Hanging Around The House 4: Upstairs Foyer

Continuing the series of posts that try to capture the various pieces of art I have hanging around the house. Remember that these posts are made up of quick snapshots–these are hardly professional images, and the upstairs images are worse than the downstairs ones since the angles I could use to take the snapshots are much more highly constrained. The images in the post link to larger images.

Since we finished the downstairs last time, we’ve moved on to the main level. The house is a bungalow, so there is only downstairs and the ground level (which we tend to call “upstairs”).

Let’s start in the foyer just inside the main entry way. When you walk in the door, if you look to your right, you see this:

That’s the Neil Gaiman poem “The Dangerous Alphabet”. Some years Neil makes up some kind of print that he signs and sends out to his “Christmas Card List”. I’ve received a number of these things over the years, and I tend to frame them and hang them somewhere that my guests will have time to read them. The foyer is good for this since you tend to get people standing around while shoes/boots/coats/jackets etc are handled, etc.

When I first got this back from the framing place I thought the frame was a little too ornate, but over time I’ve come to be quite happy with it.

If you look directly in front of you, you see this:

The mirror was a wedding present, and the spray of copper leaves is something that I brought back from one of my trips to the Minneapolis Renaissance Faire. I’m saving one double-height wall in the family room for a gigantic version of this–I’ve seen the much larger variant of this, with something like 60 leaves, at the show and as soon as I figure out how to get it to Nova Scotia…

Here’s some detail on the leaves:

When the door is closed, you can see on your left another of the Gaiman “Christmas Cards”, this time his poem “Instructions”. What you probably can’t tell from this image is that there is a small typo in the printed text–there was an attached note telling the story of how Neil’s daughter found the typo as soon as he got them home from the printers, and how he decided to just leave it in place. I had the note fixed to the back of the frame, and no one ever notices the typo unless I point it out to them.