I had such high hopes that I would be able to finish our bedroom suite foyer this past weekend, but Matt had other plans for us. Around midnight Friday night, he began shaking uncontrollably and had a fever of just over 104 degrees. Long story short, he is now in the hospital being treated for a urinary tract infection and sepsis.
He’s been feeling much better since this morning, but we’re still not sure when he’ll be able to go home. I was hoping it would be this afternoon, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. So I’m keeping my fingers crossed for tomorrow.
While I was stuck on the foyer before our unexpected hospital stay, I was playing around with an idea for the long wall in the bedroom. This wall is over 11 feet long, making it the longest uninterrupted wall space in the entire bedroom.
None of the obvious choices really did anything for me. I could leave it empty, but again that’s a lot of wall space. I could put up three or four large pictures, about the size of the chapel picture.
I didn’t like this idea because more pictures of this size would detract from the special nature of the chapel image.
And of course I could use the other 12 pictures I cut out of the Bible study book and make a gallery wall on the long wall.
But that doesn’t make sense to me since I’ve already taken out the four with the most orange content and put them on a separate wall.
I like the idea of ​​using the other 12 as a gallery wall somewhere in the house, but literally having the 12 on a wall opposite the original 4 seems strange to me. Also, the 12 that are left don’t actually contain orange. They are all heavily colored in pink, blue, teal and yellow. So they don’t fit well with what I’m planning on doing in the bedroom anyway.
The more I thought about this wall, the more I really wanted something unexpected, freeform, and unframed. And my thoughts immediately went to the birds that I have on the wall in the living room.
I love these birds, but I’ve always wished I could find a more prominent place for them. They seem to get lost in the corner of the living room. Well, if we moved them from the corner of the living room, where the walls are painted so light that they barely stand out from the birds, to a dark turquoise wall in our bedroom, they would certainly stand out more! Of course, for an 11-foot wall, I would need a lot more than just 12 birds.
So I ordered more. Much more. Maybe I overdid it, but I now have a total of 48 birds. Since I didn’t want to figure out the arrangement with the actual ceramic birds, which would have required a lot of trial and error with real nails through the grasscloth, I used the ceramic birds as patterns to cut out paper birds that I could stick on the wall to figure out the arrangement. I don’t have the final agreement yet, but here’s a look at where we’re headed…
That’s just 36 birds, and I have 48 in total. I have 16 large birds in total – 8 facing left and 8 facing right. And I have a total of 32 little birds – 16 to the left and 16 to the right.
I’ll keep playing around with the arrangement until it’s just right. As much as I want the arrangement to be free-form, I also want to test an arrangement that is a perfect oval. My need for symmetry requires that I at least try out this idea before deciding on the final arrangement.
Anyway, there’s not much I can do until Matt gets out of the hospital. I would love for that to happen this afternoon. It’s so difficult to truly heal in a hospital when you’re woken up all night. The body needs sleep to heal, but good sleep is virtually impossible in a hospital. But it looks like it won’t be until tomorrow at the earliest. Well, yes. Instead of using paper birds and tape, maybe I can use my photo editing software to create the perfect bird arrangement for my wall while we’re stuck in the hospital. At least it gives me something creative to pass the time with.
