An Inspiration Challenge ~ Styling a Vintage Valentine Cloche

Happy Valentine’s month, dear friends! Don’t you just love the month of February? I love wearing more pinks and reds than usual, wearing the heart-shaped diamond necklace even more than usual which Mr. Ethereal gave me for Christmas 35 years ago now, and reading everyone’s Valentine’s posts. February is such a happy month with volumes of inspiration!!!

We had an unexpected extra four days off this past week with the “Icepocolypse” hovering over the mid-west from Jan. 31-Feb. 3rd, so it has been rather like a six-day weekend. Really wonderful to have an extra week off during wintertime to get things done around the house! With it, I have been busy painting and working behind the scenes on Valentine’s posts… This is my second Valentine’s post as I guess the Valentine’s cake I made last month counts as my first. 😉

💜 My Inspiration 💜

I actually got the idea for this post from our friend Amber of Follow the Yellow Brick Home who linked up a post sharing how she decorated a large cloche she has with vintage Valentines:

I loved this post and chose it to feature it along with others at this past week’s Share Your Style, as you may recall. I love all the ephemera with antique buttons, sewing notions, the little birds and, of course, the vintage Valentines!! Amber’s cloche was part of a Pinterest Challenge which I missed last year. I think I just couldn’t get a post together in time; it happens! 😉

In revisiting Amber’s post this past week, I became inspired.

I thought, “Why don’t I do my own challenge?! Challenge myself to do something similar.

It’d be fun to create a cloche inspired by a cloche which was inspired by yet another blogger! You’ll have to check out Amber’s post to see who was her inspiration and the cloche this person created. Really cute!!! 💜

Now I knew we had done another cloche post with Cindy from County Road 407′s Pinterest Challenges! Where is it?…

Found it! I thought I’d share this one along with the Christmas cloche as with just a changeout of decor items, you get an entirely different look. This pheasant cloche was the first time I’d ever used an actual cloche in decorating. My daughter and I would use our small, glass-topped marble cheese board as a cloche for little Christmas displays, but never a large cloche.

Anyway, I digress!

These challenges are all about taking an inspiration photo and taking the idea and making it yours…

How I made this Vintage Valentine Cloche my own

First, I retrieved my cloche from atop our kitchen cabinet. It has been hugging little houses since early December… I snapped a bunch of photos to try and get posts created that month, but they never materialized.

Eventually, after Christmas, I moved the cloche display up above the cabinets for a nice wintertime display (another unpublished idea; it’s been that kind of winter).

It’s nice to share these two photographs here with you today!

So leaving the three little cottages up on their cake plate village green, I cleaned the cloche and began with ideas!

The small pile of Valentine-sy books, antique and new Valentines made to look old, and vintage hand-painted rose plates were all tried but didn’t work.

The sun was going down so I worked quickly to get a few sunlit shots.

I started with a pretty painted serving tray I spray painted white when we lived in our Prairie Home trailers.

Next, I added this little book by Susan Wheeler called We Belong Together ~ a Holly Pond Hill story. It won the spot inside the cloche for its size and sweet rabbits… and their love story.

Very cute, if you’ve never read any of Susan Wheeler’s books. Her artwork is beautiful, too! Heartwarming and ethereal… Can’t get any better than that, in my humble opinion! Several of her books have been in our bookshelves since the early or late 1990’s/early 2000’s.

Rabbits are timeless!

Sidenote: As a sometimes artist, when you create something which is all your own, if you believe in it, others will too. 💜

I wish I had listened to my heart way back when and studied more art, but my father told me artists starve and artwork doesn’t sell. In this country, maybe. But Europeans and others appreciate good artwork more, and nowadays we have Etsy and other places to sell our beautiful creations. (I’m preaching to myself, more than anyone else!)

It may be harder, but you’ve got to have a BFA in Art plus a BS in Business to back it up. You’ve just got to promote yourself, don’t you think so?

I look at all of your artwork and think, that is my retirement: to be the artist I dreamed of being when I was a little girl.

Thirdly, I flipped through my small stack of Valentine’s cards and leaned them, laid each one down. None of those worked. Rejected many as being too big, too small.

Then I found these two: one is a note from a friend last year, and the young girl on the right-hand card is a true antique…

Hard to photograph through wavy, curving glass; however, she still looks sweet and ephemeral in her white dress and surrounded by roses…

The addition of a tear-shaped antimacassar my grandmother Rosa tatted almost a century ago and a Shabby Chic rose napkin ring completed this vignette. I scrunched up the antimacassar a bit in behind the book.

I am very happy with how it all turned out!

Oh, and the pink heart napkin I made, (and another set when we were living in our trailer, is a tutorial), as a little under-cloth.

There’s my challenge for myself! 😉 And now…

A Valentine’s Cloche Challenge for You

Please link up your Valentine’s cloche idea below, just for fun!! Can be old, can be new. Take a few moments later on to visit some of the folks who share theirs. 💜

The party is open as of now through February 14th at 12:00 noon, and I can send you the link for the link party in an email so you can put it on your post.

Should be a lot of fun!

My email is: french.ethereal@gmail.com

(Warning, though: I’m not great at creating parties for others to share, but if you help me when I get stuck, we should muddle through. I do have the link on Inlinkz to share with you! Really only my second attempt at a party on my own, although I put up Share Your Style all the time! Lol!!! 😉 )

Happy Valentine’s hugs,

Barb 💜