Hillary Butler Fine Art

I am so excited to share Hillary Butler Fine Art with you today. I discovered her work about 6 months ago and I can't stop gazing at it. It is so beautiful. I find her use of color stunning and though landscape-esque, her paintings are so much more than that. I want to live in one of them.

Isn't there such a melted ice-cream quality to them? I think one of her pieces would be stunning in a little girl's nursery or as a centerpiece in a light-filled living room. Or maybe hanging in my bedroom? (Ok ok, mostly hanging in my bedroom). I find Hillary's work so inspiring. 

And I love that you can commission a custom piece (wouldn't that be an amazing wedding or anniversary gift?), and that her work comes in tiny (and affordable!) 4" and 6" squares, perfect for hanging on a gallery wall.

Love Rocks

I know that many new moms experience moments of panic. The constant checking to make sure the baby is breathing. The way that stairs become suddenly terrifying when you're holding a newborn. These were fears that, for whatever reason, I didn't experience when Tate was born. But it was a different story with Ames. Throughout my pregnancy with him, and since he's been born, I have been plagued by this never-ending unease, a sometimes crippling fear that something will happen to one of my boys (Zach included). I am not sure what led to this, but I find myself having to willfully turn off certain news stories so as to not feed my paranoia. 

Even still, some stories inevitably leak through and although many of them haunt me, some have the power to uplift, to inspire, and to remind to be grateful every day.

One such story belongs to my friend, Susan Dieter-Robinson. About a year and a half ago, her two girls were celebrating fall by playing in a pile of leaves. Meanwhile, a young (only 17 years old) driver swerved into a large pile of leaves while driving with her boyfriend, not realizing that Susan's girls, Anna and Abby, were hidden in the pile. Susan lost both her girls that day. You can read more about Susan's story here.

When I learned about what happened to Susan's girls, I couldn't stop thinking about it. I spent days crying. I couldn't sleep. At the time, I was pregnant with Ames and I would feel simultaneously overwhelmed with worry and so, so grateful for my healthy boys. My mind would race into overdrive as I tried to imagine what Susan must be experiencing, and just thinking about it was so paralyzing and terrifying that I would find myself up at 2:00 in the morning shaking, heart racing. 

Unbelievably, what got me through this was Susan herself. Trust me, I realize the irony that the person who was experiencing the greatest suffering was also the one who helped me gain much-needed perspective, but that speaks to the power of who Susan is and the power of her choices in the wake of her loss. 

As Susan puts it on her blog, she and her husband Tom view their life with their girls as the ultimate love story. And in honor of those girls, Susan began creating "love rocks"- rocks modge-podged with fabric hearts just like the ones the girls had created for her and Tom's wedding. And now Susan leaves those rocks everywhere, as signs of love and celebrating love, all in honor of her girls.

So many of us who love Susan and her girls and who believe deeply in loving in the face of tragedy are making love rocks, inspired by Susan, her bravery, and her girls. I took Love Rocks to Tate's pre-school this year, and had so much fun teaching the kids how to make them! It was so therapeutic and it was a really easy set-up.

I cut out all the hearts in advance, and each child got to pick 3 rocks. The teachers and I supervised and helped the kids glue the hearts to the rocks. While they dried, I told the kids about how they could leave their love rocks anywhere they wanted, and I left all the parents a note in their cubbies about the meaning behind Love Rocks. We had such a great day!

Susan's story and incredible grace and love while coping with such tremendous loss is an inspiration to me. Her relentless focus on love helped me find a way to appreciate each moment I have with my boys instead of wasting those moments worrying about what might happen in the future. I can't say that the crippling fear isn't still there, that I don't have moments where I inexplicably feel a sense of dread, but in those moments, I think of Susan, I think of Love Rocks, and I squeeze my boys a little closer and amazingly, the love wins out.

P.S. Want to make your own Love Rocks? Buy a kit here.

Making a Home: Come at Evening

For the last year, I have been focused on making our house (which we rent) feel more like our home. There were so many reasons I felt this needed to be a priority. It all started about a  year and a half into living here, when we were driving home and Tate saw our house, pointed at it, and in a happy voice exclaimed "There's our home!". 

I started crying in my driveway.

The idea that Tate thought of this house as his home, not the house in Oregon that I loved and had painted and felt like us, was, for whatever reason, devastating to me. Combined with the realization that I was reluctant to invite people over because I was afraid they would think that I had actually hung those terrible floral curtains or chosen that horrible baby-poop colored wall paint, and it became crystal-clear that our space was negatively impacting not only our quality of life but also my own sense of contentment here.

So began the great home investment of 2014. We painted. Hung wallpaper. Bought furniture. And put up art.

