Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall

A very practical, yet ornate, decorative accent that greatly enhances home decor is the Victorian wall mirror.  Homes in the Victorian era were known for their elaborately decorated rooms.  This elegance has been captured in the designs of mirror frames made from modern materials such as fiberglass resin.  Cherubs, angels, flowers, and scrolls are the typical artistic renderings that grace these classic mirrors.  Mirrors were an important decorative home accessory in the Victorian era and continue to enhance home decor today.

Mirrors Bring Elegance

As decorative items, mirrors can increase the apparent size of the room or give the illusion of space.  The earliest known mirrors are approximately 8,000 years old and were made from obsidian, a volcanic glass.  As long as 4,000 years ago, mirrors were used in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and in China as well as by the natives in the New World.  During the Victorian era in Europe, fancy mirror frames were popular in most of the elegant houses, and now, designers have recreated these mirrors to put all of that elegance right into your own home. 

Puppets for Imaginative Play

A child can be anything that he can imagine, so in your child’s living space, it is best to provide him with endless ideas and inspirations. With a police puppet, he can arrest fellow stuffed animal citizens for speeding down the highway rug, or with a doctor puppet, he can save the stuffed animals’ lives who might have been injured by a speeding plastic truck. Maybe your little one would really like to be a chef who earlier in the imaginary scene had cooked for the plushy citizens at a fancy restaurant under a table. At the end of the day, the puppets’ work is still not done: they can be placed in a relaxing position in a chair or on a shelf and add the perfect comforting touch to your child’s bedroom decor.

Puppets for Creative Minds and Creative Decor

For a child’s room with a magical theme, an interesting decorative addition would be puppets of wizards, dragons, unicorns, and pegasus. These mythical creatures will transport your child into an imaginary world for hours of fun. Your child can decide who the puppet will be and how he will act. As David Logan, a renowned puppeteer, expressed, “This allows for the imagination to explore countless different possibilities.” In decorating a child’s bedroom, parents should be sure to provide an environment that will stimulate the child’s creative mind.

Animal Puppets As Bedroom Accents

If your child’s room has an animal theme, a matching puppet is not only a play item, but a decorating piece, too.  For an under-the-sea theme, brown octopi, clownfish in their signature orange and white stripes, and other tropical fish in reds, yellows, and blues make great characters to spark your child’s imagination and accent the colors in the room.  What’s the sea without a dolphin or shark?  The personality of each puppet shines through its colorful appearance.  If your child is not the ocean type, you can decorate with frogs of magical shades and bugs that don’t bite.  Or take a step back into the prehistoric age when dinosaurs in exquisitely bright colors roamed the earth.  Whatever your choice of animal is, colorful puppets with big personalities will enhance your child’s bedroom decor.

Puppets & Marionettes For A Child’s Bedroom

Camels, elephants, tigers, and monkeys will dance around your child’s room when you decorate with animal marionettes.  Real geckos, tarantulas, snakes, and bats all may go bump in the night, but as puppets they are children’s favorites.  They provide hours of imaginative play and make-believe fun.  They are also the decorator’s favorites when planning an animal theme for a kid’s bedroom.  Puppets and marionettes are unusual decorative items that can add personality and a creative touch to a child’s bedroom or playroom.

Puppets Make Fun Decor

One item that you may not think of as home decor, but which can liven any child’s bedroom or playroom is a puppet or marionette!  Children love to put on puppet shows, and what better way to spark their imaginations than with well made, intricately detailed, colorful hand puppets?!?!  Children can be doctors, soldiers, clowns, and magical people or pretend to be monkeys, cats, elephants, or even fish.  These puppets are perfect for play, but also, when displayed in a child’s room, they are perfect accents for any theme.

Armillary Sundials

Of all the sundials, the armillary sundial is most reminiscent of the Middle Ages and Old World astronomers.  The design comes from the early astronomical device called an armillary sphere which was created to represent the heaven’s great circles.  The armillary sundial indicates solar time by the use of an arrow which corresponds to the Earth’s axis.  The arrow’s shadow is cast on an equatorial band which is marked with the clock hours.  Today, these sundials are made from a variety of materials such as brass and iron and are sometimes quite ornate with exquisite detailing. As favorite decorative items for landscape artists, they are usually placed on pedestals and make perfect accents and conversational pieces in classic garden settings.

Adjusting Your Sundial

There are a few basic reasons why your sundial may not indicate standard clock time.  Sundials available today have generally been designed for a given latitude.  The style or gnomon must be set in alignment with true North while the angle that it makes with the horizontal should equal the specific latitude where the sundial is located.  To insure that this angle is correct the sundial may need to be slightly tilted along its North/South axis.  A correction for the actual longitude of the sundial compared with the longitude of the official time zone may be necessary.  The hour-lines must be rotated by an angle that equals the difference in longitudes. 

The sundial’s time differs from standard clock time also because the earth’s orbit around the sun is elliptical and because the earth tilts on its axis.  The distance between the Earth and the Sun actually varies, and the correction for this ranges from zero minutes to as much as a quarter hour either early or late.  On some sundials the “equation of time,” which describes the correction, is inscribed on a plaque attached to the dial.  In very sophisticated sundial designs the equation is incorporated automatically. 

In areas where daylight saving time is used, the sundial time will be off by an hour.  This is often corrected by use of two sets of numbers on the dial rather than just one.  With a little patience and perseverance your sundial can be situated so that its accuracy is totally satisfactory.

 

 

Types of Sundials

Most of us usually think of a sundial as a flat disk with an arm that extends at an angle from the center, but actually there are several categories of sundials.  Some, like the ones with which we are most familiar, use the edge or tip of a shadow to indicate the time, while others use a spot of light or a line of light.  The shadow-casting part of the sundial is called the gnomon which usually is a thin rod or a triangular shaped object with sharp tip or a straight edge. 

Sundials can also be categorized by the type of gnomon used.  Some gnomons are stationary while others are moveable so that they can be adjusted for the seasons.  Gnomons can be oriented horizontally, vertically, in alignment with the earth’s axis or in a direction which was determined mathematically.

Another categorization of sundials has to do with the different types of surfaces that are used on which the spot of light, the line of light, the shadow tip or the shadow edge are cast.  The most common surface is the plane – usually in the shape of a disk, however, some other shapes that have been used for sundials include cones, cylinders, and partial spheres.  These, as well as more complex shapes, are used for increased accuracy and also for their artistic appeal. 

Sundials can be categorized according to how difficult they are to orient.  Some sundials require that the installer know the local latitude, the direction of true North, and a very accurate vertical direction.  Other sundials are virtually self-aligning and do not require knowledge of latitude etc.  The sundial, no matter how it is categorized, is an intriguing instrument that measures time by the position of the sun.