As if you couldn’t guess, I’ve been filling what little down time I have with more creativity.  I’ve been hanging artwork on my walls that make me smile and dream of made up stories of what the artwork tells me.  Or, what I want it to say.

I wrote about this barn last week, and over the weekend, I put aside the big project I’m currently working on (and yes, coming soon, right here) and decided to hang a collection that had been sitting neatly stacked on the bottom shelf of my design table, patiently waiting to be displayed.

What I’m talking about is a collection of plates.  Old plates.  Some from the 1800s.  Others, quite a bit newer.  I’ve been collecting them for about 3 years now with the intent of hanging them in my remodeled master bedroom.  But, things happen and priorities shift and that master bedroom makeover is tabled for the time being.  The plates though – well they’re just too pretty to sit, stacked.  They needed to be hung and what better place than the kitchen.  More specifically, above the newly refinished dresser.

In my aim to spruce up the place and make things a tad more sophisticated, I took down one of the three signs I had hanging in our kitchen, moved a sketch to another wall, and the Pinocchio marionette now lives over by the cookbooks.

I carefully laid out the plates in the pattern that I deemed good.  Thing is though, once I started to hang the plates, that pattern went out the window.  The plates ended up telling me where they wanted to hang.  And the little project that I thought would be a quick one, took me a bit longer.  The best part about it, I had lost track of time.  I was enjoying hanging these plates so much that a couple hours flew by, feeling like only a few minutes.  Funny how that works.  Each plate, with their date on the back, started telling their story.  I wondered how many meals each plate hosted, or if ever they were displayed on a wall as they are now.

Hanging there in this little niche of the kitchen, the collection is right at home.  Vibrant colors of various sizes are bringing old and new personality to the wall.  Perhaps, one could say, history is art.  What is old, is new again.