Mermaid Integration

Most of the Christmas presents I received this year were invisibly integrated – clothes, a cookbook, a beautiful cutting board, a couch blanket, and other lovely things. I also got four mermaids – three from the same niece. One of the mermaids she gave us was on a card. The paper cutting of the lotteria card La Sirena was accompanied by two other card images – El Sol and El Gallo. Unlike my sun and mermaid collections my chicken collection is small and all but one of the chickens lives on two of the black box shelves in the hall.

So it only made sense for the card to go above this set of box shelves. I cut the card down, backed the card with purple tissue paper to match that which was behind the paper cutting, and framed it a small clip frame.

The second mermaid is a Frida Kahlo mermaid tile. I knew where she belonged right away – in the bathroom behind the sink with the other tiles. We moved a mermaid that was hanging there that wasn’t a tile and hung the new tile up.

This was a kind of “she looks good for now” situation but I knew I had to be on the lookout for another tile that would pull it all together. I can’t believe I found the perfect one last week at a Salvation Army store.

I like that she is the same kind of flat colorful tile as Frida. I think she complements the other tiles well too. We took down the seahorse tile (which being real not mythical didn’t fit in so well anyway) and the white merboy and mergirl are on hiatus (although I already have an idea where they might go). The mermaid that wasn’t really a tile moved out to the bedroom.

It was quite a surprise when we got another mermaid from our niece at a second Christmas celebration. She is cut from an aluminum can and colored with alcohol ink (according to her packaging) and we had the perfect place just waiting for her! I had hung the miniature weather vane mermaid on the left bottom shelf swirl this summer. The new mermaid fit perfectly on the right one.

And I got a mermaid tile coaster and matching cup from my brother and sister in law. They seemed to belong in the bathroom too. The cup usually sits on the tile but I photographed them so the tile is visible.

It’s always fun to figure out where the gift additions to our collections go!