Soothing Color Palettes

A lot of what was in my dowry reflected my mother's conservative tastes or was whatever I could scrounge. There were a few exceptions.

I had an uncle who was a Gemini like me.  He picked out the pastel large floral "wild flower" sheets given to me one Christmas or birthday in my teens and it was eventually paired with a pale peach king sized comforter on a queen bed, which meant it draped like a bedspread.

I also had a favorite set of purple and beige towels. Sadly, nothing really got done with that.

Early in my marriage, I acquired two bath sheets, one in pink and one grey. Years later when we moved into a fixer upper with a horrifying pink bathroom, I salvaged it by replacing the wallpaper border with a black-grey-pink-and-white probably fleur de los pattern or something akin to that and putting in lots of black and grey accessories to tone it down.

My bedsheet curtains were pale green and I was redoing street find furniture. My pieces were frequently NEVER really finished and they were Frankensteinian monsters.

But I had a salvaged dresser and I like painted it green I think and covered the drawer fronts in blue and green brocade cloth. And added new replacement white knobs.

And I had a blue sleeper sofa and I dyed an unfinished table top blue and attached it to a pinkish wood table I turned upside down and put on wheels.

So curtains in place of walls and pale green plus pieces in various shades of blue and it was the most feminine space I probably ever had and I was getting divorced and it was kind of my first only space designed just for me and I was happy there.

I don't think I would cover furniture in cloth again like that without finding a way to seal it in shellac or something, so maybe not at all. And I would be unlikely to ever refinish curbside finds again. Those are both cleanliness issues.

I also dyed a salvaged coffee table green. I like dying wood blue or green and I like unusual wood tones trending pale yellow and pink.  

I had a somewhat fancy coffee table in yellowish wood with glass inserts. UGH. Never again. It was gorgeous but a cleanliness nightmare to pull out the glass and clean regularly.

But it was one of the prettiest and most feminine pieces I ever owned.

I had a "country" style dining table and chairs similar to this BUT instead of white paint and light wood, mine was black paint and cherry tones. Like country style cherry, not European stuff. Reddish brown, not RED.

I had upgraded my kitchen appliances to black and I had plain dark wood kitchen cabinets and I replaced the wallpaper with brown and black striped paper that pulled everything together and looked both country and sophisticated at the same time.

I like that Japanese aesthetic where you use natural materials in a simple yet artsy style.

I wanted to be a geology major and I had stone stuff in my apartment, like a marble pastry board, a pizza stone and marble book ends.

Our first Christmas together, I bought my husband sharpening stones in cedar storage boxes that were gorgeous and looked like Japanese abstract art pieces. It was three sharpening stones of different hardness grades, so different stone types, in a cedar display box.

They got stored for years like artwork on our living room shelves. My sons eventually asked what they were. They had no idea it had a utilitarian purpose.