Bringing Up Baby

Good morning Ladies.
Meet our new Spode, Blue Italian, soup tureen. This new addition to the household repertoire is courtesy of Mom & Dad. Over the years Mom has hand selected beautiful pieces for my table every year for Christmas. As time past and the family grew it became more efficient to gift us all with pin money to add to our collections at will. I have had my eye on this beauty for a while, so in the tradition of lovely pieces for the table it became ours.

Hopefully for Valentine's Day a big boquet of creamy white roses will fill the empty vase.

Well, you all know how one thing leads to another when you add something new to a room. Here is the thing. During the holidays my red rug that used to be in our cottage goes under the dining room table. The rest of the year a less than desirable old blue and green rug has filled the space by default.

It occurred to me that there was another rug from Summer Hill (the name of our old cottage) in the basement that might work better. I had been hesitant to use it in the past because of concern that the pink background of the rug would clash with the orange hue of the kitchen cabinets, not to mention the whole red thing going on in the adjacent great room.

Over the years, and with an English Cottage attitude toward houses, I have learned that sometimes the things that you can not imagine working actually do work out. The play of light and shadows do amazing things to soften the look of a room. The light in our kitchen comes from the north which generaly produces a cool effect. When the table and chairs were added back in the shadows it created really did soften the area. I am guessing here but I think that the combination of the cool color of the rug against the warm color of the furniture and cabinets kind of neutralized the whole room.

I do not know, but when the rug went down with out any furniture on it the look was awful. When the furniture went in place I really liked the way it turned out. Am I wrong here??

See how blue pink it looked here all by it self.

Anyway, I am glad to have this baby up out of the basement seeing the light of day. This tree of life pattern rug came from a junktique shop in Charlivoix, Michigan in the early '90's. It was in pretty good shape for an old barn rug. After a trip to Hagopian in Birmingham for a good bath and new fringe it looks almost like a really good old rug. I do not remember exactly how much I paid for it originally but it probably was not much more than $100.

I hope you are all having a good week. It is sunny here this morning for a change and there is a pretty light dusting of snow on the ground covering up all the dinginess from our last rain shower that melted all our snow.

Thanks for coming by.

xoxo

Sue