Home Archives - Page 10 of 14

The Three Chairs

April 14, 2008 By Paola 7 Comments

We finished painting them over the weekend and I think they’re OK. They’re pretty dazzling when the sun’s out, but brighten up a dull grey day like today no end. We just need a little round cedar coffee table, which will stay resolutely natural in colour.

It’s going to be interesting to see how they go with the garden colour scheme as it develops over the year. The yellow of the daffs will fade away and be replaced by lots of purple and chocolate plants enlivened with splashes of hot pink, red and orange. Though next year I may avoid such very pink tulips.

Come Into My Garden – March

April 1, 2008 By Paola 6 Comments

Quick! *Rushes to get the March update in before April*

Spring has indeed sprung and the garden is looking fab at the moment. All the back-breaking effort in the autumn (oh my goodness, I nearly said ‘Fall’), planting daffodil and tulip bulbs is really paying off.

The star of the show is the shade garden at the back under the tree, which is bursting with daffodils and hellebores. Hellebores, how much do I love you.

The first tulips also bloomed this weekend – a sweet lipstick pink called (I think, I forgot to make a note) Elizabeth Arden. You’ll notice that I’ve put in a wigwam to grow peas though nothing much is happening a present. There’s parsley, rocket, red oak leaf lettuce and broccoli for harvesting in the little vegetable patch though, and the Minx and I recently sowed carrots, radishes, spring onions and more lettuces.

The tulips in my pots are looking beautiful already, I just love them next to the watercolour-splashed pansies, which have been going strong all winter.

Next month I foresee painting in my stars. I ordered these Adirondack chairs off Ebay hoping that the colours wouldn’t be quite as sickly as they looked on screen and lo and behold they look exactly like the Easter Bunny has just barfed all over the patio.

Cooking in Translation

March 12, 2008 By Paola 10 Comments

It's funny the things you end up missing as an expat. Who would have imagined that glace cherries would be among them? But I haven't been able to find those ridiculously sweet and sugary candied fruits in US supermarkets, until a few weeks ago when I found a pot in DeLaurenti, Seattle's legendary Italian deli.

So the Minx and I set to with a will to make Nigella's Cherry Almond Loaf Cake from How To Be A Domestic Goddess, mostly so that the Minx would get to experience that quintessentially British childhood cooking experience of shoving as many sickly sweet and sticky cherries into her gob as humanly possible. It is no coincidence that Jane Brocket from Yarnstorm's new book on classic childhood cooking will be entitled Cherry Cake and Ginger Beer.

Note that my precious cherries were of the traditional lipstick scarlet variety and probably full of unmentionable additives. Nigella suggests using the more natural dark red ones, and yes, Nigella, I would if I could.

Cooking from a UK book in the US is not without its challenges. You will notice that UK books use metric measurements instead of cup measures (to which I have become entirely converted since living here). So I first had to fiddle with my scales to stop them weighing in pounds and ounces. (The hyperlinked recipe above gives quantities in cup measures, presumably from the US version of HTBADG).

Self-raising flour also doesn't exist in the US, so I had to refer to the Internets to find out how to make it from plain flour (add 1tsp of baking powder to every 125g/4oz of flour according to Good Housekeeping). And then I had to use the Internets again to find out how to convert centigrade temperatures to Fahrenheits. Can someone somewhere please unify all these measures immediately? It really is doing my head in.

But the resulting cake is one of those quietly delicious cakes that you appreciate much more in adulthood. I had to add a brown sugar crust (not exactly a hardship) to appease the Minx's disgust at the lack of 'sprinkles'. And yes, the cherries did sink towards the bottom of the cake, as is only traditional and right.

The New Coffee Table

February 28, 2008 By Paola 27 Comments

When we bought our rug from Emma Gardner we ordered the largest we could afford – all the while suspecting that it was really too small for the space. It certainly didn’t work with the extremely heavy curved glass coffee table which we brought from the UK, which we were afraid of even putting on the rug for fear of digging irreparable grooves deep into the pile.

