I love the color green. Maybe it is all those walks in the woods my dad took us on when I was little. Maybe it was spending so much time on the coast as a child, the live oaks and salt marshes stretching away in all directions. However it started, green is now peacefully neutral to me; it rests easy on my soul when I'm surrounded by it. In all the years that I lived in rental properties with cream or white walls, I kept acquiring more green items so that the house could feel alive and woodsy. Here in this new house, however, I wanted some color on the walls themselves. Thankfully, Brian agreed. But how many shades of green can one room hold?
The lovely thing about green is that mixing greens gives a forest effect. A mixture is actually good. At the same time, though, the effect should be purposeful rather than haphazard. To achieve this, I knew I needed artwork of many shades and it needed to be large enough in scale to carry a room with a high ceiling. I would love to do a quilt to hang on the wall above our sofa, but since I don't actually know how to quilt, that isn't in the cards anytime soon. Then I found some great vintage embroidery hoops at an antique store...
I found a few old shirts at Goodwill with nice fabric and the rest came
from the cotton quilting sections of a couple of fabric stores around town.
I stretched the fabric into each hoop, trimmed away the excess, and then hung it using straight pin. Since the room is already home to a large grapevine circle over the fireplace as well as a wrought iron tree in a circle on the opposite wall, I wanted the pattern of circles to feel organic rather than geometric. Or was that just an excuse. At any rate, I just winged it rather than measuring. And instead of making a block pattern, I had the circles ascend vine-style.
I had to do some restretching of fabrics and also made a run to the craft store for some tiny hoops to go with the larger vintage ones. For a day or two I kept walking by only to stop and swap one circle with another. Now I'm really happy with it. Although we still don't have the large area rug we need, the room feels pulled together. And woodsy.
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