Home Sweet Home

Basements

The first place to look for that extra living space you need is your basement. Bright, cheerful colors and well-chosen, durable materials can work miracles in this often neglected area of the house.

Basin Stand

A piece of wooden furniture designed to hold a washing basin. The basin stand originated in England in the mid-eighteenth century. Thomas Chippendale included some in his design book, and the form remained popular through the Hepplewhite and Sheraton periods and even beyond. With the introduction of modern plumbing, the need for basin stands disappeared. Most of them stand 30 inches high on three legs that support a molded ring into which a porcelain wash basin can be fitted. Some have space for an urn for water and a cake of soap.

Basket Weave

A style of weave produced by the interlacing of two or more warp ends with the filling yarn. A popular pattern in hand knitting, it resembles the plaiting of a straw basket. Cotton and linen monk’s cloth are made from a small-repeat basket weave. The loose construction of basket weaves makes them impractical where tensile strength is required.

Baskets

Surprisingly inexpensive accessories, baskets are functional as well as decorative. Available in a wide variety of shapes, colors, and sizes, they can be used in any room of the house and outdoors.

Bassinet

A baby’s bed, one end of which curves up and over into a hood that shades the baby’s face. Originally most bassinets were made of wicker basketry, and many still are, but today the term is used for any baby bed with this hooded shape, whatever the material.

Basswood

Alightweight, strong wood from any one of the several trees known in America as basswood and in Europe as linden or lime trees. Also called linden and American whitewood, this wood is creamy-white, fairly soft, and glues well. It is used largely for inexpensive furniture and boxes, as core stock, and as cross-banding in veneer work. The tough inner bark of the tree is often used for caning and wickerwork.

Bathrooms

Long consigned to the realm of the functionally unattractive, the bathroom has taken on new possibilities for creative decoration. In remodeling your present bathroom or adding a new one, choose fittings and accessories for style, convenience, and safety. Look into the possibility of a compartmented design—often the answer to the problem of a two-bathroom family in a one-bathroom house.

Batik

An ancient method of decorating fabric by a waxing and dyeing technique. Probably developed in what is now Indonesia and widely practiced there, particularly on the island of Java, batik has also spread to neighboring areas of Southeast Asia. Fragments of cloth found in Java indicate that batik patterns have been handed down in certain families for at least a thousand years and the technique itself is probably much older.

The batik process involves covering parts of the fabric design with a layer of wax that will repel dye when the fabric is dipped into a cool vegetable coloring. After the color has set, the wax is dissolved with hot water, thus leaving the undyed pattern against the dyed area.

There are five steps in batik making. (1) The design (usually geometrical or based on conventionalized natural objects) is drawn on paper. (2) The design is traced from the paper pattern onto the cloth, usually a thin cotton but occasionally silk. (3) Wax is applied to the parts of the design that are not to be colored in the dye process. (4) The cloth is dyed and absorbs the color in the areas unprotected by wax. (5) The wax is removed, and the cloth is

properly rinsed and dried to fix the dye. If multicolored batiks are desired, this process can be repeated several times, with different areas of the design covered by wax each time the fabric is dyed.

Java is the major source of batik work, and each important batik center there has its own exclusive designs. Work from western Java tends to have bright colors and large patterns, often florals, while central and east Java batiks have subdued colors and symmetrical, geometric motifs.

Batiste

A fine, diaphanous fabric of meshlike weave. Created in the thirteenth century by a French linen weaver named Jean Baptiste. Available now in cotton, rayon, silk, and wool fabrics, batiste is a highly versatile material especially suitable for linings and curtains.

Batten

Length of sawed wood used to brace or hold two or more boards together. Usually a batten is 7 inches wide, less than 4 inches thick, and 6 feet long. When less than 6 feet in length, the sawed wood is a batten end.

Battersea Enamel

Enameled copper articles made at York House in the Battersea district of London. The Battersea enamel firm was founded in 1753 by Stephen Theodore Janssen, John Brookes, and Henry Delemain but was operated only about three years. It produced small personal articles such as snuffboxes, patch boxes, and watch cases. Battersea workmen coated a copper base with a soft white enamel and often gave the piece a pale blue or pink ground with a white reserve. The white field or reserve served as a surface for decoration. Mottoes, landscape vignettes, flowers, birds, and portraits of celebrated people were the most common motifs. Some were painted by hand in polychrome; others were decorated by transfer printing in either black or sepia. After 1756 many engraved plates of the Battersea works were used by other firms, which used them to make similar wares.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
Master of Guide part A

• Bathroom Furnishing Touch
• Bathroom Decoration, how to put on the Style and Colour on
• Awesome Array of Bathroom Styles, DIY Bathroom Grand Plan continue...
• The wasteful home, What we should do to improve home consumption?
• Bathroom linens and accessories
• Bathroom Renovation, where to start
• How to Design Your Bathroom for Beauty, Convenience, and Safety
• Awesome Array of Bathroom Styles, DIY Bathroom Grand Plan
• Skillful use of color
• Household Master of Guide part I (Bombe, Fabric, China, Book Shelves, Decor)