As regular lurkers will know, we’re trying to do up our house within a fairly rigid deadline (!). As it stands at the moment, all of the floors upstairs are sanded, varnished and look lovely; although they are covered up with the old carpets to keep them nice. The front two little bedrooms are in the process of being glossed and emulsioned: one room in white (for now), the other in teal to match Sanderson’s ‘Squirrel & Dove’ wallpaper. Aidan has the week off work next week, so we really need to get thinking about colours for other rooms and get wallpaper and paints ordered.
We had the bright idea of putting together a powerpoint of all our ideas for each room: House Ideas. You can have a nosy at it, if you want to. Any feedback or ideas are appreciated!
The 1960s Homemaker magazines that Steve found for us a few months ago have become extremely useful on the ideas front:
This morning I had a look round the ‘Vintage Finds’ shop in Glossop which has some gorgeous fabrics in. The one I really want to use is this:
I’m thinking this would be very striking in the front guest bedroom with quite bright walls in a similar shade to what’s on the fabric. However, the material is currently two very long, quite thin curtains that I’m not sure would fit in our extremely large window. I’ve been looking up how to make different kinds of blinds, so that’s another option of what to do with it. Or turn it into some kind of bedspread.
I liked this as well:
But this one isn’t jumping out at me of what to do with it or where to put it. Other than to make a giant swishy skirt…
I’m hopeful that by the end of next week I should have some photos to share of finished rooms. Not everything will be done, but enough to make us feel that real progress has been made. We finally won a 1950s sofa and armchairs on eBay, so we should be going to pick up those next week. Getting those into the house is going to be a little more tricky given my current state. I’ll blame that and not the fact that I’m generally a weakling!
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Little Owl Ski 
Love that 50s French fabric, it really would look fab against a colourful backdrop, either one of those 3 x main colours would work brilliantly!
That’s what I think, but Aidan has decided tonight that it ‘won’t work in our house’. What?? He loved it a few weeks ago! I’ll wear him down, I’ve got good leverage at the moment… Emma
You go girl! xx
In my experience you might as well get red wine coloured carpet in the living rooom from the start.
I like the French fabric too. As it is thin and quite long I would think about it as wide (wide!) edgings for curtains using the green or yellow to border central panels. I think the red may be too much and the black or white too depressing or blah.
I would see how much fabric there is to save some for one sided accent pillows backed with the curtain solid color. Also if there isn’t enough left over from edging all sides of the curtain (s) I would widen the center (and bottoms if they would show) borders. When the curtains are open the border would frame the window view. Most people only see the center of windows so this can be a useful “cheat” on fabric.
The curtains could be drawn back or gathered back with a band to hold them open and it will look quite nice. If you make the curtain hold back with the same fabric It will show off the print well.
If there is very little fabric then I would do a fabric pull shade with borders on all three sides and a topper the same width as the edge borders. Remember if you need to back the primary fabric you use the solid and more available fabric.
That’s my 2 Pins worth..best wishes.
Oh for the love of heaven. Why is it after you post the errors glare at you? The main central panels of the curtains are the solid fabric edged with print. Oh well, it seemed clear as mud after the posting so I thought to add a “fix”.
Thanks for the ideas Paula, don’t worry about the errors! I understood what you meant. I think we’ve changed our minds yet again about the colours for that room though… so hard to decide. Today we’ve just painted it all white to give us a neutral backdrop to work with. At the moment, we’re erring towards a pale blue to keep the light in the room. This will probably change tomorrow though! Emma