furniture... the floorboards would still have had to come up this summer to investigate the potential damp problem, and just thinking about moving all that furniture, taking up the carpet, etc, makes me feel exhausted. Taking up floorboards when the whole room was empty because we were decorating it, though? Perfect timing.

Taking up the flooring revealed some lovely old fireplace tiles, which have sadly been damaged over the years. Okay, so they don't look too lovely in this photo but there's actually a sweet little floral pattern under there. I'm thinking about drawing it before we get the carpet fitted, so I can maybe use the motif elsewhere in the flat in the future.   

The bedroom renovations continued in June: the walls gradually got painted (goodbye dark purple!)...

 

 ... and my dad repaired more bits of plaster...

... replaced a missing section of skirting board, re-opened the vent in the chimney...

...and did a whole bunch of other little repairs which collectively have made a real difference to the neatness of the room.

Elsewhere in the flat, we got the bay window roof repaired and (no longer paranoid that the roof was going to fall in) I moved everything back into the living room. It was really great to unpack boxes, put stuff back on shelves, and move my desk out of the kitchen where I'd been working sandwiched between the oven and my drying launding for weeks.

There's currently an island of furniture and boxes (displaced from my bedroom while we're working on it) in the middle of my lounge but it's still wonderful to have the rest of the room looking nice again.

Here's how my office shelves were looking this summer - I'm so pleased with them!

I've been doing lots of tidying and re-organising and decluttering this summer and I'm sloooowly getting things set up how I want them.

I'm also slowly working on my "finally frame and hang all the artwork I've collected over the years" project. It was really exciting getting the first things framed. It turns out actual proper frames (even super cheap ones) look approx a zillion times better than clip frames. Who knew??

As you can see I've opted to frame pretty much everything in simple white frames. I might upgrade them to something fancier in the future, but for the moment these are working really well. It's easy to find cheap white frames like this in all the sizes I need, collectively they're not breaking my budget too badly, and they'll look really great on the plain white walls of my flat.

It's obviously time consuming buying frames and custom mounts and getting the pictures neatly framed and mounted, but the real time-suck is the hours spent thinking where to hang everything! I've accumulated so many different pictures over the years, and there are so many different possibilities for where I could hang them all in my flat. I've changed my mind about the grand picture-hanging plan a frankly ridiculous number of times over the past year and will probably continue to change it again with great frequency over the coming months.

Despite all this indecision, at the end of June we finally got the first batch of pictures up on the wall.

I was beyond thrilled when we hung these eight pictures up - it was a much more exciting moment than it looks from that slightly gloomy photo! They're a set of pages from a vintage book, The Good Housewife's Enyclopedia, which a (now ex) boyfriend bought for me as a joke but which turned out to have some really gorgeous illustrations in it - you can see them all here.

 

I had three of the pages on the wall in my old flat and the paper darkened gradually over time due to the sunlight, so they no longer matched the rest of the set. I was a bit worried about how they'd look hanging together because of this but actually the reason that photo is so gloomy is because we've hung the pages up in my dark and gloomy hallway (which gets very little natural light)... and the gloom helps hide how the pages are all different colours. Hurrah!

It might seem weird to have hung pictures up in the hall when we've not decorated that part of the flat yet but the joy of this space is that I'm not going to be putting any furniture in it, so I don't need to wait until I've bought and/or planned furniture to work out where the pictures need to go. Decorating the "big" wall in my hallway is also soooo far down the priority list of my renovation plans that these pictures will likely sit happily on this undecorated wall for years before I need to take them down again.

More flat updates soon! In the meantime, you can catch up with all my home renovation posts here. 

June & July in Pictures: Colour & Crafting amongst the Chaos!

I spent a hectic few weeks this summer living out of a suitcase, travelling back to my flat from time to time but mostly staying with my parents and helping them prepare to move out of our family home and across the country to their new house. You might have noticed that I rather dropped the ball on the blogging front (oops!) while all this was going on... but I still managed to squeeze in some crafting and other fun stuff in between all the packing and general moving prep.

So... what did I get up to in June and July?

My friend Kate visited Bristol and we met up for a day's sightseeing and photo-taking (you can read about her trip to the city here and here). It's always a joy to show people round my favourite city, and Bristol was looking pretty darn gorgeous in the summer sunshine.

