My Beautiful Kitchenette (plus bonus outfits)

 Good morning!

While I was taking photos Sunday of the Annie Hall wall for inclusion in yesterday's post, I thought I would also take a few snaps around the kicthen while I had the forethought to photograph my natural habitat in natural lighting (novelty!). I recently swapped kitchen tables (not for the last time I'm sure), and ended up with this wrought iron, rococo early 70's number. Check it out!

My last kitchen table, the yellow Formica one, was bought in a fit of passion for Don Draper style home furnishings about five years ago. While it served well at parties as a buffet station, it hadn't occurred to me when I bought it (at an estate sale in a Tudor house in the Sylvan Park area of town) how LARGE the table itself was. "What, it's a fifties' table and I have a fifties' house! Sure it'll fit!" I reassured myself as my dad and I wrestled it's delicate, prone-to-losing pins chrome legs into the pickup truck. The kitchen of the aforementioned Tudor was an eight-foot ceilinged, long rectangle of a room, with one wall fitted with tall, creaky white cabinets and sink. The rest of the room was practically ballroom sized in  comparison with my diminuitive dining nook. It was a lot like the lamps I got at a Bordeaux sale a dog's age ago-- I took them out of the car and went, "DID THEY GET BIGGER ON THE DRIVE OVER HERE?"

This table was bought by my Uncle Johnny and Aunt Doris in the early seventies'. The set sat in the same household, circa 1972, as those insane Graceland gold velvet and brocade sofas that used to be in my living room, which is more than I can wrap my head around. In the early eighties', when my parents bought this house, Johnny and Doris sold them the set as they upgraded to something a little more Reagan-era, and my dad, son of antique dealers, has said on more than four occasions, "When I grew up, it was always 'Don't sit in that chair! What are you trying to do, sitting in that 200 year old chair?!' So I always liked these. This chair! You couldn't do anything to this chair if you WANTED to! [knocking appreciatively on the tabletop] SOLID." It sat just where it's sitting now for the whole of my childhood, and as in all the heirloom items I've received down the family tree, I can specifically remember Sus and I, as young babs, trying to wrest the weird shaped finials off the tops of the chairs (why did I shoot myself in the foot this way! I was always trying to destroy things I would one day own!).

It was in storage for awhile after my parents got a new dining room table at (you guessed it) an estate sale, and when I called my mom asking after the table, she was almost too eager to have it back in its old position at her old house! "Oh, it's perfect for that space. You're really going to like it there." (I read too many old horror comic books where a remark like this prefaces a chain of events in which a haunted piece of furniture or a cursed piece of furniture or a generally evil piece of furniture spells doom for the protagonist, in this case, me).

Note the missing finial on the chair under the window. GOLDURNIT, where was my childhood foresight?!

As well as the Formica served me, I am over the moon about this new set. Matthew and I can ACTUALLY SIT ACROSS FROM ONE ANOTHER AND HAVE DINNER. We used to have to sit side by side, diner style, owing to the fact that the behemoth old table took up almost the entire space between wall and cabinet. You could scoot the table out from the wall and angle it for when people came over to dinner, but if somebody needed a fork, whoever was on the end that wasn't blocked in would have to reach it to them (which, I'm sorry, always made me feel more Dogpatch than domestic goddess, no matter how pretty my table setting was and how elegant the food was). No more! Now, we can add a leaf and two more chairs if we need to, and there's STILL room for people to get up and perambulate around the room (should the mood strike them). Success!

Here's the light fixture that hangs o'erhead:

At first, I thought you were too Laura Ashley to fit the decor....now, I love you.

The only other thing in this part of the kitchen is my Martha Stewart (I don't know why that impresses me, it does) baker's rack, which my mom bought for my birthday one year. Furniture is a tricky thing to get someone for a gifting occasion, but I really needed somewhere to put my microwave (and excess pitchers, and Ben Siebel servingware, etc, etc).

How many kitsch things can you spot in this one photo?

The little face-mug is from the Texas Centennial in 1936! I realize I was just talking about that last week with my Texas posts, and had this all along. #Ineedtomovethere The chihuahua portrait is labelled "Lucy", btw.

Last but not least, here's two bonus outfits from this weekend:

I love the classiness of the backyard trashcan being included in the composition of this shot. Take that, Cartier-Bresson!

I got this dress at the Murfreesboro Goodwill and LOOOOOVE it. The material is heavy enough to make drapes out of, but I'm glad whoever made it decided to make a dress instead. The pattern is wild! I wore this to the mall on Sunday and got more than three compliments on it. My head swells to the size of Rushmore.

Kelsey and I were talking online the other day about what I should wear for my wedding reception (the dress is 80% in the bag, I think-- I have a vintage one that makes me look like Jean Harlow in Dinner at Eight, but we're also going gown shopping sometime next week, just to see what we can see) and both got REALLY excited about gold, and sequins, and drama. I was searching ebay for suitable formal duds to fit the bill and thought--wait, I have the MOTHER of all dresses to meet the criterion of "gold, sequins, and drama". Remember this from the one-two-dress punch of that estate sale I went to with Eartha and Rae? I think it might be too chi-chi to wear at a reception, but I now know that I want to wear it out on the town (or heck, just around the house like this, with a stole carelessly wrapped around my shoulders) ASAP.

So! How do you like the kitchen? Have any design hints or tricks? I'm still trying to decide what to do about the curtains and the valance in this room, as the primary red doesn't fit the color scheme as well as it once did, yet what goes with the acid-ish goldenrod and black of the chairs in that room? Also, if you're in Nashville, and looking for an oversized yellow Formica vintage table at very reasonable rates, let me know!

That's all for today, see you kids back here tomorrow. Til then!