For months (okay...fifteen years), I have been pondering putting something pretty over our bed.
(We need something in that bare spot to the right, too, but that's another story.)
As you can see, there's not much space between the ceiling and the top of the headboard - maybe 2 feet. I can't really imagine a painting there. I thought about chopping a big grapevine wreath in half (the half-circle would nicely mimic the shape of the headboard) and arranging flowers and ribbons on it, but when I think of all the dust and cobwebs it would collect over the years (I keep things I like forever), the thought of sleeping under it kind of grosses me out. I thought about a series of plaques or doo-dads of some sort, but haven't found anything that grabs me. I thought about a "saying" - you know, those vinyl letters that you stick on the wall that say stuff like "Always Kiss Me Goodnight" - but . . . . Nah.
So. What to do?
I have been clueless, until today, when I stumbled upon the idea of a macrame wall hanging.
Enter the twisty stick.
Last fall, I decided I'd had it with a crape myrtle tree growing near the front of our house. We did not plant this tree; it was a "volunteer." Evidently, a bird pooped a seed it had eaten in someone else's yard, for the tree that resulted from it bloomed a lavender color we don't have among the other crape myrtles in our yard. The bird's aim was a little off, and the seed landed about a foot to the right of where I would've planted it. But we let it grow.
It grew taller than our roof. As it grew, a stray tendril of jessamine (from a plant we'd cut down years ago) found a limb and twined around it. Initially, I thought this would be pretty cool. In our back yard, we have a crape myrtle that became fully entwined with stray sweet autumn clematis. Amazingly, they co-exist peacefully. The clematis begins to bloom just as the crape myrtle blooms start to fade, and the effect is that the tree sort of changes color from magenta to white. Of course, I knew that the "volunteer" tree and the jessamine vine would not bloom at the same time, but I thought the tree might make a nice support for the jessamine.
Wrong.
The crape myrtle grew up to be spindly (I guess it tried to out-run the jessamine), with a big clump of jessamine at the top, like a giant Tootsie-Roll sucker, and the least little wind, or snow, or ice would bend the vine-choked crape myrtle over until it nearly touched the ground. It looked plumb ridiculous. So this fall, when I was cutting back a neighboring shrub, I went to work on the crape myrtle with the loppers. As it turned out, we had to break out the chainsaw, but within minutes, the crape myrtle was (probably temporarily) gone.
But one of the sticks had grown twisted from hosting the jessamine all those years, and it was too cool to throw away. It has been living in a corner on my back porch ever since, waiting on its perfect use.
What do you think? Maybe not necessarily THIS pattern, but something similar - a macrame wall hanging on a piece of the twisty stick.
Now, all I have to do is learn how to macrame.
