Complete Setting

This is a picture the left hand built-in. You can see a house with an egg and a raven on it, behind that is a raven siting on an eight-ball. These are pieces that I picked up last year to commemorate our new home and family. They are very simplistic shapes that speak volumes about the silhouette and lines of real ravens. The work is done by Mark Orr at his Michigan studio, Scavenger Art.

I had the great fortune of meeting Mark at the American Craft Council’s Baltimore show. Mark is very friendly and has a great sense of humor. This sense of humor really reflects in the pieces that he creates. Like the birds on most of his pieces, much of his larger pieces are made with unique and interesting finds.

There is one murder of ravens very near our house and we get the occasional visitor to our house. The ravens and crows are actually all over SF and so I thought Mark’s work was perfect for our new house.

Next to these pieces is an earthenware plate, that I made myself, filled with a collection of pine-cones. The real ones are from walks with my son. Exploring our new neighborhood, he would always find a pine cone and want to carry it. They started to pile up and the more they did, the more I liked the look of them. I added silvered glass pine-cones that I found at Target. The silver is a duller antiqued look and I love the way it picks up soft light amongst the wood. There are also a few metal pine-cones that I found at a great design shop in the Castro. Given is not only a cute shop but it also happens to be the site of Harvey Milk’s camera shop. The photo in the back was taken by my partner. He has a great eye for shadow and form. I thought that a picture of a pine tree was a perfect back drop for this display.

The towel ring voting was very quiet but the concensus was to keep it, unless I could find a ring with either a duck or clamshell. I’ve not found either so for now the rings will stay.

If you know of a duckie towel ring or a clamshell towel ring let me know and I will follow the advise.

This week I’m searching for accesories: cup, soap dispenser, etc… tell me your thoughts? What do you really use on your vanity? Do you keep it clean and minimal or do you have everything out and at your finger tips?

In a prelude to outfitting the rest of the bathroom I need to know whether or not to keep the towel rings. They won’t be hard to remove, just some wall filler and paint. I wouldn’t normally hang hand towels but then again I’m not decorating this room, you are. Some people have said the rings are ugly and some people like to have them around.

Start voting and let me know whether or not these towel rings should go? Here is what they look like now.

I don’t know what happened but the entire site went down today.  Since it was down all day I won’t total until Monday morning.

Today being our busiest day since we moved into our new house!!! Yeah!  We have settled into a chaos of boxes, paper, etc…. of course that meant that I didn’t discover the missing site until this evening and wasn’t able to fix it until after the little man went to bed.

It will take awhile to get settled in.  We are holding off on painting, decorating until we are done with a few major projects: i.e. updated wiring, new windows, new skylight, etc..  all of these things will effect the walls and I don’t want to paint twice.

OK After three hours and almost losing the entire site I need to find another poll plug in. So not to delay this any longer, because we do need a shower curtain, please cast your vote by submitting a comment. You can vote for one of the choices I have made or if you feel that there is something better please vote for it.

If you are suggesting something else include a link where others can look at it. You can vote just once, please no back and forth voting since I’ll be counting these up the old fashioned way. I will count on Sunday afternoon and post the results then.

Please let me know if I can answer any questions or if you need something clarified. I will do my best to respond quickly but we are moving in this weekend. Yes after 3 months of being between homes, the boys are finally settling into their nest.

Please pass this on to your friends, colleagues, etc… the more votes and participation the better.

somebody sent me two more suggestions for shower curtains today and I’ve gotten some great responses from designers out there.

I wanted to answer a couple of questions.

We are very much into each room standing on it’s own. In other words we don’t try to get every room to coordinate. We are multi faceted people and like that to reflect in our home.

I know that I can’t make the sink disappear right now, although someone suggested painting the tile and sink white. To be honest I hadn’t thought of that so that may be a question for all of you.

Quite a few of you wanted a list of thinks we’ll be talking about, voting on, planning etc…. to be honest I really hadn’t thought that far ahead. I’ll try to make a rough list for you and post it on here. This really started because we didn’t have the energy to focus on this room and secondly thought it might be fun to see what happens when we let others decorate for us.

Mad Stripe

Water’s Edge.

Ruthless Designer: Who lived up to her name. I loved your questions and somehow I’ve goofed up approving the comment. It won’t let me do it. I’m new to Word Press and I promise to fix it. Brutal but honest! LOL

Tomorrow starts the official voting and you’ll have until Sunday to vote, get your friends to vote, etc… talk about it on here to come up with a decision. I’ll post a picture of your selected shower curtain so we can move on to the next stage.

I decided to start here for only one particular reason. We need to be able to shower and this was as good as anyplace else.  Yes there are probably better places to start but since we need a shower curtain to shower I decided to be practical.

There are over ten choices here to debate and look at.  If you think there is something I’ve missed, I probably did miss it, let me know and I’ll include it in the post.  Remember we are on a budget, so no hand woven, Egyptian cotton  curtains from a small enclave of virgin weavers.  As beautiful as it might be it probably isn’t in the budget.

On Friday I’ll put up a survey for people to vote on their favorites.  I’ll get it and put it up. Then I’ll post a follow up picture for you.

Here we go.

Annapolis
Cape Cod
Real Squares
Ocean City
Mirrored Silver

Martha Nautical
Just Ducky
Duck Pond
Dyed Yarn
Brady

OK what do you think of these?

I’ll make the first post on Monday morning.  I won’t tell you what it is but start spreading the word.  The more people who participate the more fun this will be.