Every year we go to the Columbus Arts Festival in June. It’s always near my birthday and has become a tradition for my birthday weekend. This year, unfortunately, we were feeling under the weather. We didn’t let that stop us though because we had a mission this year: to get our first piece of art specifically for the new house!
Last year we fell in love with a unique artist that specialized in a media we had never seen before, leaves. No not dried leaves or glass leaves, but sculptures made from real leaves. At the time we talked about how wonderful it would be to add some of his artistry to the new house to bring the outdoors in in a more sophisticated way than a lot of the decor that you find out in the mass market.
You see while I grew up in the country with a lot of at home country decor for lack of a better term, my tastes have evolved over the years and I most definitely do not like most country decor now. Most of what is out there on the market falls into the ‘primitives’ category which is just not us. In fact, our last house was decorated entirely in a nautical and beach motif. Richard is from the coast of North Carolina and we lived in NC for the first 3 years of our marriage and went to the beach often so it is near and dear to our hearts. I figured if we couldn’t go to the beach very often any more when we moved back to Ohio, I would bring the beach to us. However, a house in the country with acres of woods in the back just doesn’t lend itself to beach decor and yet I’m not looking to feel like I live on a farm or a cabin. So I’m trying to ride a line between occasionally rustic touches and looking like a farmer’s barn threw up in my house.?
It’s taking a while for me to really grasp what kind of feel I want to give to this house because the house has a completely different personality to it than our old house. The settings are different, the styles are different, the colors are different, the lighting is different….honestly just everything is different…in a very good way. Trying to get in touch with what I really want to do with the house has been more difficult for me than I thought. I am a designer at heart and normally I get a pretty clear vision right away, but 17 years of collecting nautical decor had left me with tunnel vision and a lot of indecision. While we have gotten rid of lots of our old decor, we have sentimental attachments to some of the nautical/beach decor and I was trying to figure out how to blend those items with the style of our new house.
I think I finally figured out that the vision I have for the house is more contemporary with a lot of natural elements. I am like most women in middle America who love Joanna Gaines, the difference is I would never want to live in one of her houses. They are just too much for me….too busy, too primitive, too rustic…just too everything. I like clean lines and less trinkets and I find myself getting rid of more and more chotchkies all the time. At the same time I want to give the house personality because too many clean lines and open spaces make for a house and not a home.
So the festival came upon us this year and we knew exactly WHO we were going to buy from, but not exactly what or where we were going to put it. The great room was the obvious place, but because we have an open floor plan and a wall of windows we actually have limited wall space for decor in the great room. In the end we picked this medium size vine that holds 3 leaves and we chose these beautiful hosta leaves in various sizes with more natural/autumn coloring.
Last year Richard bought me this smaller leaf vine for my birthday which is for my craft studio and has a little more artsy/less realistic coloring. I am still deciding where to put this up in my studio, but here is a picture of that piece. On all of these vines the leaves are attached via strong magnets to the vine, so you can choose to position the leaf itself in any way you like. The only drawback to these pieces is because of the strong magnet and not wanting to rip the piece out of the wall when you are removing the leaves for positioning or cleaning is that you have to use some pretty large toggle bolts to attach the vine to the wall. This requires a significant sized hole so if we ever want to take these down or move them to other rooms, there is some definite wall patching that would have to happen. The vines each take 2 of the toggle bolts and are hidden beside the magnets so that they are behind the leaves themselves and are not visible once mounted.
Back to this years arts festival, we also walked around and checked out a lot of other booths, but I honestly didn’t enjoy the festival as much as I normally would because we were sick. However, as tradition, we stopped at the end to let Creative Kid play in the fountains located in downtown Columbus where the festival is held.
A few days later CK gave me some earrings he picked out with Richard for my birthday from the arts festival. That’s also been a tradition in recent years that the guys pick me out something from the festival that I had been looking at…typically jewelry from CK and Richard often gets me a piece of glass art, but this year we wanted to invest in the leaves for the new house.
Be sure to check out the amazing leaf artist, John Wayne Jackson and his company Imagine That! Creations.
Thanks for reading!
