Rethinking Collectibles
Tina loves to “repurpose” everything from fabrics to garden accessories. “The lace tablecloth on my dining table is really a bedspread, the vase is a canning jar container and I turned an old screen door into a message board by attaching a chalkboard to it,” she says. A birdcage in her hallway holds note cards, and red-checked kitchen “curtains” are really napkins from Wal-Mart draped over a rod.
Three basic colors are used throughout Tina’s home. To complement yellow walls and green accent furniture, she uses summery fabrics with red motifs and patterns. One of her favorite projects was mounting red rose vintage tablecloths of different sizes over art canvases and then stapling the fabric to the backs. “I was looking for inexpensive art for my large wall in my hallway when suddenly I got the idea to display my tablecloths as big floral art. It feels like an indoor rose garden.”
Tina’s husband, Milton, is her handyman and helps her with most of her projects. One adventure the couple still laugh about is when they mounted china plates around a chandelier on a bedroom ceiling. “The first plate we tried fell down and broke. But we kept trying and finally got it to work,” she recalls. After the ceiling plate episode, which Tina wanted to try because she thought the little blue birds on the plates would look like they were flying against her “blue sky” painted ceiling, Milton finally asked her, “When are you going to stop all this decorating and collecting?” Laughing, Tina told him, “Never Milton, never, because it’s simply what I do.” He smiled good naturedly. “I had a feeling,” he said.
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