Bye Bye Ugly Vanilla

It has been two years since we bought the house and the only room that has not been painted at least once is the kitchen. I loved the blue kitchen tiles when we first bought the house. I hate cleaning the white grout. I guess I can complain about the kitchen for several reasons (bad lighting, ugly color, etc).

The picture on the right has the grey primer on it. I think it looks better than the vanilla.

My vision for the kitchen is dark red walls with a colorwash technique ontop. Eventually I would love to have granite counters put in but that is not in the budget right now, so I figured the dark red would tone down the blue counters.

We spent forever the other day putting in new recessed light, oh what a chore that was. The ceiling was starting to look like Swiss cheese. Atleast that is what I was telling everyone. Steve ran into strapping that shouldn't have been there or double wide joist. I was quite surprised he didn't swear as much as I have heard in the past. lol.. Oh by the way in this photo the kitchen looks like fire engine red and it's not. We only had one light that works and the flash made the red look awful.

This weekend we bought a new pub style table & chairs, which we are picking up tonight. I can not wait. I had a calendar for 2008 that had chefs on it. So I bought some 8x10 picture frames, cut down the pictures and placed them in the frames. I think they look great and can not wait to place them on the wall above the table. For Christmas Steve bought me a wine piece art which will be flanked by four other chef frames. Are you sensing a theme hear??? wine & cooking. hehehe....

This morning I will be painting the ceiling. Did I mention we are having people over for New Year's Eve. I guess I better get a move on things.

Well here is the finished project. I love the rich dark color of the wall with the dark color of the table. Steve got home a little early from work on New Year's Eve and we quickly hung the pictures on the wall.

Hold 'Em or Fold

Every New Year's Eve Steve and I have a gathering at our house. We have done this for the past 10 years (well that is as far back as I can remember).

After much deliberating I come up with a theme. We have done Pizza, Mexican, Chinese, BBQ well you get the idea. This year is Poker themed. The boys were playing with a deck of cards the other day and I sat there for a few minutes wondering what kind of invitation I could come up with. The light bulb went on in my head and I came running down to my craftroom and starting cutting the paper. I wanted the invitation to look like you were holding some cards. I decorated the "backside" with a patterned paper. Then I stamped the "face" side with my acrylic heart, diamond, clubs & spade stamps. I placed a brad in the bottom lefthand corner to fan the cards so you can see the information.

Oh La La

Splitcoast has a challenge everyday of the week. Monday's are Technique Lover's Challenge. So for today's challenge you were to make a wine glass shade out of vellum paper. They provided a template to use. The first time I tried making one I realized my wine glass mouth was too large for the template. So I remembered I had a set of glass stemmed votive holders and used them.

As I was planning the shade I thought of a specific stamp set and the embellishments to go with it. About a month or so ago I had ordered the French Quarter Stamp set by Inque Boutique. I stamped a full sheet of vellum with my Inque Boutique French Quarter stamp set in black stazon ink. Then I traced the template onto the vellum and cut. The embellishments I used were black velvet ribbon and black fringe. I felt this gave the shade a little French Flair.

Elegant Reindeer

Today Color Combo challenge you were suppose to use Basic Black, Sahara Sand & Vanilla colors.

I was just able to get to this challenge and decided to use my new Reindeer stamp from Unity Stamp Co. I love the antlers on this guy.

Could this be our Christmas card this year??? hmmm..