A collection of death

A lovely bouquet of roses

is now drying,

heads down, with strings attached.

One day I came home to this exquisite bouquet of soft pink roses and I wanted to preserve their beauty. This is my first attempt to dry flowers. I've been told to hang them upside down, not touching each other. First remove the outer leaves that may have signs of decay and them hang them like that in a dry place. They are still hanging from my living room chandelier. They've been here for about two weeks now and they do seem dry, but their color is not the virginly soft pink it used to be.

On the background you see my current project; a collection of death and macabre. The collection started with the beautiful centerpiece Elselien offered me for my birthday; the deer skull. After that I  got all inspired to add more death and serene decay to my wall. I spray painted all the frames. In the picture above, the frames are still empty. The small ones are now decorated with white on black prints of skulls and the larger frame holds a crow or rook feather I found in my childhood home town.

The cuckoo clock is an item I purchased a couple years ago.  I bought it secondhand from the internets, for a lovely price of ten euros! However, neither of us at home can stand the ticking of clocks, so it is always showing ten to twelve. The charm hasn't worn out yet, and this clock will never strike twelve, so no rush.

The seahorses are one of my recent creation that I am very proud of. They are a souvenir from Bulgaria that my grandfather brought from one of his journeys when I was only a few years old. When I told mom about my wall of pretty references to death, she dug these up and gave them to me. I made a deep frame for them, by attaching two frames back-to-back. The sea horses are held in place by tiny pins. The back is high quality velvet on a couple of layers or cardboard, so that the pins hold well. Then I painted the outside rim of the frames so they match together.The inside of the frames was of course painted beforehand.

My next idea it to hand a tiny shelve under all this, so I can display my cow horn and possible other relics.

Right next to the death wall is a stairs going up. Already a while ago I started decorating the stairway, but I never got to post pictures of it.

The collection is inspired from the wall stickers that I matched together; a chair and a classic lamp psot with a clock. The lamp post was originally much shorter, but I made it longer. The chair gives a funny optical illusion when it comes to size. From downstairs it seems to have a reasonable height, but standing next to it, its back hardly reaches up to hip-height.

The three oval frames are from a flee market and have no purpose yet, that is, they don't have a content yet. The two round clock frames are a second hand find as well. I printed Alice pictures to in them and colored the flamingo pink and the pocket watch purple.

The decorative key comes from the local handy shop. I love that they sell such keys, even though they cannot carve them. I wonder if anyone ever buys those for real usage.