DECORATIONS FOR THE COTTAGE WALL

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 246, 7 January 1928, Page 17

DECORATIONS FOR THE COTTAGE WALL

rpHJERE is a craze just now for decorating our cottage walls with framed or wooden panels bearing quotations from favourite authors, quaintly wise old saws, and humorously appropriate sentences of admonition or advice. For those who pride themselves on making their own Christmas presents, and getting them ready in good time ahead, this new idea is very opportune. Care, neatness, and some small aptitude for line drawing, are most important assets for this sort of thing. Old English lettering, as it is called, is more generally u ? ~cl for illuminated script, and the capital letters are painted and decorated. Parchment paper, both fine and broad-nibbed pens. Indian ink. or coloured inks, gold-paint, and a paint-box and brushes for colouring the initial letters and their backgrounds, are materials required. Experienced script writers invariably pencil in the lettering lightly but accurately before commencing in earnest, and rule faint pencilled parallel lines to keep it all straight. Sometimes a border is drawn as well, and delicate little thumbnail sketches appropriate to the subject of the verse or proverb. Some amusing lines addressed to golfers had a bag of clubs, in colour, as a tailpiece; “Home, the place where we grumble the most and are treated the best,” had a little red-roofed and green-shut-tered house in the right-hand bottom corner to balance the handsomely decorated first Hin the top left. „ . , , x . , Glazed, and simply framed in passe partout, the finished article is a pretty specimen of one’s handiwork. Polished panels of thin wood are also used a good deal, in which case the initial letter is not so elaborately illuminated. These do not need glass or frames, of course, but are suspended by a cord through bored holes.