Study/Studio Re-Decoration Part 1: Feature Wall

In a much earlier post ::here::, my study had bright purple walls, vinyl decals, etc. I felt it was too kitschy for my current tastes, and started redecorating. It has been a slow process, as decorating is costly, and there are other parts of our house that have needed our attention more urgently. The room isn't finished yet, but it's pretty close. As it's quite a complicated, multi-purpose room. 

Featuring the Wall

My feature wall, also termed a 'display-wall' or 'gallery-wall' is probably the part of my study that most embodies the aesthetic that I am aiming for with my study. It was initially a black wall with silver Valspar glitter for some sparkle. I repainted it after the initial surface got scuffed up by me reposition the pictures, knocking it with furniture etc. For the repaint, I wanted to have a slightly green colour, partly to balance the purple walls, and partly because I just like green. I couldn't find the shade that I wanted in the range my local DIY shop carried, and I had tried some testers, so I bought another of a more neutral black tester I liked and mixed it with a black that was more like a very dark blue-green and blended the two at home with more glitter to get a colour that I liked. The glitter shimmers somewhat green, rather than silver, because of the green dye. Yes, I am that finnicky! 

The display wall 

My collection of frames are mostly from TK Maxx and Dunelm Mill, bought before I decided to drastically reduce my purchase of new items. The moon painting that I did was professionally framed by Riverside Gallery in Inverness, and the large mirror with the swirly frame was bought second-hand in in Inverness' PDSA branch. I like the silver gilt finish on these different frames because quite a few have some texture to them, more than just a metallic finish. Some of them also have some dark dry-brushing in the cervices, or a wash - things to make them have a little more life on them. I think things like texture, some variance in colour, etc. quite helpful for making the arrangement more dimensional and interesting. They're not all the same silver, not the same level of metallic finish, they're diverse, but also - hopefully - harmonious too. These ones were bought like that, but in our bedroom I've repainted and varnished frames to try and get the same concept.

Very terrible photograph of my wall with bad lighting (and wonky stars).

Terrible grainy photos are what happen when I take photos on my own phone.

I managed to align the dado rail along the bottom of the photograph, but because of perspective distortion, lens distortion, etc. there's more slope along the top of the pictures than real life, however the wonky stars are all my own fault; I haven't got the black paint all the way up to the ceiling partly because I can't reach up and partly because I know that along the top there will be cornice, however unfortunately I didn't leave that gap evenly, and I matched the stars to the wonky edge instead of the ceiling. I regret this. I will stencil in some more high up stars at the right edge, and more low stars at the left end and try and level this out. I will wait until I have the coving up, however, so I have a good visual straight edge to match things up to. It's really important to have a good visual marker, especially when you're dealing with something big and you're painting up close. Also, it will never be truly straight when working in a building like mine, and I need to give the visual illusion of straightness when the walls and ceilings aren't straight. 

Antique sword. Also a close-up of the wallpaper and the orb string-lights. 

I collect bladed weapons - what I really like are swords (there is another one in my study) but I have a couple of knives. I would like more fine daggers, especially antiques. Currently I don't have the income to collect antiques right now. I have considered selling off some of my collection because of financial situation, but there are complex laws about blade sales in Scotland so I'm keeping them, plus I remember how much work I put into saving up to buy them in the first place. There's something fascinating about the history behind objects: for example, the sword pictured is Italian, I think from the 1870s, perhaps later, and while it is displayed in its scabbard, there are beautiful engravings - somewhat scuffed - that tells a bit about the military background of the sword, and it also has dings along the spine of the blade that look like it may well have actually used in a sword-fight, or at least in defence of another bladed weapon (the context could be all sorts of things!). I also think it fascinating how much beauty and art that is often invested in embellishing what is primarily a weapon. I am interested in H.E.M.A, used to do modern sport fencing, as well having had a few kendo lessons, so I have an interest from a historical swordsmanship perspective, too. I think a lot of people think it's creepy, or that I have some murderous intent - I joke that I'd never use my collection to stab anyone because they're too precious to get blood on (true, honestly. Even skin oils are bad for them!) and 'creepy' is a subjective judgement. These are art objects to me, even if that is not what they were made as - but they were made with craft, care, and creative skill.

I repainted this moon. The camera angle is really awkward.

Good camera because I used Raven's phone instead of my own... 

Moon iconography is a prevalent in my study - mostly in my near my Book-Nook and meditation space because one of my ways of remaining in tune with nature is doing devotions according to the lunar cycle at the meditation altar in my Book-Nook. My next blog post will have more details about my Book-Nook. This particular ornament was bought as a yellow glossy moon with the slogan "Sleep tight, sweet dreams through the night" painted on it, so I repainted it to fit in better with my study décor. The original ornament was £1.50 on eBay. I tried to make it a slightly adorable sleepy moon. It's hung up just by the entrance to the Book-Nook. 

