A Warm Welcome

I adore the entryway in the home of Janice, the linen lady. It says, "Come in. We're glad you're here!"


Janice did the 3-D pattern herself using a 3-D stencil and hard molding paste. Then she painted the whole thing with the warm, welcoming choice of color.



She even did the ceiling. Can you believe it?



What a stunning detail!


No, the picture below isn't the entryway. It's her bathroom and I had to show you her wall finish and color in there. Don't ya love it?

Faux painting inside and out

Janice, the linen lady, loves faux painting as much as I do. She doesn't see a blank wall. She sees a canvas just waiting to bloom under her artistic direction.


Take the the cinder block wall that surrounds the patio area at her condo. A little paint turned it from an eyesore that provided privacy into a piece of art that enhances her plants instead of the other way around.


Nice, huh?


Come back tomorrow and see Janice's entry way. I guarantee you'll like it!

A stephome tour!

My stepmother Reetie picks up a paint brush at the front door of every house she moves into and doesn't put her paints down until she reaches the back door. She marks her territory better than any dog I've ever seen!

Reetie lives with my stepfather Wade, a sordid tale of lust, romance, confusion, cancer, dizzy spells, good food, and wine, mostly red! The following pictures are of their house in the hill country.

Finally, plants I can't kill!

You've alread seen this bathtub
but I wanted to show it again. I love it!

Yes, the headboard is painted on the wall.

Wade made this sofa table out of an old western twin bedstead.

These hanging windows separate the TV viewing area
from a sitting area with fireplace.

I love all the mirrors together.

Here's another cabinet I made. You stick your fingers
into the adjacent knotholes to open the doors.

And the sweetest doggie in the world...
except for mine, of course.

Cowboys and Cowgirls and Love = ART

I adore murals at restaurants. Make those murals about cowboys and cowgirls and I am ecstatic! This is a tavern and eatery in the famous Northgate area of College Station.

Look at the size of those murals. To get both of them in the picture I had to take the photo from across the street!

Don't you just love how the painted shadows make the mural pop? Want a closer look? Come to College Station!

No, really, for a closer look, scroll down.




Fiddlin' around on horseback...



A beautiful woman waitin' on the steps...


Reminds me of the night IT Guy and I met!

Mural art in Waco

I love going to restaurants. Oh, yeah, the food is great - mainly because I don't have to cook it. But it's the decor that pulls me into the same food establishments time and again.

I'd never been to the Ninfa's Restaurant in Waco before Saturday, but you can bet I'll be back. The food was fine, but the murals on the walls were outstanding!

Check out the folds of the wrapped-up curtain above. And those shutters. Wonderful, tedious work in a precarious place to be doing something like that. It was two stories up where flooring didn't exist. It's not like the artist could stand back and see if he or she was getting things just right. This little boy was between the restrooms, and from the look on his face, he needed to use one. Sweet painting with his belly button showing and the dog's paws repeating the placement of the boy's hands.

One might think the brick was real, but look at the girl's arms leaning over the sill. The brick were fake.Here's another one that shows how well done the brick is.


And I couldn't pass up a shot of this lovely piece. I want it for my own cantina.

Retractions, Corrections, and Benches

"You misquoted me on your blog yesterday," IT Guy told me last evening.

"I did?" I asked, innocently sitting down on the nearest bench.

"Yes." He paused to make sure he had my attention. "Technically, I said, 'Son of a bench! Stop making these dang things!' "

"What's the difference?" I said, doubting he had used the word dang.

"The difference is, I want to get credit for a great pun!"

Credit given, IT Guy.


Here are more benches. Thanks for stopping by. Do you want sugar in your iced tea?

I can't stand it when old fence wood is thrown out. I feel compelled to make something out of such good, weathered wood, so I have a fencebench in the front yard and a fencebench in the back yard, plus I've sold a few fencebenches. (Say that word fast three times!)


This bench is a favorite, mainly because the sides are shaped like cowboy boots.

