beautification

Lately, I've been trying.  Trying. Trying. Trying a lot of things, with varying degrees of success.  But mainly I've been tying to breathe some new life into our home without spending any money.  

Spring is that time when, along with some spring cleaning, I get super antsy for new stuff. Stuff being the point. We need less stuff, not more stuff, but being the visual person that I am, I want change and newness and brightness. Spring is "penetrating... (my) dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing".

That's a quote from the beginning of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows.  Pretty perfect.  I'm the mole.  And just like him, I tend to want to both whitewash frantically, and also run outside and ignore the housework.  But today it's raining, so I'm wanting to brighten. And buy new stuff.  So I'm solving a problem, and repurposing some old stuff.  Today's little project: wooden blocks.

Several of the windows in our very old place have broken sashes.  Meaning that our enormous, ancient, ridiculously heavy windows don't open and close, but must be propped with something very sturdy if we want any fresh air.  Enter the old wooden blocks that I recently dug out of a box of college things in my parent's basement.  These were an unfinished project that I started, it doesn't even matter what for any more, but I had an idea.  These wooden blocks were perfect window props. But they needed to be pretty.

So I dug out some gesso, slapped a coat of it on the blocks, and looked up some design inspiration on good old google.  I used some vintage wrought iron scrollwork patterns as my starting point, used a gold paint pen to draw the designs, then brushed more gesso overtop. All in all, it probably took about an hour at the most.

 Here are my 6 blocks:

And here they are propping the kitchen window...

And awaiting use in the bathroom:

They would also be fun on the newly decluttered and restyled bookshelf, come winter:)