Whether your home is contemporary, modern, country or eclectic, adding a vintage accent adds interest and adds dimension to your room. This can be achieved in many interesting ways by using items from the past.
A picture wall can have special mementos matted and framed to expand on a family member’s photograph and thus tell a story. Great–grandfather’s military metals, and the drumsticks he used in the drum and bugle corps from long ago campaigns have special meaning and keep his memory alive. Great grandmother’s christening gown, now fragile with age can be safely mounted on acid free board and placed under special light filtering glass in a shadow box. If you dig through some of your treasures, you undoubtedly will find something meaningful from your family’s past.
No matter how formal or casual your home, it is still the place in which you should feel most comfortable, and it should reflect where you came from and possibly where you are headed.
A collection of frilly or beautifully embroidered handkerchiefs can be mounted, folded or flattened to display the skill and intricate workings of a bygone art. If you travel and collect small items, you can make a clever display of them for either table tops or a wall.
Larger items like musical instruments can be grouped together and placed in bookcases or on table tops, to encourage people to handle them and get a sense of a past era. It is through sight and touch that we connect with the past; museums are great places for such an education, but your home can be a similar place in which your own family can take pride in the past and their own history.
As we age, we are amazed that what was new is now old and frightfully how quick the playthings of our childhood seem like Stone Age toys to today’s children. Do not be afraid to dust off some of your favorite memories and put them on display. I kept my husband’s original slide rule-- now a bit rusted from age and non-use-- framed it and placed it in a place of honor on the family picture wall. I imagine that to children today, that slide rule is as foreign to them as the abacus was to us; but where would any of us be today without an understanding of how these “ancient” tools were used and evolved?
I found a sculpture I made in grade school of a rabbit; it must have been for Father's Day, since I gave it to my dad. He kept it, and years later when he was gone, I found it again among his saved treasures. My husband was surprised at how intricate the piece was, showing musculature and details--pretty good for a third grader, so up on the wall it went.