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My Office: One Room Challenge Week #3

It’s week #3 people!  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m in the middle of a six week One Room Challenge.  The idea is to redo one room in six weeks and blog about it each week.  You can read my first two weeks here and here.  And you can see the other bloggers and read about their progress here and here.

Last week I said I would try to get the window treatment finished.  I succeeded in completing that task.  Here’s the before:

office 2

And after:

Silk plaid panels with a pink balloon shade

Silk plaid panels with a pink balloon shade

This is the first house that my husband and I have lived in together in which I’m not sharing an office with him, so if my design seems a little girly, it’s because of that, and the fact that my daughter is now 11 and doesn’t want the girly stuff in her room anymore.  I’m loving the tiebacks that I adorned:

bee tieback 2

DIY Bee Tieback

They started as a simple black wood tiebacks, and I added the honeycomb design and the bee charm.  If you don’t know already, I’m pretty crazy about bees.  In fact I’ve blogged about this obsession, which you can read here if you’re interested.  This weekend I’ll post a blog on the super simple how-to that could be adapted to all sorts of tieback designs.

I wanted to share with you art that I’ll be adding to my office.  The first piece is by my grandmother, Ruth Peevey Erwin Lavender.  It’s a batik that she made when she was an art major at SMU.

Ruth's Batik

Ruth’s Batik

My parents gave it to me years ago and I’ve never figured out a way to successfully frame or display it.  I’m going to attempt to do that in the next 2-3 weeks.  My first idea is to hand stitch it to a heavier fabric and wrap that fabric around a piece of plywood and hang it on the wall.  If that doesn’t work, I’m going to add rings or a rod pocket to the top and hang it from a cafe rod of some sort.  Fingers crossed it’ll work out.

My second piece of art that’s going into the Office is by Le Ba Dang.  I bought it a thrift store  several years ago.  I like getting art from thrift stores.  They always have the most random selections but it all has some kind of history or provenance.  I always wonder why it ended up in such a sad circumstance (although I’m thankful it’s not in the landfill.)  In my old house I had a collection of almost entirely thrift store art over my Living Room sofa:

Newbold LR 1 - Copy

Just yesterday I decided to look up Le Ba Dang on the internet to see if the artist was well-known.  I found a biography of him that said he was born in Vietnam in 1921 and that he, while in his 90’s was still alive.  They included a quote from his wife about the secret to his longevity:

Le Ba Dang quote

Le Ba Dang quote

This really rings true with me.  The busier I am, the better  I feel and the more I can enjoy my accomplishments.

Then I did a little more research on Le Ba Dang and I found my print for sale!:

My print for sale.

My print for sale.

Don’t know if you can read all the text, but the price for the print is $2000 firm.  I’m not exactly sure how much I paid for mine, which is also signed in pencil, but I’m guessing it wasn’t more the $10.  I have no plans to sell it, but I just love the fact that it’s one of only 260 prints, and it’s been saved.  Sadly, with more research, I learned that Le Ba Dang died on March 8th at 94.

Next week I’m going to show you the lighting I’ve been working on for the Office,and I have a wrapping paper organizer that I’m going to finish and install (if my husband is reading this, which I’m pretty sure he’s not, I’ve just put him to sleep with that sentence.)

Have a great week!

Rachel

 

 

 
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One Response

  1. love all these little sneak peeks and i love how your passion for art just exudes in your writing…can’t wait to see what everything looks like in it’s place!

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