New Wall Plate from Wolf Dottir

A few weeks ago I added a new piece to our plate wall and it’s so perfect. I’ve been following Margaret, Wolf Dottir, for ages on Instagram and I’ve been wanting one of her pieces to add to our plate wall for just as long.
Recently we sent a few messages back and forth as I loved her The Great Mother plate [which was out of stock at the time], so I asked if she had any other plates she would be willing to print her Great Mother artwork on [yes, Margaret is a talented artist as well plate technician (is that even a term? Well she is)] another plate. A week later I had my hands on this custom piece and it has perfectly bridged our plate wall to a second dining room wall.

I’ll include below an updated legend of the other plates included on our wall, as they’ve moved around a bit since I last blogged about our wall.

SOURCE LIST:
1. Fuck That Shit decorative plate by Lou Brown Vintage
2. Thrifted ‘abundance’ plate from Value Village [extra points if you get the SNL reference]
3. Thrifted gold plate
4. Thrifted side plate from Value Village
5. Plate left in our Lower Town apartment by previous tenants
6. Thrifted plate from Value Village, added a sparkly black gothic ‘C’ using my Cricut
7. Insect Mandala side plate by The Curious Department
8. Bubble wall sculpture by Lana Filippone
9. Thrifted tea set from a charity shop in Dublin for our wedding
10. Plate left in our Lower Town apartment by previous tenants

I love adding more pieces to this corner and can’t wait to see where I find my next plate.

Cora’s Big Girl Bedroom™ reveal!

I’m very excited to finally share some photos of Cora’s Big Girl Bedroom™! Yes, it’s taken me *checks calendar* 13 months to take photos of her room since sharing my moodboard and layout plans for it last year. And while it’s a pretty tiny bedroom, the layout and design packs a punch and still works as efficiently as the day she graduated to her Big Girl Bed™. I had a lot of fun thinking of how to make this previously brown bedroom a perfect room for a curious little girl.

See something you like? A complete SOURCE LIST is included at the end of this post.

Cora’s bedroom is TINY. For most of these photos I’m standing as far away as I can in an opposite corner of her room. It’s so small that there’s no room for built-in storage and it’s just wide enough to fit a bed, as seen below [you can also see more of my 3D mock-ups here!]. I really do love a challenge so I took my time with creating the best layout [as simple as it seems] and worked from there.

I sourced a gorgeous spindle-type bed secondhand on Kijiji for $80 as well as an armoire perfect for all her clothes [and that would fit her dormered room] for $50 [via Facebook Marketplace]. The bed was pine and didn’t have a great finish so I wasn’t guilty about painting it in Fusion Mineral Paint‘s ‘Coal Black’ [after doing a mock-up of it in SketchUp and seeing it would look *chefs kiss* against the green walls].

Speaking of walls! I gathered a huge amount of inspiration for Cora’s room from her dollhouse. I matched the colour almost perfectly [‘Agaves Green’ by Sico Paint] and painted half the walls. When I say I, I mean Robert did all the painting. I was in peak pregnancy nausea with Zelda at the time and wanted to sleep and puke so Robert did all the tedious painting #Blessed.

I wanted Cora’s room to feel sweet, creative and earthy with a sprinkle of odd. I can’t remember what I searched for in Etsy to find them, but when I found Grannet Home‘s mushroom linen fitted sheet and pillow case I knew this was the pattern that was going to tie Cora’s room together. Its sweet birds, mushrooms, beetles and and berries were just gorgeous and a perfect mix of earthy and odd.

Going with the wall colour and bed linen, I built the room from there. I filled it mostly with pieces Cora / we already had. I tried my best not to smother the room in burgundy or pink and I think it worked out well.

The irony is that I took these photos the day before doing a total bedroom reshuffle and upgraded Cora to our spare bedroom to turn this room into Zelda’s bedroom, so this room doesn’t even look like this at all anymore.

I had a lot of fun with Cora’s room, but I already have HUGE plans for her new bedroom, and even more amazing plans for Zelda’s version of this very room.

