Chiang mai master bedroom finished

I think its finally finished. My chiang mai dragon pillows are here, which is the final finishing touch. (For now, anyways. When is a room ever totally finished?)

I think I've talked just about every item in this room to death.  The only things not discussed so far are the new indigo blue duvet and the rug.  The blue duvet came from The Company Store.  We have a humongous brown flannel pinstripe blanket that is super-warm, but brown flannel pinstripe did not lend itself to this design, so I tried a duvet.  I am normally a duvet-hater, but I am happy with this one so far. The ties in the corners that keep the blanket from sliding around make a huge difference.

Our old apartment had carpeting in the bedroom, so we did not have a rug for this room.  A new 8x10 rug that would be almost entirely covered up by the king bed was not in the budget.  Instead, I bought two 5x7-ish white flatweave rugs from Ikea ($80 total!)  and taped them together with carpet tape.  I am less than impressed with how they have stuck together--my side is fine, but the Mister's side always moves around, so it is on my list to get a large needle and some fishing thread-type-stuff and sew them together.  Since that would involve moving a king bed in a 10x10 room, I have been putting that task off for a while now.

You can read more about pulling the room together here: the original moodboard, the evolution of the moodboard, the summer bedding version, headboard, Espana night tables, art over night tables, striped curtains, West Elm euro shams, lampshades, dressers, chiang mai dragon art.

Sources:
1. Headboard: Craigslist
2. West Elm bedframe
2. West Elm euro shams
4. striped curtains made from West Elm duvet
5. Company Store indigo blue duvet (The lightweight coral summer bedding is from West Elm.)
6. chiang mai pillows
7. Espana/Rast night tables
8. dressers: already owned, from a defunct furniture store
9. hardware on dressers and Rast night tables
10. jewelry box: garage sale
11. mirror: thrift store
12. Erslev rug, 2 laid together
13. Bamboo frames: thrift store
14. Chinese lion: Homegoods
15. Green vase: Crate and Barrel
16. lamps: Homegoods and Pottery Barn Kids years ago, spraypainted Krylon Navy Blue
17. lampshades: plain Target shades with blue grosgrain ribbon added

the master bedroom with the dragon painting, so far

My master bedroom is slowly coming along.

Here it is on moving day:

Here it is for the last few weeks, with stuff of everywhere:

And here it is today, with my chiang mai dragon painting finally finished, new bed, pretty curtains, bamboo blinds up, and navy blue mirror in place.

I am really happy with the navy/coral/citron color combo I've pulled out of the painting, and I think the painting makes it look a bit more pulled together as well.

The room is tiny.  We have a king size bed and there is about 25 inches on either side of the bed to the wall.  There is 18 inches between the end of the bed and the dressers.  I have stubbed my toe many times rounding the corner of the bed.

You might notice I decided not to get that mirror from craigslist and instead used a mirror we already own.  It was in our bedroom at our old apartment, then I painted it orange and put it in the boys' room here.  Since I was looking for a round mirror and knew that one was the right size and it was already in my house, I decided to use it.  I painted it navy blue and I think it works nicely.  That gives me a blank spot over the dressers in the boys' room, but I have some ideas for its replacement.

Things that still need to be done:
* art over the bedside tables
* hack a Rast table for my bedside table
* tray for dresser
* throw pillows
* navy Euro shams

Nearly done!

chiang mai dragon paint by numbers

Chuck the Magic Dragon is finally done.  Isn't he pretty?

I was inspired to try this after seeing Danica's chiang mai dragon wall she did for a client. (Hers is much better, but we can't all be artistes. Did you see the de Gournay painting she did in her foyer?)

I won't lie, this was one of the most tedious, time-consumig projects I've ever done. It took me about two months.  If I had huge blocks of time it might have taken a few days, but I did it during nap times and after bedtime, so it took a while.  I finally made a big push to finish it, and worked on it every available moment for the last four days.

 After some false starts trying to get the design onto the canvas, my friend Jackie took pity on me.  She started to hand-draw the design onto the canvas, but her sister is an artist and has a giant projector, so she blew it up and traced it onto the canvas. This essentially allowed me to treat it as a paint-by-numbers project, although without the numbers or the ready-made paint.

If I were more artistic, I might have known to treat the canvas. (I asked the salesperson where I bought the canvas if I needed to do anything to treat the canvas and he said, "oh, no, its ready to be painted on!" Jerk.)    I probably should have started with a layer of gesso, or at least a base coat of white, so that the canvas didn't suck up all the paint.  Since I didn't know this, it took two and three (four for the pinks) coats to get a uniform coverage.

