Ok, I think I can now officially strike 2 items off of my New Year’s Resolution/To-Do List. This weekend, we officially tackled my striping project in the entryway and…. AND!!! … we got the BEST fabric for the curtains in the kitchen. I am so excited. I just stood there and stared at them all weekend, that’s how excited I was. I was so excited, that I went ahead and painted the entryway in my enthusiasm. 

On Saturday, we visited one of my most favorite places, the Fabric Factory, over on NW 23rd Street. It is fabric heaven. They have all these gorgeous fabrics, and I really feel like a kid in a candy store. I would love to work in a fabric store so I could just be surrounded by all of that all day. (Same goes for ribbon & me, too.) Simon found a roll of this beautiful green & cream stripe silk, and we were both in love. So we had them cut it and we were on our way. Jude was just happy to be in a fabric store. And then he burped loudly and, um, it kinda sounded like he yakked up something, so I’m sure the saleslady was thrilled about that and was happy to see us go. But he didn’t yak, and we didn’t have to buy a roll of expensive fabric because our child ruined it. Whew!

Two years ago, when we were living in our first house, I fell in love with this inspiration photo from Domino magazine:It was from Mary McDonald’s studio in LA, and I just thought it was so chic. And we had this little powder bathroom that was off of our kitchen. It had beautiful, pristine black-and-white tile and I decided to paint the horizontal black and white stripes to match it and this was the result:It was such a tiny bathroom; this was the best photo that I could get of it. from the kitchen. But I loved it, and it was such a conversation piece. I painstakingly painted those stripes. I’m sure that whoever lives there now is like, oh man, thanks SO much for painting BLACK stripes on the bathroom wall. ::rolling of homeowner’s eyes::

Anyway, ever since then, I’ve wanted to paint something, anything, in this new house in stripes. I love the effect. A lot of it may stem from my time in VisComm at OU. My mom will attest to me calling home many, many times, frustrated about having to re-do these crazy ink and pen stripe projects we were given. It was so hard, but it was good because it made us really conscious of precision and proportion.

So this was the final product of my stripe obsession. Our walls are painted in a flat paint called “Blonde” and we have a can of it left over from the sellers. So I took a sample of it to Lowe’s and had them match it, and then tone it down by approximately 25%. They also did it in a semi-gloss, so we would have some contrast against the original wall color. And then the prep work began! I knew I wanted an odd number of stripes, so I measured the height of the wall from crown molding to floor, and then divided by 7. This turned out to be about 12 1/2″. So each stripe is about that height, give or take.

I’m just pleased as punch. Simon is too. He said numerous times this weekend, “Jude, if your mother could stripe our whole house, she would.”  Ahh, he knows me well! I wish you could see how pretty the gloss is against the flat paint. I am just in stripe heaven.My next project is to get a runner rug for the entry and replace the sweet little blue kilim rug that is currently there. I want one of the Madeline Weinrib dhurrie rugs, and I think I might purchase it with some Christmas money. Nothing striped, though, for the rug — something more organic.

As I rehung Grandmother’s mirror in the entry and I put the buffet back in place, I wonder if Grandmother ever thought that these pieces would be here now. I wonder what she would think of it, and I wish that she could come over and see it all together. Did you know that the china cabinet still smells like her house? I love that, and I hope it never changes.