Sword, mirrors, picture frames, art. 

I have, since these pictures were taken, got more pictures, and pictures I like better, to fill the frames. I'm aiming for more fine-art prints, as well as my own artwork. It is an ongoing process, but having the frames first means I can arrange the wall and then find pictures to fit on the wall, which I find is easier than when I have had the pictures first and then tried to find a place for them (situation with our living room). A lot of the prints are repurposed greetings cards and I'm eyeing up some Caspar David Friedrich and Salvator Rosa postcards.

The moon-phase banner was a Winter Solstice gift from Raven. He bought it for me from someone on Etsy and I have been asked on Instagram where it is from, but unfortunately he can't remember where. The moon-phase garland along the top was from SpookyBox Club when I was subscribed, and I painted and assembled it myself. 

Moon phase banner. 

I think the picture above is pretty useful for illustrating how the curtains tie together the aesthetic for the main area of the study/studio. and screens off the Book-Nook. I am not always proud of my decorating decisions, and often it takes more than one go to create what I visualise in my head, or for me to realise that what I visualised doesn't work out so well in real life, but I really like how the damask voile curtains go with the wallpaper and monochrome wall. Also, this is possibly the only photograph I have with the stand-lamp in it.

Terrible, terrible photo; why I'm part-exchanging my phone for a better one.

If you can see anything at all, it's an old photo of the Book Nook before the altar

I will be doing a few more posts about this room specifically, and then more about specific projects, especially furniture repaints. I will also chart more of decorating the rest of the house, although not all of the house is in a particularly Gothic aesthetic, so I will be focusing on the more Gothic-looking rooms. As you can probably tell from the square photographs, most of these pictures are or were on Instagram, where my accounts are @domesticatedgoth for this sort of content and @architecturallygothic for ruins, cathedrals, churches, monuments, and other spooky or pretty buildings. 

Ice-Skating, Botanic Gardens and River Ness

On Saturday, my friend Mavis invited me out to go ice-skating because Inverness Ice Centre apparently has cheap public skating on a Saturday afternoon. It was £5 for over an hour of skating, with an extra £1 for skate hire. Other people certainly bought their own skates, so that is an option. Both Mavis and I have been ice-skating before - but both somewhere between 12 and 15 years ago! Neither of us could remember how to ice-skate. By about my fourth or fifth circumnavigation of the ice-rink, I finally remembered how to skate well enough to stop hanging onto the wall and skate relatively freely with a little confidence. I even remembered how to turn on the spot and approximately how to stop without falling over. We both thought we'd escaped from falling onto the ice, right until 8 minutes before our session was over, when Mavis fell onto the ice. I came close several times, but thankfully the edge wall was there to save me, although I did do some rather ungainly slips! Mavis was a bit bashed but mostly OK. 

Photo by Mavis. Editing by me.

After we went skating, we thought about visiting Inverness Botanic Gardens (Floral Hall) which is pretty much nextdoor to the ice-rink, but they were just closing up. Instead, we posed for photos by the exterior of the perimeter wall, which had some rather pretty climbing plants growing on it. I get a little creeped out by certain bugs, which Mavis kept insisting on talking about, and I started getting worried that there'd be some in the bush I was posing by, hence why some of the poses get further and further away from the bush! I'm not entirely sure what the flowers were, but they were quite pretty. I am also not entirely sure how old the stone wall is; it looks quite old, but I'm not really sure how to tell beyond the profusion of lichens and the rather established climbing plants. 

Photo by Mavis, editing by HouseCat.

My thanks go to Mavis for taking these photos. She took them on my rather dire phone camera, so I am impressed that they came out this well because it is very rare for any photograph taken on my phone to come out well. It works better outdoors, certainly, but these are far nicer than my outdoor shots with the same phone camera. I did the editing afterwards because they were on my phone, but all I did was crop them down to squares, tweak the contrast slightly and apply the 'dusk' filter from ::PicMonkey:: because the grey weather made everything look dull, so all the actual photographic stuff was done by her.  

Photograph by Mavis, editing by HouseCat

My outfit might look like it's a bit much for the day before the midsummer Solstice, but the weather was grey and prone to rain showers, plus it was obviously going to be cold in the ice-rink, so I was wearing my thick and warm winter tights, a skirt with petticoats, bloomers, and a slip under my corset, blouse and dress... with a shrug! While I was skating I did think that it might have been sensible for me to have been wearing lace gloves. I almost always wear lace gloves, every single day, and the one day I don't (because I do have to wash them all occassionally) is the one day I regret not wearing them... typical! 