At first I was very exact and colored in each little piece as it was drawn on the canvas.  After a month of that I started taking liberties with the design and went for more organic strokes, trying to follow the shape rather than the exact pencil drawing.  That helped speed up the process.

I also used $1.29 acrylic craft paint from Michaels, which is not exactly stellar quality.  Its very flat and muddy.  Despite the wide array of colors available, I ended up mixing my own to get closer to the color of the design.  This was difficult--try as I might, I just could not get the colors of the dragon to come out right.  So I ended up going with sort-of-close-but-not-quite colors.  I prefer to think of this painting as a "chiang mai dragon as interpreted by Lisa" rather than a true to form replication.

The canvas is a 36x48 size that I bought at Pearl for $45, and I bought about $50 worth of craft paint and brushes, although I used about $20 worth.  If only I could find the receipt to return the rest.  So, for approximately $100, I got a large scaled painting of my favorite fabric.     

this will take me till Christmas

So....I've been working on this guy for a while:

What should I call him?  Fred and George are taken, that leaves us with Charlie, Bill, Percy, Ron or Ginny.  He does have long hair, I guess that makes him Bill. Or Ginny.

This is taking forEVER, btw.  Painting dragons is not one of my many skills.  This might be done by the time we are ready to move to the next house.

Normally I wait till projects are done to show you stuff.  However I am thisclose to chucking the whole thing. I have never painted anything on canvas before, and I asked the dumbasses at Pearl if I needed to do anything to the canvas prior to painting and they said no, so I was unaware that I should probably have painted the whole thing with a layer of white (or aqua, since its the background, or gesso?) before drawing on the design.  The canvas is sucking up all the paint, so even though this is clearly going to take me a few months to finish THE FIRST COAT, it will need a second coat (and heaven freaking forbid, possibly a third).  And I do not know if I am up to the task here.  

I actually ordered a 36x48 poster of that image a few months ago.  The problem with taking an image off the web and blowing it up that big is that it might get pixelated.  The poster looks good from far awy, but up close its very blurry.  Its also very shiny and didn't have the texture I thought painting it would bring.

I am seriously contemplating just slapping that blurry poster on the canvas and living with it.  I may have bitten off more than I can chew here.

Epic fail on so many fronts: new bed, chiang mai

This weekend was incredibly busy, what with painting Princess's dresser,  packing up my house, and various projects that crashed and burned.

Epic fail #1:

About two weeks ago I bought a headboard off craigslist.  I went to pick it up, and found myself at this veritable barn of furniture.  The woman selling it was a realtor and had an industrial storage space full of stuff she used to stage houses. I bought the headboard, but also wandered around the barn looking at her other stuff.  Back in a far room, I found the bedframe that matched the headboard.  

I debated about buying the frame, but one of the reasons I wanted a new bedframe was so that we could utilize some underbed storage in the new house.  (Our old bedframe was a platform style that did not allow for underbed storage.)  The bedframe seemed a bit low, so I passed them at the time.

Fast forward to this weekend, I sold our platform bed on craigslist.  The new headboard has a weird hinge for fastening to a bedframe, so I thought rather than mess around figuring out how to attach it to another frame, I will just contact that woman and buy the matching frame and put it up on risers or something.

You'll notice that nowhere in there did I mention measuring the bed. 

Dun dun dun.....

We pick up the bedframe for $50. We stop at a hardware store to get new hinge pins for $11.  We get home. We clean the bed and put it together.  It looks great!  We pull our never-used box springs out from behind the enormous pile of crap in the garage.  We are now super hot and sweaty.  We put the box springs on the bed....

and they don't fit.  The box spring is about three inches too long for the frame.  

We think, hmm, mabe this is supposed to rest on top of the frame, instead of being cradled inside the frame?  We attempt that. We put the mattress on top.  I sit on the mattress.  The mattress comes crashing down and things sound like they are breaking.  

Ok, that wasn't it.  We spent much time trying to figure out how we might easily and inexpensively rig the bedframe to fit, but essentially every fix involves cutting parts off and rebuilding, and ugh, forget it, we are not Ana White.  I will take the $61 loss and move on.  

It did not even occur to me that a vintage king size bed might not fit a modern king size box spring and mattress.  LESSON LEARNED.  

So, we will be buying another bedframe from west elm to go with the new headboard, but for the moment, since we are moving in two weeks, we are sleeping with the mattress on the floor like broke college students.  

Epic fail #2:

After talking about my chiang mai dragon inspired bedroom, I sat down and thought, what can I do to get that pattern in my bedroom?  I love how this painted chiang mai wall has such an oversize scale--I want that.  Just ordering a piece of fabric and framing it won't give me that big of a focal point, even though the pattern repeat is pretty large.  So I came up with the brilliant idea of painting it myself on canvas.