On the seat of the bootbench, I painted playing cards. My daughter, Code Girl, says I need to paint another one. I'm one short, like that's news to anyone that knows me.

For lurkers who don't read the comments, I quote from yesterday:

Anonymous said...

Come, dear friend,
Let's sit a spell.
The weather's fine,
All is well.
We'll sip a glass of Texas tea and
Enjoy the shade of the kind oak tree.

The Toy Room

We call it the toy room. It was designed for C-Bear, our only grandchild. He needed a place at NaNa and PaPa's where he could play and call his own. He's sixteen now, and the room has progressed to even hold - heaven forbid - dolls! C-Bear won't even sleep in the room anymore, preferring the couch, a tent, or the RV. It's NaNa that resists redecorating the toy room!

My first inspiration for the room was cheap paint. I was at Lowe's and found two cans for $3.00 each, my kind of price. Next I had to find something to paint.

Once I decided to paint the ceiling in that room, I took a stiff paper plate, cut it into two pieces, and started tracing half the plate around the room. I admit I tried to use math to make the circles even, but numbers aren't a vital part of my brain. To compensate for my poor arithmetic, I had to make adjustments to some of the scallops. I put those adjusted half circles over the doorway so they wouldn't be so noticeable. After the scallops were painted blue, I used a felt pen for the wrinkles and stitches.

With the room light on it's hard to see the details in it. There are other carousel horses in the room (you'll see them Thursday), so I was delighted to find this globe at a garage sale for the huge price of ten cents. It's not the cost of the treasure; it's the fact it's a treasure!

I used sticker letters to write the poem on the wall. It's always been a favorite of mine. "Life is the first gift, love is the second and understanding the third." Marge Percy.

C-Bear and I added the last line. "But toys are the best gifts." C-Bear.

When you've decorated every other room...

I’m convinced the laundry room is the least decorated room in a house. And why not? It’s a work room, not a place to relax and read a book. It’d be like hanging pictures in the garage. Who's going to see them?

But we’re changing our ways…in laundry rooms, at least.

Because that room is traditionally a blank canvas, I treated it as such at our house and got out my paints and brushes. I painted a portrait of our little dog Sally hanging from a towel and just continued painting around the room until I got back to her. Then I got out my ant stamp, which I love, and placed ants along the clothes line. I even incorporated my hanging dusters into the painting by pretending they were attached to the clothes line. I also used the painted rope to spell out the words Laundry Blues.

And that was my downfall. One day C-Bear, my grandson who was about ten at the time, came into the kitchen and asked, “What's 'laundy' mean, NaNa?”

“I don’t know. What?” I said, thinking it was a ten-year old’s joke.
“I don’t know either,” he said, with a gotcha smile, “but you painted it on the wall in there.” I hustled into the laundy room…I mean, laundry room to view the mistake for myself. Sure enough, I had dropped the consonant. Paint brushes don’t have spell check.

Fix that rug for me, would ya?

Isn't this the sweetest rug?

Or is it? Oh, it's sweet, all right, but it isn't a real rug. It's a painted one on the hardwood floor of my dentist's waiting room. Technically, it's excellent. And the details of the piece - the intricate designs in the center and on three of the corners, the border of fringe with gaps like missing teeth (well, it is in a dental office), and the highlight on the edge of the flipped up part - pull the viewer into the artist's world. But it's the creativity that keeps drawing me back to the dental office. Well, that and a tooth that's being crowned.

By creativity I mean the clever corner flip of the rug placed right in front of the doorway. It gets me every time I enter the room.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love the rug without the flip, but it's the flip that turns this rug into an extraordinary work of faux art.

The artist is Becky Luther. Becky is a decorative artist in the Bryan area who specializes in old world and textured finishes, murals, gilding, and faux effects. I'm hoping to run across some more of her work. (Get it? Run across? It's a rug! Get it now? Oh, never mind!)