making the bed
New sketch for the Leontine Linens home page!
Don't you wish you had this to fall into after a long day? I sure do. When I am standing in the middle of my bed, beating the fourth-floor-walk-up dust out of my pillows I often find my mind wandering back to this illustration.
Oh to have not one, but two side tables. And to have a headboard! Sigh...
I am so far from having side tables it is almost painful to type the words. My "bedroom" may actually be a closet. Based on the dimensions, I'm fairly certain it isn't a bedroom. I mean, what were the original architects of our building were thinking when they built a 5 x 14" room? Maybe it was going to be a canoe storage facility? Whatever the intended use of the space was, it is now just wide enough to place a queen bed and nothing else. Definitely not side tables.
And a headboard would never work. How would I stand on the window sill behind my bed (where a headboard theoretically could go) when I am wrestling the fitted sheet back on to the mattress after doing the laundry?
However, despite these shortcomings, the bed used to be the place I retreated to after my hatred of the love seat became unbearable. But now even the bed is becoming a source of discontent.
You see, every day for the last year and a half I have launched myself onto to bed and stood on top of it to fluff the pillows and attempt to make the bed while standing on it. This consistently does not work. And yet I do it day after day because the only other option I see as a possibility would be installing a "flying" apparatus to suspend me over the bed like Peter Pan while I fix the bedding before heading off to work each morning. While this might make bed-making easier, a pulley system would definitely detract from the overall look of the room.
So, standing-in-the-middle-of-it technique remains the daily routine. This is an acrobatic feat, requiring very zealous jumping and launching of my entire body weight as I attempt to become airborne momentarily to smooth the sheets under my feet.
Just try to picture this.
Apparently a year and a half of anger-driven jumping on the bed while trying to make it up each morning has had its repercussions. I discovered that I have effectively ruined my under bed storage system as all my leaping around has knocked the bed off of its bed risers and now the poor bed-frame is teetering on top of the six plastic Container Store bins that are placed beneath it.
So, now the frame and mattress (and human) weight is slowly crushing the container store bins and trapping my shoe collection along with it. I'm getting claustrophobic just talking about it. I mean... what am I going to do? We have to save the shoes! Save the shoes!
#SaveTheShoes
And sweet, wonderful Jane Scott of Leontine Linens offered to work with me on the design of my own monogramed set of leontine beauties when we first talked on the phone about my illustrations. Oh, if she only knew what kind of life she would be sending her poor unsuspecting linens into if she shipped them off to my house, the bedding equivalent of sending your son off to spend the summer working on an oil rig in Alaska.
So for now, Leontine Linens is strictly a source of illustration inspiration and a dream and I shall continue my very decidedly non-traditional bed making technique until one day the entire bed with me on top of it breaks through the floor to the apartment below.
I'll let you know when it happens. I've been dying to see what really is going on below me and I think airdropping in on an unmade bed would be just the way to make an entrance. From the glimpses I've seen in passing, they have manhattan's largest and most unorganized collection of used shoes, marijuana plants and also appear to offer in-house a capella singing lessons.