Moments of Maximalism

As much of a fan of maximalism as I am, I’m not entirely convinced you’d know it by coming into my house right now. Our family has lived in our current home for a year and it is only now that we are starting to finalise exactly what we want, and start to buy things to pull it all together.

I might have the paint for my living room already, but I haven’t necessarily got the time or beans to move all of my furniture and paint it all! So our walls remain magnolia, very much boring and in need of some love. For now, I make do with little handmade moments of maximalism throughout my space. I have so many more planned, but there is little that compares with the joy that these bring me, and it feels even better knowing that I made them myself.

Mobile Maximalism

My son and I sat together and made this pom pom ceiling mobile together over a couple of snowy afternoons in mid February. He was off school because of the weather, so I taught him to make pom poms and we spent the afternoons chatting about life while making pom poms, not sure if we liked them to be multicoloured or all-one-colour, so doing a few of both.

I got some mirror ball decorations from Amazon and (keeping a few aside for his Taylor Swift birthday cake that I made a few months later!) we also popped some brightly coloured thread on those to hang from the mobile too. In typical ‘us’ fashion, it then sat finished in the window sill for a good couple of months before we got around to actually putting it up. But I couldn’t be more glad that we finally got there and I think it was actually right to wait so long; I genuinely feel so much joy every day when it reaches the portion of the evening where the sun starts to make it throw sparkles around the living room. Because of where I live, we have very long and dark Winters, so I know that next year this is going to serve as my first sign that the Winter is ending and the sun is on its way. I can’t wait!

Punch Needle Petals

An ongoing project that I’m working on is my punch needle petals. Don’t be fooled – they’re actually pretty big! Each petal is around 17cm in height, and I keep taking breaks so that I don’t burn out while I’m doing this project.

Our house is perfect for us, in that it has unique characteristics that make it stand out. For example, it is an upside down house (meaning the living room and kitchen are upstairs and the bedrooms are downstairs), and this house actually used to be a shop. As an aside – I love when locals share old black and white photos of when it used to be a shop, and I even had a discussion with my great aunt recently about her remembering the horse and cart parked outside what is now our front door.

While it is very much a residential space now, there are certain ‘shop’ traits that linger on, and one of them is that the hallways have these huge round wall lights on them. I cringed a little bit at the industrial appearance when we first moved in, but got to work in thinking of a way to infuse my own brand of maximalism into whatever I decided to do with them. The idea to make the lights be the centres of flowers came to me fairly quickly, but my initial idea was to print large vinyl petals. Sometimes I wonder if that might have been a better idea; it would have been a cleaner aesthetic, and taken me a lot less time! But when I learned to punch needle earlier in the year, I had a bit of a brain wave that I could make all of the petals myself. I made the decision that every petal would be unique, and I don’t plan the designs in advance, I just let them come to me while I’m setting up my canvas.

I know that my home design isn’t for everyone (and that this is only going to be the case more and more as I start to paint my walls and decorate further), but we really feel so much joy being surrounded by bright colours, and it truly feels so satisfying knowing that we have done these projects ourselves. My husband is a keen 3D printer (3D printer-er?) and has also printed lots of bits and bobs for the house too, so I might share them in another later post!