Breakfast with Nekkid Mermaids (And Other Bathroom Vintagey Goodness)

Happy 4th of July!  I woke up and celebrated my freedom by painting nekkid mermaids.  Then, I went swimming to celebrate mermaids. If you follow my blog, you may remember mention of the aforementioned nekkid mermaids in the entry titled "I Collect Nekkid Ladies".  I have molds for vintage-style mermaids and their "bubble babies", and I had cast them years ago.  They've been waiting for paint until this morning, and they now hang in my bathroom.

I always wanted to be a mermaid; actually I still wouldn't mind some days.  One of my friends knows a lady who is a professional mermaid at a tourist attraction in Florida.  If I had known that was a career option when I was a little girl, I would have developed bradycardia skills like a Navy SEAL by the time I was 7.  So not surprisingly, I took some delight in painting one of the mermaids to resemble myself.

I bought paint for another unfinished project years ago, but didn't remember purple.  When the back half of her hair is purple, she'll be my mermaid doppelganger.  Any of you who have done art enough to know about paint mixing can vouch that mixing a good purple is dang near impossible- you just have to have purple paint.  At any rate, I hadn't really painted for leisure in years.  I thoroughly enjoyed it. :)

Some of my neighbors want custom-painted mermaids after seeing these pretties on the patio, so I'll be taking orders soon!  Here's my favorite of the "bubble babies", the little sleepy one snuggling her bubble:

I'm debating whether to coat them with matte or shiny acrylic spray, and if I might want to tweak a few haircolors.  Regardless, I've never had such a cool beachy bathroom.  I recently painted a vintage metal shelf with towel bar that i found at Carolyn Thompson's Antique Center of Texas.  It was el cheapo because the scrollwork holding the towel bar was bent, and there were rust spots.  That's nothin' a little sandpaper and pliers can't fix.

The seashell tissue box is vintage as well- a lovely gift from someone dear to me, and it reminds me of my hometown, too.

It's hard to see with the weird lighting in this photo, but I finally hung my capiz shell chime.  The glass shelves on the top hold my antique medicine, poison, and quack cure bottles- but that could be another entry entirely.