Our Trip to Washington State

I wanted to blog about our trip back home to Washington, but I have so many pictures I didn't know how I was going to do it.  I made a bunch of collages to try to condense a handful of them.  Now about our trip in a nutshell, we visited and stayed with family and friends, went to the beach, and did a lot of driving.  We had so much fun!  We miss all our friends and family there and it was so nice to see everyone again.  We spent some time at Jason's parent's home in Castle Rock, where they have a lavender farm.  It's such a great place to take pictures.  We spent some time at our favorite place, the beach.  We camped at the KOA and had a family reunion there.  On our way home we visited my Grandma and stayed with friends.  But most importantly Jason and I celebrated our 16th wedding anniversary.  In the photo above we had dinner at a nice restaurant in Astoria, Oregon right on the Columbia River.  We have been through a lot together and I'm pretty lucky to have such a great guy as my companion in this life and forever!

Kitchen Island Makeover

 

Our kitchen island is finished!  Woohoo!  All I need now is the hardware.  I'm very happy with how it turned out.  It took me longer than I had planned, but I think because I took my time on how I was going to achieve what I wanted, I got good results.

above

 (Before)

 

We added trim around the ends of the island and a toe kick using the same molding around the bottom.  We used real wood, since it's in the kitchen I don't want any warping problems.

The color I used I altered a bit.  I chose Palladian Blue by Benjamin Moore, 5% enhanced.  I thought it was a little too minty green, so I had about 4.5 drops of blue added into the mixture.  Now I did use a little bit of the paint before adding the extra drops, so on a full can maybe 5 drops would be about right.  I'm happy with how the color turned out, it's exactly what I was trying to get.  It goes really well with the blue green backsplash.

I used Advance Paint by Benjamin Moore to paint the island.  This is the best paint for cabinets out there.  It acts like an oil-based paint, but cleans up like like latex, just soap and water.  Awesome stuff!  I got a nice smooth paint finish, which was important to me.

There are so many great tutorials on painting your cabinets so I won't go into detail (see Kitchen Island Project), but one tip that was helpful was when you paint in the grooves using a good paint brush, wipe off the excess paint that gets onto the flat part of the cabinet.  If you don't you will have a build up on the edges, which you don't want for a nice even finish.  Also, I did use a wood grain filler and I think it worked out really well and was pretty easy to use, EXCEPT next time I won't do it in the groves of the door, it was too hard to sand out.  I will only use the wood grain filler on the flat part of the door.  I don't see the wood grain on the flat part of the doors now.

 above

(What the kitchen looked like when we moved in a year ago)

 

Now!

(after new backsplash and painted island)

I'd say we're getting there one step at a time.  Next for the kitchen:  paint the cabinets white!  I'm not sure where that lies on my to-do list, but I can't wait for the finish product.

A Tulip Quilt for Julianna

 

 

I recently finished my niece's quilt I've been working on for quite sometime.  We went to Washington in July and I wanted to hand deliver it.  She just turned 3yrs old yesterday, so I'm a little late on the "baby" quilt.  Her crib bedding I made a few years ago was with Moda's Soiree fabric by Lila Tueller, so I used a Jelly Roll in the same fabric to make her quilt.  It's close to a twin size quilt so she shouldn't out grow it for a while.  I love it, I think it turn out beautifully even with a few imperfections.  I saw an inspiration photo of a quilt and copied the design.  I free-motion quilted it and used a turquoise fabric for the backing.

Happy Birthday Julianna!