One of the most important pieces that we hung was the piece hanging in the window in our entryway. Here's the story.

There is an amazing store called Pinch Gallery about 30 minutes from our house. I love Pinch so, so much. And I walked in one day, just a few months after we moved here, and saw the piece above. I immediately loved it. But when I went back to buy it, it was sold out. Lo and behold, about 2 months after I decided that I was going to try- to really, really try- to make our home our own, I was at Pinch and they had it back in stock. It was meant to be. I bought it that day.

In so many ways, I feel like this is an aspirational piece for me. A reminder of what I value, the kind of home I want to have here. It makes me so happy.

If you're looking for art, be sure to check out Pinch Gallery. I find their stock simultaneously funny and sweet and beautiful... definitely worth exploring.

From the O Chickadee Mailbag

Our entryway before wallpaper installation.

I never get mail. So I was delighted to get this email last week:

Dear O Chickadee,

I would love to see a post on wallpaper.  My husband and I recently moved to a new place and want to try some fun things to make our space feel more like us.  We like the idea of using wallpaper on one of the walls in the kitchen, but our building is a bit older and the walls are textured and fairly uneven. Is wallpaper impossible?  Would a bright bold paint color work better?  I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Best, 

Lindy

Lindy, I am happy you asked and happy to chime in. As you know, this year we spent a lot of time painting walls and hanging wallpaper, a refresh to our home that made me feel so much happier in our space. I am sure that it would do the same for you!

A few logistics- we rent our house, so I used renter's wallpaper, or removable wallpaper, from Spoonflower (Dawn introduced me to Spoonflower wallpaper way back when). This wallpaper (we used what they call "Smooth Wallpaper") has an adhesive backing activated by water, and you can take it off easily (this has been proven by Ames, who decided to peel a piece off about three weeks after installation. Sigh. Life with toddlers.)

The great thing about Spoonflower is that they have so many designs to choose from. At first I felt overwhelmed by the choices, so I requested swatches of the designs I liked best. Ultimately, I went with this one, a design called Farmers Market. Part of the reason that I chose it (and frankly, what is driving a lot of my design decisions these days) is that it was bright and made me feel so, so happy. There were other designs that might have been more sophisticated or more in keeping with the style of our home, but because this house lacks a lot of natural light, I wanted to choose things that were bright, cheerful and made me smile. This wallpaper did exactly that.

Anyway, I found the entire process of working with Spoonflower and hanging the wallpaper totally doable although it took a long time. Here were a few of the pitfalls we experienced:

• We wasted a lot of wallpaper due to the fact that we were wallpapering around four (!) doorways. This project would have been much simpler (and cheaper) if we had just done a flat wall.
• Many of the wallpapers tools we bought were unnecessary, but this smoothing tool was absolutely critical. You will also need a really sharp x-acto knife. Other than that, I found hand towels to be critical but all the other recommended tools (the seam roller, etc) were not needed.
• It was not cheap. This was exacerbated by the aforementioned fact that we were working around a lot of doors, but I think most people would be shocked that I spent about $500 on wallpapering the entryway in a house we don't even own. I think it was totally worth it though, in that it was an immediate transformation that made our space feel more like ours and it makes me happy every time I walk by.
• You will need two people. My mom and I did it together when she was visiting.
• Make sure you unroll the wallpaper and determine if you need to hang it from left-to-right or from right-to-left to get a smooth repeat of your design. We did not do this and hung it in the wrong direction, so on some parts of our wall, the design is off. Happily, our wallpaper is busy enough you don't really notice, but with another pattern, we would have had to start over.
• I found this tutorial on Spoonflower super-helpful
  

Ok. Now that you have the basics, let's tackle some of the questions in your specific situation.

I think it would be very, very difficult to wallpaper textured and uneven walls. My first thought was to wallpaper some large pieces of plywood and simply attach those to the walls you want wallpapered. Is that a possibility? If not, paint might be a better option, although it doesn't do as much heavy-lifting as wallpaper from a design impact perspective. 

Another option might be to paint your walls and then frame large squares of wallpaper- I can imagine different size square frames of wallpaper hung close together, giving a kind of patchwork quilt effect.

If your walls are only lightly textured, I would recommend ordering the swatches from Spoonflower and actually trying to install them. Even with the small swatch, you should get a feeling right away on if the wallpaper would work in your space.

After dipping in the water, waiting for the adhesive to activate.

Before trimming, Why don't my boys ever wear pants?

Hope this helps. Whichever way you go, I think the investment of time and money on making your space a reflection of you will be well worth it.

Happy boys with my mom following our successful installation.