A snowflake bedroom
Hello hello! Happy Tuesday-in-that-odd-bit-between-Christmas-and-New-Year. I hope you had wonderful Christmases and are ready for amazing 2015s.
I’d meant to post this in the run-up to Christmas but, of course, what with everything else, I got a bit sidetracked and it never managed to make it out of draft mode. Still, it’s not specifically about Christmas, just winter, I suppose, so hopefully still of some small interest in these last few breaths of December…
Scuse the graininess, there’s no blinking light at all up by the ceiling in the middle of winter…
Because my Mum lives 90 minutes away from us, whenever she looks after one of the boys for the day, she spends the night beforehand in our guest room.
The term “guest room” is a bit of a misnomer. It’s more like a “dump the junk that won’t fit anywhere else room,” stuffed full with car seats, concertinaed spare prams and teetering piles of craft supplies.
Ever since we renovated the house about a year ago (and then ran out of money before finishing the decorating, just like in every TV property show ever broadcast) it’s had some curtains tacked in place across the window, not able to open or close. It used to be the bathroom, before the big house reshuffle, and the window has been specifically designed to be permanently open a crack, an icy breeze filtering through at this time of year.
So my poor old Mum has spent many a night picking her way to a bed through a floor full of detritus, sleeping overlooked by stacks of boxes and, though mostly cosy under our warmest, thickest duvet, she has confessed to me that she sometimes puts a pillow over her head to try and keep her face warm from the draught.
As she spent Christmas with us this year she had five whole nights to enjoy the delights of our spare room. And, it being Christmas’n’all, I wanted to actually make it a pleasant experience for her.
The boxes and spare prams were banished to a desultory corner of our bedroom, the car seats stashed in her car on arrival and, most exciting of all, we actually put a curtain pole up, so the curtains could be opened in the morning, woohoo.
And then I thought, oh wouldn’t it be fun to make it like a proper white Christmas in there?
So, one evening, the hubby and I (well, mostly the hubby, really) made hundreds of snowflakes to hang from the ceiling.
Now she’s gone back home, I’ve brought them all down into the sitting room, where they sway endlessly in the breeze from the window and the heat from the radiator. What do you think? Quite festive, no?!
The one on the top right of this picture is my fave
I think the overall effect is actually quite classy.
Okay, maybe only a little bit classy and a lot kitschy.
I followed various different templates and patterns I found on Pinterest (obvs) — but mostly just hacked out little shapes from folded triangles of paper to see how they would end up. If you feel like brightening up your room in January, you can find all the patterns saved in my Pinterest board Homemade Christmas.
But, even better than this veritable paper wonderland for my poor old Mum, I also made a draught excluder from an old pair of pyjamas to lie across the gaping hole in the window. Otherwise, she may well have woken on Christmas day, a glacial breeze wafting across her face and — yet to put her glasses on — glanced up to the ceiling and thought she had woken to a genuine white Christmas.
So on that icy note, happy 2015 to you all! I hope you’ve got something lovely planned for New Year’s Eve. Me, I’ll be digging something out of the freezer to eat, scoffing the odd mouthful, inbetween the wake up calls of my two never-great-sleeping children who have entered all manner of horrendous sleep regressions over the Christmas week, downing as much wine as I can manage when free to do so and possibly watching an episode of Modern Family before, most likely, flaking out on the sofa at about 10pm. I know, I know, I’ll stop now for fear of making whatever plans you’ve got seem completely anticlimactic in comparison.
xxx
