New interior ideas

If I would make an interior magazine, it would have to be called: Slowly but Surely. It would be a small, sympathetic number, with lots of unfinished rooms. I ask you: Who ever got the idea that interiors of homes should look like a modern art museum where nobody actually lives?

I've been so sleepy and tired the whole summer and autumn - the reason is our upcoming baby, so it's kind of OK. Although it would be nice to get more done at the home. ( So many ideas - so few of them ready!) But small things make a difference: For example this lantern and lights make me happy (more so because I have to get to the bathroom at nights and it lights my way there)

Then I got my great grandmother's old chest delivered from my home town to Mikkeli. It's from 1920's and needs a bit of loving restoring. Well, there is no hurry with the restoring, because the thing is already on use in our living room. The space above it is looking really empty and I'm planning a big, colorful, textile board on the wall. (The fabric I've bought for it, is on the chest there).

A close up of one of the wood carvings from the chest:

Then the next big thing: A challenge! A possibility! The room that is to be 50% home office and 50% baby's room... At the moment the room contains just all our junk that has no other, better place yet (We have been living here only for 1 year - for heaven's sake!) And all the baby's stuff we'we acquired. Well as usual - I'm planning something really useful....

Instead of worrying the boring stuff (like the baby caring unit, that I let the father of the baby to get) I'm planning to paint a funny big tree on that blank wall (picture above). White walls are not my thing and this, for me, will make a huge difference on this room.

I've found many different tree silhouettes, but this one, I think, is the best:

I'ts a decorative sticker from Djeco. I might just buy the tree, but it's way too small.

Complementary colours

This is one of my favourite pictures and now I know why. I saw an art programme and there was an artist who told about Van Gogh's and his friend Gauguin's colour schemes. It was actually their "invention and science". I really luv these colour combinations! For example our kitchen is turquoise and bright red (and white - I have to admit).

This is the painting that takes me back to 2004 when me and my friend were Interrailing and visited The Vincent Van Gogh museum at Amsterdam. I soooo wanted to buy a replica of it, but the painting could not travel easy in or on my back pack.

The colours and the quirky way of making the perspective makes this a nice one too.

Gauguin loved the complementary colours so much he wanted there to be many of them side by side.

That is why I like Gauguin and Van Gogh.

Painted Sofa

The sofa-project is ready
Sofa isn't the original design I was thinking (look at the older post). And lucky it wasn't, because this easy-lookin pattern was suprisingly hard to do! I painted it twice with acrylic paint and then I made the mattress from old textiles I wasn't going to use anymore (like felted wool gardigan, old towels, a stained and really old bedspread...) I'm always really happy when something garbage-like thing can be re-used!! The striped fabric was just waiting in my fabric stash (it is wast)... And the pillows I found really cheaply from work, when we had closing-down sale of Esprit Home. The dog tried to eat the buttons that I made for the mattress :) Before the hall was so lame

And after!

I'm thinking of doing a picture collage over the sofa. I'm thinking ancestral dogs. I'm thinking fake (I'm so cheap) gold frames! You'll see

"Summer" holiday begins tomorrow

It's sunny (but cold, as I realized when i went jogging with the dog just now - wearing too little) spring morning and I have two hours before I go to work and after 6 hours - HO-LI-DAY (I can hear Madonna singing it for me). Then I can spend my days (for two weeks) working on the interiors of this home!

And then the one week trip to Belgium to see my little brother who lives there at the city of Brussel. It will take me deep into the summer weather and feel (because here in Finland it still can go freezing at night in May). I'm waiting for the trip for so many reasons: I'll get to hang out with my beloved family/ I'll get an early start to summer/I'll see things that inspire me/ I'll take interesting and artistic holiday pics AND I'm pretty sure that I can find some home interior things (extraordinary) to bring back to this home nest of mine.The renovated kitchen

The things have evolved here at the home nest remarkably: The clock (if you see the older posts you know what I mean) is on the wall. The kitchen is now officially ready! (Alltough I'm thinking of changing the insides of two tall cabinets that are from 1949 and in those times everything was really tiny?! I mean - there is no packages or parsels that will fit into these tiny small shelfs.) I'm enjoying it so much: running water makes all the difference!


This picture show next: tells you the story of how a small dressing room is turning into a inspirational safe heaven for my idealistic passions for making things (clothes, miniatures, quilting, jewelry, comics...) At first it looked a bit like some dark cave... (but it is one of the biggest reasons we liked the appartment in the first place - the potential!)But it was fixed with a splash of colour :)But then I took (almost all of) my important things in and it looked like...well...not like a safe heaven at all! This will be the first task I'll attend to. I need the forse to be with me!!!

I hope I'll get this done, and after that I can think again about the hallway, where I plan to (maybe) make the painted sofa I was telling you...