SOURCE LIST:
– Walls painted in “Agaves Green” by Sico Paint
– Bed secondhand from Kijiji
– Bed painted in ‘Coal Black’ from Fusion Mineral Paint
– Sequin gold and white pillow thrifted from Value Village
– Pink pillow gifted from Cora’s Nana
– Mushroom linen bedding [fitted sheet and pillowcase] by Grannet Home on Etsy
– Pink bedsheet from IKEA’s DVALA bedsheet set [including fitted sheet and pillow case]
– White embroidered blanket from Mariposa Design
Grey faux fur blanket from !ndigo [light gray option no longer on their site]
– Not pictured, but used: IKEA’s LENAST mattress protector
HUSVIKA twin mattress from IKEA
– Armoir found secondhand on Kijiji
– Vintage pink porcelain knobs via Firstfinds on Etsy
– Brass Cappa curtain rod by Umbra
Sanela velvet curtains from IKEA [olive green curtains are since discontinued, welp]
– Irish landscape painted by Cora’s talented Nana
– ‘Cora’ embroidery by Hextrovert
STORM book by Pieces by Georgie
– ‘C’ scrabble-style artwork DIYed by me years ago
Isild medallion bird portrait tray by iBride
– Felted piggy faux taxidermy by Felt Fauna by AC
– Shelf with peg hooks found secondhand on Kijiji [then painted in FMP’s ‘Coal Black’]
– Gray EKET cabinet from IKEA used as a bedside table
TARNABY table lamp from IKEA
Miniature dollhouse dollhouse DIYed by me

Cora’s Big Girl Bedroom™: beforemoodboard and layout – after

A decorative plate display for our dining room

A few weeks ago I added a plate display to our dining room and I’m so pleased with how it turned out. I added some of my favourite thrifted plates along side some very fancy one-of-a-kind plates I’ve collected over the years.

A lot of the steps I took to hang the plates are pretty obvious, but since I encountered some trial and error [i.e. I dropped a plate], I thought I’d share my whole hanging process as this was the first time I’ve ever hung up decorative plates.

I started by making an arrangement with our plates [above] and swapped them around until I was happy with how they looked. I next left them on our dining room table for 5 days and awkwardly ate each meal around them. This step is optional.

I next worked on how to hang up the plates. Two of the plates came with hooks already fixed to the back, and I think we were in a state of lockdown when I was working on this [I’m loosing track of lockdowns at this point], so it wasn’t an option for me to walk into our local hardware store to pick up some sort of plate hooks, so I DIYed my own. I took some pull tabs, bent them slightly with plyers, and super-glued the bottom to the back of the remaining plates [seem below]. As an added strengthener, I super-glued a long piece of masking tape through each the pull tab. This looks 9,000% flimsy, but the masking tape sealed rock-hard to the back, adding extra “just in case Cora goes on a stomping rampage” insurance to each plate. Trust me, this is incredibly secure.

I then began adding the plates to the wall by starting with placing the two largest plates as a starting point, then adding one plate at a time. TOP TIP: it’s a total pain in the ass, but take every plate down before you hammer in a new nail [so your pattern will be: hang up a plate, hold up another plate, mark the next nail, and take down all previous plates before nailing in the next nail]. I didn’t do this in the beginning and my hammering caused the large plain plate to jiggle off the nail and fall. Luckily, it didn’t break. Taking all the plates off before nailing in the next nail is a total time-suck, but worth it in the end.

SOURCE LIST:
1. Fuck That Shit decorative plate by Lou Brown Vintage
2. Thrifted gold plate
3. Thrifted side plate from Value Village
4. Plate left in our Lower Town apartment by previous tenants
5. Thrifted side plate from a charity shop in Dublin
6. Insect Mandala side plate by The Curious Department
7. Bubble wall sculpture by Lana Filippone
8. Thrifted tea set from a charity shop in Dublin for our wedding
9. Plate left in our Lower Town apartment by previous tenants

Special mention for one of my favourite plates which was a recent pregnancy insomnia purchase, Fuck That Shit plate from Lou Brown Vintage [pictured below is a similar plate since they’re all one-of-a-kind]:

I have many more plates I’d like to add to this corner in our dining room. A good few of which will be from Canadian artists I’ve found through Instagram over the past while, and there will be more thrifted plates as well. I’d love to have so many plates that they overflow onto the next wall.

In short: this plate display virgin is a solid convert.

Also featured: secondhand painted black highchair, pretty gold curtain rods