Summer Palace Duck Egg, or how I came to hate my ugly curtains

Summer Palace Duck Egg Material by Laura Ashley, which I am planning on having curtains made out of

 

 

I have always been a sucker for beauty, motorway road bridges which are just the perfect shape and give you the feeling that you're on a massively exciting journey, beautifully cut dresses which hit you in all the right places, walking behind someone with beautiful hair, all these are things I love. I guess the reason I read Vogue is for aesthetic beauty, as well as the strength of some of the prose (the last issue has a piece written by Freida Hughes, daughter of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, which is fascinating as well as gorgeously written.)

I guess my love of poetry, of writing, of Nabokov, also stems from a love of beauty. Who cannot fall for the cadence of a perfectly cut sentence, the rhythm of a book of these, gripping you, whilst telling you a story? Who cannot love T.S Eliot? I really need to devote a whole blog post to these people, but anyway, my point is, I love beauty in everything, pretentious as that may sound.

Until recently however I have not got into interiors. Beautiful pans, lamps, curtains simply didn't interest me, they were there to servr a purpose, that's all. My Mother always said 'one day you will love interiors like you love fashion' and I was just like 'nah.' Yet recently something has happened to me, something has changed, I suddenly need to make my flat as beautiful as possible and fill my room with lovely interiors, and the kitchen with gorgeous pans (on a very limited budget.)

Maybe this is because this is the first flat where I have felt properly settled, happy, safe. Unlike previous bedsits and university accomadation it doesn't feel like a stop-gap home. Also, I think that recently my nesting instinct has kicked in. Although I have no children and no intention of having any til I have a decent living wage and all that which will probably be when I'm thirty, I find that as I hve got older I have wanted to created a nest, a safe haven, for myself, and my friends. I have a desire to feed people, to look after people, to nurture people, and also to nurture myself, and I think that my desire to make a perfect home is linked to this, although I am still messy I am lessy messy than I was.

I guess all this has led to the desire for new curtains in my room. My curtains are ugly, they are a pale green colour reminiscent of those disgusting mints you can suck in the back of the car on rainy days when you're a kid and you're bored, and they have chaotic white spirals on them, drawn as though a token design, a scribble done in a warehouse 'can we sell this as curtain material?' 'Just do a doodle on it and it'll be fine.'

In short. I hate my curtains, and this hatred is pretty intense, so intese that I'm thinking of taking them down and living without curtains until I can find a new pair. They seem to scowl at me every time I see them. an insult to my crispy cotton bedsheets, my lovely mirror with the lace scarf draped over it, my wardrobe full of somewhat tatty but beautiful vintage dresses which |I love. It's sort of like having a spot, a massive one you can't stop thinking about or picking at because it's somewhere stupid, like right under your eye.


With this in mind I started looking for new curtains, at first I looked in Argos, which was a mistake (argos mighthave okay pans and bedsheets but curtains: nope.) I considered other places which do ready made curtains but none of them seemed right, plus there's the issue of them fitting, then, browsing the internet I came across the Laura Ashely made to measure curtain service.

I know, Laura Ashley are expensive, almost expensive enough to warrant an exclamtion mark, if I didn't hate the things. Yet, the fabrics they offer are so beautiful, and they also take the exact measurements and make them to fit perfectly, offering you a choice of trim as well as heading, the name for the top bit of curtains where they attach to the rail (there's a name for that?)

Suddenly I was fascinated by which material and which heading I wanted for these fantasy curtains, these curtains which would complete my den, my lare, my nest, whatever you wish to call it, these curtains which would blow gently in the spring breeze next year and smile upon me as all my dreams come true.

I browsed through the fabric swatches on the website for an indecent amount of time, focusing mainly on the blues...my bedroom has a bit of a blue thing going on, not through my choice but because like a woman has colours which suit her, which flatter her and show her complexion in the best light, so do rooms, and my room is happiest in blues and creams, perhaps due to it's proximity to the shore, and the gulls which can be heard constantly from the window.

Eventually I found a fabric swatch with which I fell in love. It's called Summer Palace Duck Egg, and I found myself loving the name, reminiscent of fairytale splendour and T.S Eliot's Journey of The Magi -

'There were times when we regretted the summer palaces on the slopes, the terraces

and the silken girls bringing sherbert' 

Who would not wish their room to be thus adorned? The imagery. The thoughts. Could I be silken girl, in the summer palace of my room?

Yet also I love the design, the pink parrots with the golden necks, the butterflies and flowers and branches, reminiscent of a fairytale world, as well as being similar to material, my Mother made into dresses for she and I, when I was a child of perhaps five. This material was pale blue and was covered in fairytale castles on clouds, and exotic creatures, associated with travel. Like these light summer dresses, which I associate with seaside holidays and bare feet, this material is evocative of travel, of possibility, of magic.

The Snow-Queen within every girl

And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,   
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,   
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,   
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

T.S Eliot

It's not snowing yet, and it's only a week since we had gorgeous weather, with people lying in the meadows, with bare arms. Still, those days have passed,a final air kiss blown to us from the hand of summer,an adieu, a bientot, I will see you next year Darling.


Yet already I am dreaming of snow. Last year it started snowing in late November. A friend and I got cheap tickets to The Marriage of Figaro for under 26-year-olds, on a freezing cold day, when we came out of the Festival theatre the ground was covered in a gentle dusting of snow, reflected by the lamps. It didn't stop snowing until January, by which time everyone was thoroughly sick of it, and the sludge had none of the romance of early winter, yet still I cannot hate snow when it is an abstract concept. I still associate it with childhood, with christmas markets, sledging, thick gloves, cocoa, the diamond panes of the windows in the cottage where I grew up catching the fine white dust.

I also think of Raymond Briggs snowman, which I had from early childhood, of the old collie dog we had who used to love chasing snowballs only to bite into them and find them crumble, icy in her mouth.

Yet I also always find myself thinking of 'The Snow-Queen'  a fairytale I remember for it's icy magic, as opposed to the finer details of the plot, so much so that I had to wikipedia it for this article, but as I read the entry the story came back to me. You can read it by clicking above, but the one thing which surprised me was that in the story Kai gets a shard of glass in the eye, as opposed to a shard of ice in the heart, which I had always believed, perhaps due to my Mother always telling me that to be objective a writer had to 'keep a shard of ice in their heart at all times'

I think I was always enchanted by the frozen beauty of snowqueens, from the original one in the Hans Christian Anderson story to the terrifying opponent of Aslan in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. I always longed to be somehow similar to these women, with their coolth and ability to make people follow, and wished that I could somehow mould my puppyish please-like-me nature into pure Ice.

Yet as I grew up I learned from films that Ice queens are not always evil, not always cruel, but that they are beautiful women dressed perfectly for cold weather, battling the elements bravely and somehow managing  not to get pink faced from the cold.

Iciness is all very well, but the counteracting force to this is warmth, so now I think of snowqueens as women of great warmth, beauty, tenderness and perhaps a single invisible shard of ice in their heart, because afterall, a girl needs to protect herself somehow.