But Lisa--we didn't know you were an artiste!

I'm not.  I can't draw my way out of a paper bag.  

I spent much of last week running around to various art stores.  One day I bought a projector.  You can get pretty awesome projectors with large magnification areas for about $500.  Hahaha. Not in my budget. I bought a $50 projector.  The salesperson at the art store said "This projector is a piece of sh*t, by the way." 

Thanks! I'll let you know how it works out!

I took it home, it blew stuff up just fine.  Only problem was it could only blow up a 3x3 area at a time with 5x magnification, and I wanted to cover a 36x48 canvas.  So I copied the chiang mai pattern, isolated the part I wanted to replicate, printed it out, made a grid on the paper, and made a matching grid on the canvas.  

Unfortunately, I could not get the pictures to line up appropriately on the canvas.  The magnification of the picture was a few inches short of the size of the canvas.  If my canvas had been smaller it might have worked.  Perhaps someone who does not have to ask her sister to do the math for her might be able to make it work.

I gave up on that particular version.  I haven't given up on getting that pattern in my bedroom, and I have a different solution I'm hoping will work.  Hopefully in the next month or two I'll post that. If it works. But for now I have to stop wasting time and money on crap that isn't working and finish packing up our stuff.
   

chiang mai dragon inspired master bedroom

I have had many many many ideas for my master bedroom, and haven't been able to pick among them.  I like navy, and coral, and orange, and lots of fabrics, and yet nothing seems to be jumping out at me saying "I AM THE ONE."

Well, actually, that's not entirely true.

I have loved Schumacher's chiang mai dragon fabric since the moment I saw it.  I can even remember the first time I saw it; it was a on an ottoman. I love the aqua colorway best, although I'd take any of the other colorways too.  Sadly, this beautiful material is to the trade only and retails for $206 per yard, so its not exactly the kind of fabric you run down to JoAnn's for and order a whole bunch.

This weekend I was thinking about my bedroom and how all the fabrics I like for curtains are over $30 per yard, which makes four panels (at about 14 yards total) kind of expensive.  And then a light bulb went off over my head.  Expensive!  Hell, I'll show you expensive!  Why get expensive fabric I merely like?  Why not get RIDONKULOUSLY expensive fabric that I LOVE???

I ran this past the Mister.  He said no.  Rather firmly.  

Regardless!  They WILL be mine.  Someday.  Until then, though, I came up with a chiang mai dragon inspired room.

1. The Schumacher fabric.  I could either get a yard of the Schumacher fabric and frame it, or a roll of the wallpaper and frame a triptych.  While still expensive, smaller pieces won't cost thousands like the curtains would.  Call your local designer, they can probably get to the trade fabrics for cheaper than the list price.  I called Bryn and she gave me a quote that was much cheaper.

2. White curtains with greek key trim.  These are discontinued Pottery Barn; you can find them on ebay.  Or you could make your own for way cheaper.

3. Green lamp and nightstand.  These are what we already have.  The green lamp was from Crate and Barrel and the nightstand is a hacked Ikea play table.  They will be making the move and will be reused.

4. DKNY Chrysanthemum navy quilt and shams, available at Bed Bath and Beyond. I like how this quilt is almost navy but is a bit lighter.

5. Chiang mai dragon pillow, available on etsy. A number of etsy sellers have chiang mai dragon pillows, just type it into the search box.

6. Green Brooke Madeline Weinrib rug. I'd need this in a 9x12 or so, so I'll probably look for something less expensive.  But this one is pretty.

7. Pier 1 honeycomb mirror (discontinued, but we already own it).

8. Dressers that we already have.

9. Orange foo dog, available on etsy.   My original plan was to do an orange room around the chiang mai fabric, but I liked the navy and green better.  

crazy insane painted chiang mai dragon

I have been obsessed with the chiang mai dragon pattern from Schumacher for years now. I LOVE LOVE LOVE it. (Aqua colorway is my fave, but I will take any of the colorways.) It is wayyyyyy beyond my budget at about $150+ a yard.  (Someday! Someday I will have an entire room swathed from floor to ceiling in chiang mai curtains, wallpaper, upholstery, you name it.  But that day is a long way off.)

I was perusing Pinterest when I came across this UNBELIEVABLE handpainted wall, done by Danika of Gorgeous Shiny Things, a blog that is obviously being added to my reader posthaste. 

Seriously, that is just nuts.  I am in awe of that.  Come to my house, Danika!  Paint my living room!  Love you!

Unbelievable.  LOVE IT.

(apparently I am not the only one taken with this wall--I'm looking at my reader and I see a bunch of other bloggers featuring it too.  This is blowing up the internet with its awesomeness.)