The Kitchen: In the Limelight

Lately, I have been wasting a lot of time photoshopping my kitchen photos.

We’ve had the same lemon/lime/blue thing going on in our kitchen since our first kitchen back at the old apartment:

Even before that, we had a little yellow going on in our college apartment:

I didn’t even like yellow, really, but my Mama bought me a yellow spice rack for Christmas and a pasta jar, so to make them match, I tied a yellow ribbon on the jar and a theme was born. And since then I have been collecting lemon yellow and lime green kitchen crap accessories. (With a short hiatus due to my obsession with pink which has resulted in an accumulation of bowls, pans, spatulas, measuring cups, and a KitchenAid mixer in that lovely and oh-s0-gender-neutral shade. Michael just loves it.)

Anyway, once I decided what color the kitchen in our apartment would be, I went fabric shopping (yeah!) and found a peppy yellow and green stripe fabric. I bought it all :) hehe and made cafe curtains and a tablecloth.

The cafe curtains were great to infuse our dreary apartment with some life and also to give us some privacy from our neighbors across the way:

When we moved to our new house, I just stuck the curtains in the window as they were (they matched all the amassed accessories, after all!):

But, after I cleared out the decor from our kitchen for a base photo on which to inflict my digital pasting of accessories and paint colors (I now know what my mother was talking about when as a child she would cut out pictures from the Sears catalog and arrange them to decorate her future house. hehe) I realized that those cafe curtains were sucking up the light!

And since our kitchen faces the backyard and woods, we didn’t need curtains to block prying eyes.

So, after trolling the internet for ideas, here is my photo-shopped inspiration. A nice little scalloped valance with festive black trim! (in addition to quite an array of other accessories I pasted on our blah kitchen… don’t you love the “eat dessert first sign”? I had to put that up there because someone is very adamant against having junk on top of the cabinets… hehe):

Of course, I didn’t have any green print or ball fringe, so I had to compromise. Here is our newly redesigned kitchen window:

And since I still had a lot of yellow stripe fabric left over, I made myself some placemats to match! hehe

Now, if I can just convince someone to let me paint the kitchen table black. And the oven… and the fridge……