Clock - at last :)

This clock is finally at home with me :) A lucky chance hit me, when I saw that a departmet store at Helsinki sells Habitat. (And I went there yesterday to educate myself about my work.) I'm very pleased! Tomorrow maybe we can put it up. The kitchen is almost ready too! Jej!

Grim Kitchen, Clocks an Painted Sofas

The kitchen, at the momet, is looking pretty GRIM!

There is a lot going on here at Nuijamiehenkatu! The kitchen tiles, sink and work tops are changing to new ones! (Not that new is always automatically better, but the old ones are too weary, because they are from the year 1949 as the rest of the house). The makeover is ready in couple of weeks and I can't wait to see it! (I'm also eager to get to use the kitchen again..Oh! The wonderfull warm memory of oven heated food!)I feel like the springtime gives me some extra energy boost, so I have many ideas and projects waiting. The sofa project for the "entrance hall" (about 3 m2 in size, so big you can call it a hall: haha) is on it's way. I got the idea from the upper sofa and decided to take the outlines from the one below. So the idea itself is following: I'm going to paint a sofa to one of the walls. The painting will have a bench infront of it, so I'm also thinking of upholstering a thick mattress over the bench to get the feeling of a real sofa. The fabric I'll paint (the "upholstery") will be more modest than on these sofas. Maybe stripes of somesort?

There has been some disappointments on my way to perfecting our home...The clock I was desiring to hang on my livingroom wall wasn't available out of UK. So maybe this is natures way to tell me that I should pay a visit to London? Sigh! I havent found anything to match it. Not even close! Maybe some small attraction towards having the official times of certain cities and many clocks side by side? S-g like this: But does one want the feeling of a multinational hotel in her livinroom? NOT!

I prefer a dusty, 70's office-feeling...Maybe I really have to go to London then...

Wallpaper on the wall

It took me all day to get the thing on the wall (I have made nothin like it before, so it was a live-and-learn situation). I'm so proud of my work :)

Newspaper wallpaper

I saw, maybe ten years ago, a small room wallpapered with old newspapers in some interior magazine , and I still remember thinking: SWEET! I newer thought that there might be a ready wallpaper just like that! Until I found the perfect wallpaper for the "room" (picture below) I call this tiny place that leads from the hall to the bathroom and kitchen. The wallpaper is going to go on only one wall (that you can see below) because all the other walls are with doors (and because the whole room is 150x150 cm, there is not so much wall left there).

I love this appartment, but the bath+wc+loundryroom is really tiny (150x165 cm!) I'm planning a small loundry-maintenance-area in the "room" above. The wallpaper is going to go on the wall and the the white board you can see on the picture too, is to be a kind of worktop. Underneath it will be a place for dirty laudry and I'm also planning a narrow closet to the corner to keep clean towels and stuff.

BTW, Jaakko found that ceiling light on a dumpster. He cleaned it and it looks as new alltough I expect it to be some 40 years old. We re-wired it because the old wires weren't lookin too reliable.

Decorating, it's almost spring!

Mornings are beginning to light up and it always makes me more active and hopefull. It also helps that our "new" appartment is strarting to look like a home (Can I call it new if we've lived in it for 3 months now? Yes I can!). I like painting and woodworks and thatkind of stuff, but it's nice to focus on the little things occasionally. Like clocks! And I have my heart set on this one:

http://www.habitat.co.uk/fcp/product/browse/Analogue-wall-clock/968486

It would be big enough (50x50 cm) and just look at it!

The other thing that made me smile this week, was a story about Hammerpress. I'ts really old school and still working press. You can see from the picture what kind of things they do. http://hammerpress.net/

From Wikipedia I steal this next sentence: Letterpress printing is a term for the relief printing of text and image using a press with a "type-high bed" printing press and movable type, in which a reversed, raised surface is inked and then pressed into a sheet of paper to obtain a positive right-reading image.

Sweet! Small industries like this always appeal to me for some reason.

Banksy

I have found something absolutely amazing and fun! It all started last summer when I was visiting London with my friends. The wall paintings (and more accurately) stencils there caught my attention. I hate grey, dull city scenery, so it's very pleasing to see some brave ones to take action! So I'm not the guerilla-type of a person, so I mostly admire others. (But you never know when the need to do something takes over).

So the wildest thing to me was not to go to a paint store, but to buy an inspirating picture book about stencils and other wall art from (suprisingly) the British Museum (I SO love museums). On one page there was a fine picture, but I was mostly interested about the text above it: Banksy can kiss my ass. Banksy who? Then I forgot all about it.

But this week I travelled to Helsinki (to study for a couple of days). I went to Kiasma - the museum of modern art. The level of how much feelings and thoughts the art there awaked in me was really diversified. And the best place was the little store downstairs. All the books and little trinkets! Ahh!

There I lay my eyes on a book about Banksy. Ahhh! This is the one! Wow! Look for yourself: http://www.banksy.co.uk/

By the way. The most funny modern art piece was by Anssi Kasitonni. It looks like this:
http://anssikasitonni.com/