Making It Up As I Go Along

When I moved to this house, I engaged a decorator/designer to help me pull together this house. And then I promptly interfered. But Diane did help me come up with a color scheme, pick out some furniture (that had to be strategic because the house is small) and find some things for me here and there.

One of the recommendations she made was to finish off my bathroom with silhouettes - their cream and black color scheme would go nicely with the old yellow tile and black walls (it's better than it sounds, click here to see). I set about finding some old silhouettes, mostly from eBay because I was not about to pay what the antique stores around here wanted (this would be the interfering part).

I have finally amassed enough, and they have been residing in a drawer long enough that I feel I must deal with them.

One problem. I have 6 in frames and two more that need frames. I don't want that many holes in the plaster walls. They aren't forgiving when you change your mind.

So from the crevices of my mind, I recalled something where someone had framed padded burlap and hung a number of things on the burlap. With only that to go on, I had to make it up as I went along.

Off to Michael's and Hancock's. I came home with this:

a frame, quilt batting, that sticky stuff you back needle work with for framing and burlap.

Then, with a little trial and error, I cut the batting and the burlap. Below I've started taping it down with packing tape.

After a lot more tape, I put the burlap thing in the frame to look at how the silhouettes would look in the frame.

I tweaked the layout - the one below looks better to me. Now I'm considering how to affix the silhouettes to the burlap as they're so decrepit that the hanging hardware is broken or falling off most of them. Hot glue gun is looking pretty good right now.

Wait - I just realized there are an even number of silhouettes here. One will have to be removed. Which is good because that will make 3 separate ones to hang on the other wall in the bathroom.

So, before I could hang the silhouettes on the burlap/batting, I had to make some minor repairs to the decrepit pieces - literally the wood of the frame flaked when I tied to tap in a small hook, easily repaired with a hot glue gun. And I settled on Christmas ornament hangers to hang each silhouette.

Only the bottom left silhouette had a name on it - Gladys Henderson.

I think Gladys will approve of her new display.