Showing posts with label deer skull. Show all posts
Showing posts with label deer skull. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

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.


Sunday, June 15, 2014

Well, I've often seen a cat without a grin, but a grin without a cat!

 'It's the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!', said Alice.


It's been a little while ago already, but then again, it is always late..
I celebrated my birthday with my dearest friends in my cozy backyard, with an Alice in Wonderland theme. The inspiration for that came from a book that my brother offered me, that I show later in this post. Elselien and bf helped me with the preparations. Thanks dearies for making that evening such a great one!

Painting the roses red. Drew and cut these myself, inspired from my new book! ❤
 
The teapot had a great use of holding together the bouquet of field flowers I had hunted for the day before. Almost daily I see them along the roads on my way to town. The lovely thing about field flowers is that, since they don't live long, the offer varies majorly every day. The purple ones on these picture disappeared even from the fields two days after I plucked some. 
~
Elselien helped decorating the bottles, what a astonishing result we accomplished! The bottles contained pear- and applejuice, coke and a couple of different sweet wines.

~
Our conifer hedge was decorated with roses and mini teacups and tea pots and of course, a Cheshire cat plush and a few seasonal decorative hearts. In the flower pots we put our glowing and color-changing mushroom mood lamps, which nicely contributed the the magic mood.
~
Specially for this occasion I purchased a donut game, in which players must roll a die that will determine which of the plastic donuts must be added to the stack on top of the cup. The stack gets higher and higher and the player who will make the tower fall, anti-wins! The first picture shows us playing it.


This is the book that inspired my themed party and the decorations I made. Its English title is Everything Alice, which is a Wonderland Book of Makes by Hannah Read-Baldrey & Christine Leech. Thank you so much for this book, brother, I love it! It is full of DIY ideas for decorations of all sorts, for games, for hats, for treats and it has a couple of recipes for edible entertainment as well. The photos are beautiful and it is wonderfully illustrated with quotes from the original Lewis Carroll with matching drawings from the 1866 version of the book.
~
The card garland is a 3 meter long DIY project. It is basically one pack of cards glued back to back, which are unevenly distributed over a 6 meter long red ribbon.



“Little Alice fell 
d
o
w
n
the hole, 
bumped her head
and bruised her soul” 
(from somewhere in the internets)






Among the presents I received was a NintendoDsXL with Animal Crossing New Leaf!(yaaay, even more furniture to collect! Thanks bf!) and a High Tea that E and S will organize for us three (a tea party, so wonderlandish!). Elselien offered me the skull on the photo below. I love it! it is macabre and so goth. This inspires to me collect more bizarre things.



Mom offered me these Stackers stack-able jewelry box drawers. Last year she gave me the upper part and it come in so useful, that I told her I'd like the other parts of the set as well (the are purchased separately) and she remembered! Thanks mom!







 And honestly, I love white rabbits. As well as any other color rabbits for that matter!
  ❤  ❤