If you missed them, here are Parts I and II of the saga. To recap, we moved into our house in 2008, and were inspired from the get-go by our tiny but lovely kitchen from our first apartment as a married couple when we lived briefly on Long Island.
Little by little, I pulled the kitchen apart and put it back together again, with help from my family. And I painted. Again. And again. And again.
At this point, the kitchen wasn’t getting a lot better without tearing everything out and starting over, but I kept pushing. I trimmed my open shelving out with 1x pieces of wood I had lying around to prevent dishes from being pulled out accidentally, and to make the edges look beefier. I made matching curtains for all the windows using fabric from Joel Dewberry’s Heirloom line called Opal in Dandelion. It’s no longer in stock, but I mention it because the fabric matches the kitchen perfectly, and I like all the words: Heirloom, Opal, Dandelion. 
Our house got featured on Design Mom in March of 2014, which was fun, and helped me up my photography game. But I have trouble leaving well enough alone.
That’s One and Two, under the kitchen sink.
When I last left you, we were on color #2ish (while the faux finish took several coats of different colors, I am counting it as one color). I finally got fed up with the baby poop color when I was pregnant with Three. That was October 2008. 
Remember the definition of insanity? I tried another shade of green. For a little while, it seemed like an improvement. We had sprung for granite countertops like the ones we remembered in that first apartment, and that made everything look nicer. When we did that, we bucked the double sink trend at that time and got a single big, deep sink that allows us to pile in a ton of dishes before they start to peek over the edge of it.
But the new green I’d chosen, which I believe was called Scotland Yard, had a high sheen and was next door to a red room, which is only a match made in heaven for one month out of the year.
I knew it wasn’t a keeper, and just a week or so before Three was born in spring of 2009, I painted again.
Pictured above, number Two in the kitchen of our first home, when she was one year old. We had just moved in.
When I was in college, I worked in a sporting goods store on breaks from school for a couple of years. I remember one of my coworkers rolling his eyes and sighing because his mom had made him, his dad, and his brother paint their kitchen for a fifth time because it wasn’t the right shade of yellow. I commiserated. Who does that?!
A few years later, I was married and living in our first apartment, the upper floor of an old house on Long Island. It wasn’t a typical apartment; the walls were painted shades of brown and gold. There was original dark trim and wood built-ins were throughout our upstairs dwelling. The kitchen had granite countertops and cheery, sunshine yellow paint.
The house our rental was in was situated in a strange way. It seemed as though it used to have a much bigger plot of land around it. It looked like some previous owner and had gradually sold off bits of the land to different developers, so that our street ended just after our house in a small sort of road that led past one more house and to a nursing home whose entrance was clearly visible from our kitchen window. You can just see the nursing home in the background to the right behind the trees in the photo above. (We used this pic in our immigration interview photo album, but that’s another story. Keep an eye out for it this summer.)
The nursing home employees would come outside to smoke on their breaks and it always felt like they were looking in our windows, but I hated to assume.
I’ve made a few shirts with sleeves, and the one I actually wear may someday make it into a future post. However, the type of top I’ve been most successful with is the tank top. I’ve made 5 so far, using three different patterns. It’s given me the opportunity to work with fabrics I hadn’t tried before, like double gauze and rayon.
I wanted to round up the tops I’ve made so far so I’ll have them all in one place. Also, for people like me who like to see photos of what others have done with patterns and what they look like on actual human beings – hopefully this will help.
The patterns I used were: Lotta Jansdotter’s Kiomi top from Everyday Style, and Rae’s Ruby and Gemma tops.
Back when I was looking for pants that fit, I did a search for red chinos. I knew exactly what color I was looking for — a faded, orange-red. In fact, I found some online, but only in boys’ sizes. As it turns out, that shade of red isn’t “in” this season for ladies. All I could find for myself was a washed-out pink color. Close enough, I thought. And they were on sale.
I had a boy in mind for the red pants I had found. I didn’t spring for them until I saw them in person in Branson, MO at a Gap outlet. I knew they’d be perfect for Four, and they were. He wears them for days at a time, and I have to peel them off of him to wash them when they get so dingy I can’t take it anymore.
I got my pink pair several months before I got Four his pants in the color I wanted. When I saw our pants side by side, my gears started turning. I thought, I’ve dyed some different items before, maybe I could just match the color.
