Fabric (of my being?)

Hi.  My name is Lea Ann & I am addicted to fabric.

Latest project--my porch!

Hi Lea Ann (you freak!). 

 

I can’t claim hoarder status because at 51 I wasn’t alive during the Depression, nor did I lose all my belongings in a natural disaster.  I just really, REALLY like upholstery fabric…in large quantities. Rarely do I buy it in rolls of less than 15 yards…because you never know when you might need to recover a sectional sofa…or make drapes for a room full of windows…or…OK, I have a problem. 

 

The porch is an outdoor room here

This week I’ve been turning that problem into pure joy—sewing up a radically bright facelift for my bedroom.  My house footprint is small & manageable, only topping 1000 square feet when you include the spacious covered porch.  The reason it doesn’t feel cramped, & one of the biggest selling points for me when I bought it is the beamed cathedral ceilings. I grew up in a house with vaulted ceilings, & as a result can’t stand squinchy, stingy, low-ceilinged dark spaces.  Here in the land of a whole lotta sunshine, open spaces seem even more appealing. 

 

That said, the ‘master’ bedroom (truly a misnomer since the one large-ish bathroom in my house doesn’t attach to anything other than a hallway) has a rather ridiculously small footprint for the giant ‘sledbed’ that was & is lodged in there.  The previous owners of my house were a wonderful young, international family who relocated to the husband’s native Switzerland so their bilingual toddler & his baby sister could become TRI-lingual while their brains were still sponge-like.  They already spoke English & Mom’s native Mexican Spanish, but for these sharp, energetic people, two languages & cultures weren’t enough.  Since they were relocating from the US Virgin Islands to Switzerland, they were traveling light & not taking their furniture.  Some had already been parsed out to island friends before I bought the place, but since I was moving from a furnished rental apartment to this first house of my own, I needed what they didn’t & negotiated a package deal for some of the remaining furnishings. 

 

Enter the ‘sledbed.’  This was how the husband described the sleigh bed to me when we were striking our deal, & the name stuck among my friends.  It is a beautiful bed & I loved it immediately.  Philippe was a reasonable man & I paid a reasonable price.  Which is a good thing because it doesn’t come out of that room without tools & possibly a shoe horn & a tub of Crisco.  So there she sits, dark & large & well…THERE. 

 

In the five years since, I’ve had blasphemous visions of painting the dark rich wood cream or white…or of removing the inset panels in the head & footboards & replacing them with caning (I have 2 rolls of caning—don’t ask) to allow light through…or sawing the footboard off completely & using it as a headboard for the bed in the spare room…or of making a tie-on slipcover in Belgian linen (OK, they’re painters’ tarps I got on sale from Home Depot, but after they’re washed they LOOK like Belgian linen).  And yet there it sits, like a shipwreck on a sandbar, enormous & imposing & unchanged.

 

So I sewed.  (and sewed & sewed).  I keep a white duvet on the beds in both rooms, allowing me to accessorize with any color I choose & change looks on a whim.  Aside from the dark, warm wood tone of the bed, the other furnishings in that room are honeyed shades of split bamboo & the walls are a creamy Danish yellow.  And of course the ceiling beams are espresso colored. 

 

So, I went ‘spectral sunrise,’ (to coin a phrase)--  hot geranium, ‘push up’ orange & warm yellow shams on the 3 sets of bed pillows.  A slightly more elegant orange & khaki print linen that reads old Hawaii to me for the closet drape & tailored cover for the corner shelves.  A warm yellow cushion sham for the oddly proportioned wooden chair in the corner (dubbed a slipper chair because it is low enough to be conducive to put on slippers…or heels) And I had already made a wall arrangement of orchid prints & cigar boxes interspersed with cut recycled metal framed mirrors from up island (Puerto Rico & Hispanola).  And the inspiration for the whole room—the Tjord Boontje laser cut drapey paper lantern that looks like curtains of flowers & leaves in shades of red, rose & orange. 

 

It feels like a successful transformation.  The lantern glows at night & the colors glow during the daylight.  When I wake up & look around I am energized, happy & inspired…to tackle the next bedroom!