Tonight I finished putting all the studs on the walls of the nursery…which means the walls no longer bend and fold as they did.

I also decided that I didn’t like the ornate Victorian window I had used in the previous post, since it wasn’t true to such a late Victorian house. So instead I added these two more standard, working windows (working in the sense that I can raise the sash on a nice day to let the breeze in…)

Which gives a general view like this for now (yes, the door to the nursery opens the wrong way…I will have to switch the hinges eventually).

I’ve also decided on the following wallpaper for the nursery. The swans are by the children’s book illustrator, Walter Crane (1845–1915).  I was going to use a darker, brown wallpaper as wainscoting, but decided against it. This is a nursery after all…it needs to stay light and appealing.

Finally, I took a photo of this lovely hand-painted miniature pastel picture, which will eventually hang on the wall.

There is a story to this picture. When I was a child, an older lady came to visit us once…Mrs. Olga Taussky-Todd.

She was a mathematician (1906-1995)…quite the pioneer as far as female mathematicians went (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olga_Taussky-Todd)…who had worked with my father at the National Bureau of Standards when he was just out of high school, and with whom my father later did work in number theory.

As a child, I had no idea about any of this. All I knew is that she brought me a gift of this miniature painting…the first and only miniature I owned until I was an adult. I used to hold it in my hands and imagine an entire room around it…a different room each time.

I think it deserves a place of honor in the nursery here…

Good night.