We interrupt your regularly scheduled series….

Posted on February 18, 2011 | Comments Off on We interrupt your regularly scheduled series….

to bring you a post about paint. ing.  Paint and painting.

In a post of yesteryear, I mentioned that I’d been wanting to re-paint our red wall. I loved that red wall, loved it well for 4 years, but it was time for a change. Beige did not win. Grey did!

Enter “Gray Shower” by Benjamin Moore. With the help of a wonderful paint-and-color-savvy friend, I had it narrowed down to either “Gray Shower” or “Trout Gray.”  I have to say that the name is partly what won me over. Didn’t want to be thinking of clammy scaly fish skin every time I walked past my grey wall, now, did I?

Anywhow, here’s the before:
<- forgive the Christmas decor. I didn't have it up in February; this is just the first picture I stumbled upon of the "before" color.
…and here’s the “after” (it looks a little more blue in the pictures than it does in reality):

 I was worried the room was in danger of becoming too “cold” with all of my white accents (the opposite wall, not shown, is all white bookcases and white mantel), so I sewed up some muslin pillow covers with texture to  (hopefully) soften things up.
Oh, and that’s Betsey Trotwood, our sweet puppy, in the background.

This wall has been long in the dreaming.
Also, it doesn’t look this wonky in real life- the angle makes a few pictures look off-kilter.
It’s still a work in progress. Right now it is several painted frames (paint color= “White Dove,” Benjamin Moore) housing clipped pages from an old calendar featuring sepia images of Italy. These generic images are just temporary placeholders, as is the chalkboard center of the middle frame.
My ultimate dream for this wall is for the frames to show a visual history of our family–
images of where my husband and I met,
the site of the proposal,
places and moments of significance, etc.
Another day, I’ll do a post chronicling the transformations of the frames.
A few pillow-making tutorials:
Here’s the one I used for the basic cover.
Here are a few I eyeballed for the bow and rosette pillows, though I basically just winged the textured accents based on pictures.
I may join in on some of this fun this week.
Addendum: Forgive the spastic alternate spellings of grey/gray. I always spell it grey, the paint color was gray, so I used both in this post for flavor. Actually I used both by accident, but let’s say it was an intentional writing tactic. For the record, as confirmed by dictionary.com, either way is correct.  I win, and so does Benjamin Moore!