Brightening the Bedroom

I love having company. Of course, I really enjoy the chance to hang out with friends and family in the comfort of my own home, but I also love that it's such a great motivator to clean and get stuff done around the house. Aside from the normal clean up preparation before our recent company, James and I were inspired to do some more decorating projects.


We rearranged our bedroom, and I really love the new layout. Now I can lie in bed and look out the window. James hung this stained glass piece that I bought for him several years ago, and which we hadn't had the chance to display in previous homes. I love it there! It looks so pretty against the tree outside the window. It's a copy of the rose window at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in New York. It's quite lovely; that's Christ in the center, of course, and he's surrounded by a heavenly host. Angels radiate from the center, the four Evangelists are at the cardinal points, the four Great Prophets at the ordinal points, and cherubim all around.

James also hung up the wedding shadow box he gave me for our first Christmas, with our Wedding at Cana icon, which was a wedding gift, and this crucifix which was a wedding gift to my (Roman Catholic) grandparents from the priest who married them. It is a sick call kit, like this, and it's over sixty years old so the candles and holy water are long gone.


The shadow box contains: the program from our wedding ceremony, the church wedding certificate, one of the little tissue packets that my mother and I made to pass out to guests (this was a joke on me because I cry at everything), a wedding picture in one of the little frames we gave as favors, and the service book the pastor used to marry us (he gave it to us as a wedding gift). We had yellow roses at our wedding, and these little ones also indicate our wedding date: August 9, 2003. 8 vertical, 9 horizontal, 3 vertical. You can tell we're converts, since we married during the Dormition fast.

Our bedroom feels so much more comfortable. We had really done less with it than any other room. We're planning to put new flooring in all the bedrooms sooner or later, and we had been holding off on painting our bedroom until then since it had been painted more recently than any of the other rooms. But the floors are on hold on right now, and I loved changing things up in there, so I'm starting to want to get in there with paint. But what color...