Photo by Mavis, Editing by HouseCat

My hair is currently pastel turquoise because that is what colour the green fades to when it has not been dyed in a while. My hair has become very fine and brittle after being repeatedly bleached, and my roots are growing out. My work have not made any complaints about my pastel-coloured hair, so I have not dyed it back to dark green. I do not mind covering up the bleached hair with dye, but I do not want to have to bleach my roots, as I do not want my hair to get any more damaged. My hair is snapping, both at points where it has been bleached and at points in the new growth, and it is also simply falling out. I naturally have rather thick, straightish hair that grows into a wave as it gets longer, but it is noticeably thinning around my hair-line, and also instead of growing into a neat wave, the ends curve and kink in all sorts of frizzy directions. I am laying off the hair-dye and bleaching for a good while! I have actually got nearly 2 inches of regrowth, but I am posing to try and avoid showing this. I do not plan on dyeing or bleachung my hair again until September, and I will need to get the fried-looking ends trimmed out of my hair, as the constant snags probably are not helping the snapping problem.

Photograph by Mavis, editing by HouseCat

The outfit I am wearing is: a ruffled blouse from eBay from one of many Chinese importers, a secondhand Bodyline dress that is from their 'separates' range and a bit short for Lolita so I wear it as a Goth dress, my favourite crochet lace shrug that was originally from Tesco but also bought secondhand, thick winter tights from Tesco, and a pair of very comfortable brogues with a slight heel from Gabor that I bought secondhand. I was wearing some extra layers under all that, including an underbust corset. I love thrift shopping, eBay shopping and scouring alternative-specific secondhand sales pages for bargains; it is the cheapest way to get nice Goth clothes.  

Photo by Mavis, edit by me

After we stopped for photos outside the Botanic Gardens, we wandered down towards Ness Islands. It turns out that it was the same day as the grand opening of the new skate-park on the ice-rink/Aquadome/Botanic Gardens side of the river, so we paused for a minute to watch people doing stunts on all the new ramps and things. There were people on rollerblades, stunt bikes, skateboards, etc. I used to do rollerderby on quad skates, and when I was younger I used to do a few stunts on inline skates (but nothing spectacular) and watching the kids (most of the people there were younger teens) on their skates made me a little bit jealous, but considering my unbalanced performance  on the ice skates, and considering that I have a co-ordination, balance and spatial awareness disorder, I probably won't try and join them any time soon. I no longer bounce like I did was younger,  and these days I risk actually injuring myself. 

Photograph by Mavis. Editing by HouseCat

Inverness has a series of pedestrian suspension bridges across the River Ness - two at Ness Islands,  and two between more central points within the city, so four in total, and the two bigger ones downstream are both of a rather pretty design. The two at Ness Islands are smaller and narrower, and replacements built in 1987/1988 for much nicer and sturdier-looking Victorian era suspension bridges (which were a replacement for earlier suspension bridges that got washed away in a flood...). The general idea was maintained in the new design, but it just isn't quite the same, and whenever anybody jogs or walks quickly across either of the bridges, they bounce like a trampoline which is really quite unnerving! The Happy Pontist blogged about them ::here::. 

Photograph by Mavis, editing by HouseCat

I also took some photographs of Mavis on the bridge, and she took some of me. My phone camera struggles with varied lighting, and the bright grey-white sky and reflections off the river really threw it, leaving the edges of the photos faded and my pastel hair looking almost as if it were glowing. In my edits for these photos I decided to enhance this effect and further fade out the edges. I darkened myself and the background slightly, too, in order to boost the contrast a little. The final effect makes me think of how I sometimes remember dreams; there are items, events and people who seem as clear as in reality, but then the setting seems to fade away into obscurity around them. My hair blew in the wind and went up above my head, all floofy, and my phone camera captured this really badly, so I just coloured in the blurry mix of white, brown, and turquoise with a turquoise to match my hy hair and make it look less like some weird monster had landed on my head. 

Photo by Mavis, editing by HouseCat

Mavis had never been for a proper walk around Ness Islands before, so we walked down to the bench and stoney prominance built into the flow of the river at the most upstream point of the islands, and then across all the various foot-bridges down to the most downstream end of the islands and then walked back into the town down the South bank of the river, passing lots of lovely houses and gardens, and then going up to ::La Tortilla Asesena:: for tapas. I had never had tapas food before, so that was certainly a novel experience for me,  and it was all rather delicious, especially the churros I had for desert.