Sailor’s-Trunk-of-Wonders Bathroom with Long Distance Lovers Stenciled Wall Pattern

There were a lot of albums my older brothers spun on the turntable in our suburban New England home that were not my cup of tea.  Nonetheless their lyrics were indelibly inked into my creative DNA. Much like a sea shanty that gets stuck in your brain, Love Stinks by The J Geils Band was one of them. It goes like this:

You love her

But she loves him

And he loves somebody else

You just can't win

And so it goes

'Til the day you die

This thing they call love

It's gonna make you cry

I've had the blues

The reds and the pinks

One thing for sure

Love stinks, yeah, yeah

(Love stinks)

Love stinks, yeah, yeah

(Love stinks)

Love stinks, yeah, yeah

(Love stinks)

Love stinks, yeah, yeah

Songwriters: Seth Justman / Peter Wolf

Also burned into visual memory was the very nostalgic silhouette art found in the thousands of antique shops and flea markets while treasure hunting with my mom.  Dusty memorabilia of this ilk and this song seem to have fused and parlayed into the quirky and quaint “Long Distance Lovers” surface pattern design.

This Princess Doraldina Designs surface pattern speaks of both romance and separation, of sailors and sweethearts waiting on distant shores. With four various color ways that we’ve created, the possibilities for use in fashion, furnishings and home goods is endless.

Original Long Distance Lovers colorways

After Leslie and I created the pattern of four watercolored cameos with scalloped borders, it was love at first sight. But the design continued to evolve when Leslie screen-printed the cameos over another design one day, and loving the combination, I worked with her to develop design the Long Distance Lovers Wallpaper Version, bad registration and all.

I envisioned wallpaering a room in my house with Long Distance Lovers wallpaper one day, and recently, that day arrived, however, not with wallpaper but by way of stencil and hand painting. This was a great project for decorative artists (see Arteriors.net), and I played with the scale of the cameos in a whole new way.

Like Shakespearean sonnets or old sea ballads, the pattern speaks of longing, adventure, and, of course, the heart-break of “star-crossed lovers”. Each stencil repeat becomes a lyric. Each wall a verse. The bathroom itself becomes a song—part ballad, part Peter Wolf’s “Love Stinks”.

The bathroom/sailor’s-trunk-of-wonders is further accessorized with vintage Niagara Falls prints, a lovingly depicted antique landscape painting and a collection of vintage radios; one, an oldie that probably blasted big band music in its day, and a transistor that played tinny sounding one-hit-wonders on hot summer days at Hampton Beach, sometime in the 70’s.

You can find variations of our Long Distance Lovers patterns in two versions on fabric, or as a Crossbody bag as well as in wallpaper from Spoonflower.