Monthly Archives: March 2013

After the blaze

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We have now finished redecorating our bedroom post-blaze, so thought i’d do a wee tour. In a deliberate attempt to move away from the usual vintage/floral/junky look, i decided on a blue/grey theme with some attention to texture and detail. The overall aim was a simple but indulgent, luxury look.

We painted it in two Farrow and Ball colours, the chimney breast and recessed press are ‘Oval Room Blue’ and the walls are ‘Light Blue’.

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My husband is a tolerant guy but i reckon i might be pushing him to the limits with this undeniable cushion overdose. I wanted to introduce different textures and shades within the colour palate, so tweeds, velvets and natural linens are good contenders. As you can see, tweed cushions make great bedfellows, i made all the covers and the bedspread is from Tullyroan. Poor Malcolm makes the bed every morning and indulges me by placing them all as below! Putting 3 alongside make the bed appear bigger (common hotel trick).

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I picked up the gold gilt mirror in a charity shop, which links in well with the traditional brass filial bed. The blue bowl is from Tullyroan, and is filled, usefully, with fairy lights. The picture was £1 from the salvage yard. Malcolm frequently says he doesn’t like it but i think the attraction for me is because it reminds me of walking the shores of Carlingford Lough at Rostrevor, where some of our family live. I’d love to paint the drawers a grey shade but its a bit of a moral dilemma proposing to cover over lovely stripped antique pine.

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We invested in this traditional bed from Feather and Black a few years ago, and haven’t regretted it.

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We have gathered up some great pictures in recent years. These two both came from the CCE Art Exhibition which i administrate. The first is by a friend Miriam McWilliam and suits the mood of the room perfectly. The next one we bought last year, its by local artists Alan Kay and is the exact scene where we got engaged, at St. Leonard’s Bank.

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And a few vignettes. Not sure why i have 3 non-working pocket clocks but i like them grouped together. The press is full of knick-knacks picked up over time. My current favourite is the pair of wooden vintage shoe trees. Followed closely by the enamel shoe polish box, which i picked up beside a bin.

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Onwards to the dressing room. This was a big seller for us when we viewed the flat. Basically, there is no denying that i have a lot of clothes, and to fit them all into a shared wardrobe would simply be a recipe for marital disaster. As well as physically impossible. I painted it in a Crown shade called “Rosy Cheeks’. I wanted a dusky pink and surprisingly, F&B didn’t have much in their pink palate.

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Essentially the whole color scheme is based on this vintage Sanderson curtain fabric. 

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I re-upholstered the chair in the same fabric. The shelving was a bit inadequate so i added a few extra to house all 50 of my cardigans. I still need to paint the apple crates in grey, and they are stuffed with scarves (another of my excessive fetishes).

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Vintage tins feature everywhere in this house, including here, where i keep my ‘daily’ make-up.

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I blogged about this old type-drawer before, which i turned into a rather decadent earring display/hanger.

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Just need my beautiful charcoal grey velvet curtains to arrive from the seamstress (not me this time thankfully) and we’re all set!

(With thanks to Heather McMurray for lending me a decent lens for this post!)

 

Remembering Frances

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Its mother’s day today and also the anniversary of our mama’s death in March 1997. She was the first and foremost dalzell salvage sister and the inspiration for much of our activity on this blog. Our first ever blog post in May 2010 was this newspaper article below from the 1970’s, detailing some of her projects at Tullyroan House. Since then i think we have gained a wider readership so i am posting it here again as an homage to her talents which wisely taught us (begrudgingly at the time) the ways of the salvaging underground! I recall countless trips as children to old junk yards and antique shops. One in particular always seems to stick in my mind which was The Hole In The Wall in Armagh. I used to hate going to that dank cellar which had a musty stench and seemed every week to feature a collection of odd people skulking quietly around, handling all the ‘rubbish’ laid out on tables and creaky shelves. I used to try and interest myself in the books but they all were about ancient queens, local geography, or old maps, of no interest to an 8 year old. Of course that is exactly the kind of place i myself now love to frequent. The smellier the better, in fact. Then there was Hueys in Loughgall, and an old worn-out stately home somewhere off the M1, with several floors of antique furniture.

Mum was notorious for re-arranging furniture. Not only was there mounds of it to move around but as there was a lot of space in Tullyroan, things frequently got carted off to different rooms, or just a simple re-organisation room-by-room. It wasn’t uncommon to disappear off from a task and come back shortly afterwards to find the sofa you were sitting on located on the other side of the room, or 3 inches from the fire. So as young girls we thought nothing of taking a sofa between us and transporting it to various trial venues under her tutelage.

It seems fitting to speak of all this now as Ryan and Marianne put the finishing touches just this month to their very own version of Tullyroan House after a 3 year arduous salvage project of epic proportions. One day we will get a blog post detailing it all on here i hope!

The rendition of the article isn’t great but if you can zoom in or pull out your magnifying glass you will read about Chesterfields, french polishing, auctions, bedspreads, crocheted blankets and other such topics familiar to any reader of our own blog. I chuckled to read the phrase about auction ‘finds’ – still a term widely in use in the business but more recently attached to the word ‘vintage’.

If you knew her, what memories or stories of mum’s salvaging might you have?

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Bedroom blitz

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So we had a fire. In our bedroom. Which meant 2 things. 1: A valid excuse to expedite its re-decoration, just 1 day after the kitchen was finished. And 2: The need to find a new way to clear the smell of little sleeping people doing an innocent poop in their nappy, that does not involve tea lights set in precarious proximity of the sheets. Thankfully, the little person in question was sound asleep in her own bed by the time the fire got going. We managed to limit the damage to just the bed and surrounding items, by dragging the burning stuff outdoors. (“That front door just paid for itself”). Most things were replaceable but perhaps the most annoying loss was this huge and luxurious bedspread which i picked up years ago and now can’t replace.

So i decided to try and salvage it by making things from what was reasonably left. This turned out quite well in the end, as i had been looking for inspiration for our large window and fancied a long fabric seat to go with the plethora of scatter cushions. I have a weird sensory sensitivity to foam (makes me shiver!) so i didn’t fancy the thought of having to handle a big wad for the project. I was therefore pleased to find an old window seat at the salvage yard and stripped off the cover to reveal this cotton-covered foam piece.

A word about piping. For most projects i try and convince myself its ok to skip piping, owing to the time involved in making it, and then having to fiddle around with getting it all in place and sewing through huge wads of fabric layers. But for a window cushion i reckon its pretty indispensable, so i made some out of an old skirt lining in a similar shade.Here we are with the basic shape taking form. Adding a zip somewhere is a good idea so that you can turn it all inside out at the end without having to do a magic trick. Also good for washing it at some point.Here it is in situ, alongside all its other little cushion friends.The middle turquoise one was a pleasing find, its a vintage William Morris print for Sanderson. The blue floral ones are from a (more recent) Sanderson remnant, and the grey floral is an Ikea fabric. Sadly this pic highlights my wonky piping. 

The window seat used about a quarter of the fabric, so i decided to motor on and make some bolster cushions too. I’ve made them before but obviously had forgotten how annoying they are to make. After one failed attempt, i worked out the basics. This time, to cut a corner (i love cutting corners, especially in sewing, which is overall quite a time-consuming pursuit), i cut off the edging to use as piping.Turned out quite well in the end!