Thinking Long and Hard About

The whole home decor situation. A few months back Jan at Be*mused wrote about living in a new house as opposed to her former older home. I wish I could find a link to the exact post because her words have stayed with me for months now. Ok, I found the original post, it definitely deserves linking to: Be*mused: Smoke and mirrors. In this post Jan writes about how her older home provided funky, unexpected display areas. How she could set up little surprises around this or that corner. It got me to thinking about our house and how in house terms it's a new house. There are no funky built in shelves, about the only thing funky in the house is the angles of the cathedral ceiling. We do have this odd beam that I can't figure out what the heck to do with. Some fake greenery? Some baskets? Right now it's an eighteen inch wide room living room divider that leaves me confused. There's probably a really good decorating use for it but I haven't figured it out yet. Of course everything about decorating confuses me. I stitch because I breathe but I tell the spousal unit I stitch so that we have art on our walls. He buys that excuse but wishes I was a little bit more productive with my art output as opposed to hoarding up "art" supplies. I like having my stitching on the walls. Of course it never looks quite right. We're back to that whole no inner sense of style thing. Some people, like Jan, I'm guessing, can hang stuff on the walls and it looks like it was meant to be there, it was made for that spot. I'm one of those people that has two styles. Style 1) She's been to one to many Home Interiors parties and the wall looks too set up, or Style 2) She just hung that picture on the wall-yeah, as flat as it sounds. Somewhere inbetween these two must be my happy medium. I can't seem to find it. Maybe I over think the whole decorating thing. I mean if you haven't vacuumed in three days is anyone going to notice what's on the walls over the animal hair on the carpet?

While browsing many of my in-progress cross stitch projects and the things I want to kit up for future stitching, I start agonizing over where I will hang this or that. Don't get me wrong, I'm not all caught up in what will work, I have no theme. No French Country, no Farmhouse, no contemporary, I have a house full of odds and ends furniture, I have tons of wall space and no theme. One thing about this house, we got a lot of walls. They are for the most part empty because a few years ago I watched a show on HGTV and the person being interviewed about his home said that they only have things on their walls that they made or photographed or friends had made or photographed. I took that to heart. Hey any excuse to hoard more stash and start more projects, that works for me. But while talking with my friend Siobhan, you want the stuff on your walls to mean something too. You want it be something you love a lot. So my walls are bare, I have a pile of pictures of the kids to frame and of course I either forget where I put the pictures or forget to pick up a frame or two here and there, but the point is, and I'm going to be very blunt here, my walls, for the most part, suck. Big time suck zone here. I'm not creating any kind of mood on my walls. I don't know how to do that. I can't seem to wrap my brain around it. I'm missing something big, something obvious, and I'm not getting it.

I want to create a sense of place, a sense of home, but I seem to only be hanging pictures on the wall. So my question for all you readers out there, how do you do it? How does one make a Quaker Sampler work on a wall with a Teresa Wentzler design? How does a Mirabilia work with a reproduction sampler? You have to understand, I have lots of wall space, lots of different styles of projects going, how do I make this stuff all flow together? Can a Mirabilia design and an Ackworth Quaker work in the same room?

I know where 13th Colony Bay will hang, I think that's why I'm suffering from severe tunnel vision at the moment. I know exactly where I'm going to put it, I want it finished and framed like last week. So I'm enjoying it, but Moulin Rouge, I have no clue what I'm going to do with it when it's finished other than framing it. Takes some of the wind out of the sails you know?

In the next couple of days I'll try to take some pictures of where my stitching is currently hanging, no matter how ridiculous it looks, then you all will see the seriousness of my decorating situation. I appear to be beyond the help of the major decorating magazines. I'm pretty much hopeless.