Oh Joy!

Oh Joy!

I swear by this book. It's not glamorous. It's tried and true. With instructions on how to do just about anything with food, measurement conversions and temperature guidelines, The Joy of Cooking is my most utilized cookbook and it shows.  My copy lost it's dust jacket and gets muckier every time it's used (the cookie section has bits of cookie dough stuck to the pages). To protect it from the elements, I employed a 5th grade book cover technique using left over oil cloth from recovering my kitchen stool. Now I can wipe it off, and the cookie particles inside it can serve as bookmarks for recipes I've made.

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Spinning Circles

Spinning Circles

This is the stool that used to sit under the telephone in my grandparents kitchen.  I just loved to spin around on it, drinking soda, watching golf on their little TV. The stool sat on one side of a newspaper overloaded wooden desk, on the other side, next to the doorway, were the penciled in measurements of every grandchild, some from toddler to adulthood. After they were both gone, and the home that they'd created was necessarily changed, I became irrationally attached to this stool.  It now had a cracked vinyl top and rust on the legs.  My parents brought it to me along with the dining room table and chairs. I suddenly had all of these relics of my childhood sitting in my tiny house. I put the stool in the garage because I had nowhere keep it inside.  We'll be moving in a few months to a house that has a big kitchen, with a built in desk where the phone will go. The space is just screaming for a spinny stool. I got it out of the garage today, cleaned up the rust and recovered the cracked vinyl with a print oilcloth. Here's the before and after. 

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Getting Folksy

Getting Folksy

I somehow talked my friend Coco into letting me do a little kitchen makeover at her house.  She has one of those 1950's spaces that was semi-updated at some point between then and her with no specific design style in mind.  It's kind of a functional blank slate. She has some Latin folkloric influences in the rest of her home, but the kitchen has pale pink and white linoleum flooring, which will have to stay for the project, so when I saw this poster on Etsy I thought it was a great starting point. Check out the ever growing board I've made for the redo on Pinterest and stay tuned for the results in the next couple of months.  To purchase the poster (also in midnight blue for my new house) visit One Little Bird Studio on Etsy.

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