I was nearly late to meet her in the morning, though, as I was busy taking photos of this fabulous wall! (Instagrammer problems, man...).

 

For my birthday one of my friends surprised me with this awesome "Making Things" print and I couldn't resist taking a photo of it surrounded by some of the crafty supplies I'd been using that week.

 

I made things with this wonderful marbled paper (click here to see what I made with it!)...

... and made lots of felt butterflies for June's "A Year of Wreaths" Wreath tutorial (follow that link for the free tutorial). 

 

The shiny new edition of my first book, Super-Cute Felt was published (prompting an Instagram post full of feelings)...

... with a free project from the book available over at MAKEetc...

 

... and the pear needlebook tutorial (delightfully) featured in Prima Makes magazine.

 

I blogged about some fabulous fog, my visit to Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter, a trip to Lichfield and a magnificently quirky museum: the Birmingham Pen Museum.

 

I confessed to sometimes preferring unused skeins of yarn and embroidery thread to finished projects (there's just something so appealing about those soft loops of colour!)...

 

... and had a hilarious dream in which I went on a date... not to a bar, or a café, or the cinema, but to a giant branch of Paperchase! The way to my heart is clearly via nice stationery (or haberdashery!). Naturally, I couldn't resist obeying my subconscious and visited the big Paperchase on the Tottenham Court Road when I was in London a couple of weeks later. Mmm... so many colours...

 

I shared a photo of my much beloved Dorcas pin tin - which it turns out is something a lot of people have in their sewing kit, and treasure (maybe you have one too?). This tin belonged to my mum when she was at school. I also have a larger one which I inherited from my grandmother, along with the rest of her sewing box.

 

I do love things which are pretty but also practical... although sometimes I buy so many of them that they're not quite so practical any more. Like mugs - I definitely have way more mugs than I technically need but there are just so many lovely ones! This one is my current fave: a recent gift from a kind friend who knows just how much I love a pop of colour.

 

Finally, July turned into a month of colourful selfies as I visited the WALALA X PLAY installation (a maze of mirrors and bright patterns that's perfect for taking photos)... 

 

... then got inspired by Instagram's "Weekend Hashtag Project" photo challenge and ended up spending a chunk of a Sunday afternoon lying on the floor covered in blankets (which is a perfectly normal thing to do, right??).

That week's challenge was #whptalentshow, and I got thinking about how my creative talents are things I've inherited from my parents, and which were encouraged and nurtured by them when I was growing up. Which (naturally) led to me taking selfies while sandwiched between the blanket my mum knitted for me when I was a baby, and the blanket I'm knitting for my new flat.

 

(Psst - for more blanket-y lols, check out the outtakes!).

Want more colourful, crafty updates? I'm lauralupinhoward on Instagram - click here to visit my page and follow me. You'll also find me on Facebook and Twitter.               

The Colourful World of WALALA X PLAY

Last month I took a trip to Greenwich with a friend to visit a very fun installation: Camille Walala's WALALA X PLAY at NOW Gallery.

 

 

WALALA X PLAY is a small maze of mirrors and colourful, patterned spaces - a bright and slightly bonkers space to get lost in and help you rediscover the joy of play.

You might well have seen pictures of this installation popping up in your social media feeds - it's proving so popular that you now need a (free) ticket to visit, and you get just 15 minutes in the space. 

We were lucky to visit a few days after it had opened, and (after a rather overexcited school group had left) had the installation all to ourselves...

 

 

 

The combination of all the different patterns, angled walls, and mirrors creates an almost dream-like effect as you wander through the space... it's such fun! It reminded me a lot of Yayoi Kusama's mirror rooms: a simple idea but a joyful, almost magical thing to experience.

 

Of course, with all those mirrors and Instagram-friendly patterns this place is selfie heaven! I don't usually take a lot of selfies but I couldn't resist snapping a whole bunch of silly mirror pics... 

Whether you're interested in the installation as art or just as a zeitgeisty Instagram playground WALALA X PLAY is well worth a visit. It runs until 24th September and is free to visit, but make sure to book a ticket well in advance (especially if you're visiting at the weekend). Oh, and remember to wear nice socks because it's a shoe-free zone!