Skooky Jack by Katy Kristin: Mermaids in the Bathroom

Cute Vintage Mermaids: The Blonde is made by Norcrest and the Redhead is made by Lefton.

We moved into our house a few years ago, and ever since I've been obsessed with making our upstairs bathroom cute and vintage looking. It came with a terrible fiberglass shower unit, bad stick-on fake marble vinyl tile floor, and an ok but not well-made sink cabinet. We painted the walls a very cheerful aqua blue, and that helped...then I started to collecting these little ceramic mermaids and fish from the 1950s...and that helped some more.

On a side tangent, I think the vintage mermaid wall hangings fascination probably started when my friends from the Dagons showed me the artwork for their album Teeth for Pearls. On another tangent, this is one of my favorite albums! Here's the album cover:

So back to the bathroom...we were finally able to hire a super nice guy to redo all the tiling and stuff. We found a cool vintage sink with chrome legs at Urban Ore in Berkeley, an amazing salvage place. I'd already installed an art deco medicine cabinet I'd gotten from there a few years ago, so that looked great with the new sink.

Then we had white subway tile put in for a new shower and tiny white hexagon tiles intalled for the floor. A million years ago, I had visited the Gamble House in Pasadena, sort of a mega-luxury bungalow built in 1908 by Greene and Greene. It had a fantastic all white bathroom with these same tile combinations, and have basically always wanted a bathroom like that ever since.

Sorry those pics aren't too inspiring, but you get the idea.

I made curtains from a fantastic Heather Ross mermaid print, which also features octopi and kelp, just like the giant seaweed we have here off the coast of San Francisco. My friends gave me a super cool crocheted squid in an apothecary jar for my birthday last year, which they got at the Curiosity Shoppe on Valencia St. The squid is made by artist Jessica Polka.