YUKKY ‘BEFORE’ ROOM

So a new coffee table had to meet quite a long list of requirements. Child-friendly obviously – the old glass one had been great for that – and wipe cleanable. Also preferably not wood as I’m not sure how child-friendly that is over time and we already have a lot of wood in the room. And ideally white, as we already have quite a lot of dark wood in the room. I also quite wanted something curvy to detract from all the various rectangles.

After much fruitless trawling round the Internet, we went trawling round some Seattle shops and were amazed to find something we could actually afford in Ligne Roset – heavily discounted because it was a discontinued piece (you can take the girl out of Europe, but you can’t take Europe out of the girl). And remarkably it fit all of our criteria, except the curviness, though that was less of an issue since we’d just acquired such a nice curvy pink chair.

But it was also BIG and we were worried that it would make the rug seem even smaller and more inadequate in the space.

I’m hoping we’ve solved that problem by placing the table half on and half off the rug in what we fondly hope is a Rothko-esque sort of way. What do you think? Does it work like that, or just look odd?

Here’s Rothko’s interpretation of our living room. Which would look extremely fab over our not so fab sofa. Apparently it’s a snip at a mere $72.8 million, or the Husband has just offered to paint me one himself.

Here’s my list of what still has to be done in this room.

Get rid of the egg yolk yellow walls. We have a couple of quotes from painters to paint the whole house, so I just need to finalise the colour palette and we’re set.
Replace ugly front door that opens right into the room.
Do something about all the ugly TV and stereo equipment
Get cushions for the sofa (I’ve got some ideas for cushions I want to make)
Sort out curtains for the front window
Sort out the lighting
Organise the beautiful built-in book cases a bit better.
Find beautiful piece of artwork to go above the sofa, unlikely to be a Rothko

Unfortunately, because of a certain someone, we can’t replace the more-shabby-than-chic sofa just for the moment.

Come Into My Garden – February

February 25, 2008 By Paola 3 Comments

We’ve had a week of glorious spring sunshine here in Seattle (which of course didn’t coincide with our friends’ visit) and the little garden (I’m sorry, I still can’t bring myself to say yard) we had built last year is springing into life.

I spent the weekend tidying it up and planting lilies and other bits and pieces acquired at the Northwest Flower and Garden Show, where I spent absolutely too much money.

There’s rather a lot of bare earth on show now that the perennials have died back and the deciduous shrubs are just bare twigs, but if you look closely there are definite signs of life.

You will notice that we abandoned the idea of getting a swing seat in the end because I couldn’t source anything I liked and instead bought a wood and rope swing from a carpenter on Ebay. If the Minx ever dares complain about her childhood I will counter with the fact that she spent her formative years swinging under a hundred-year old cherry tree.

The stars of the garden this month are the hellebores in the shade garden under the tree.

The pansies I planted last autumn have been flowering all winter and are still going strong and adding a splash of much needed colour.

I just wish I’d planted a few more.

The flowers of the nandinas are not so showy, but I love how the shadows of the branches dance on the old wooden fence.

We’re also anxiously waiting to be able to harvest broccoli and red oak leaf lettuce, which has somehow made it through the winter snow, from the tiny vegetable patch.

And here is the very best secret surprise. A nondescript bush at the sheltered south side of the house planted by the previous owners, turned out to be an orange tree! The fruit itself is nothing to write home about tastewise, but it looks so exciting and makes me feel like I’m gardening in Sicily.

The Saga of the Fireplace

February 14, 2008 By Paola 12 Comments

Once upon a time some people bought a house in Seattle. And it was mostly a very nice house, if you ignored the fact that it had been painted by colour-blind people.

The living room, for example, was painted bright egg-yolk yellow accented with a pillarbox red fireplace.

The woman who bought the house really wanted to do something about the fireplace as soon as they moved in, so she set up a poll on her blog asking whether she should just paint it white or strip back the paint.

Despite 49% of her readers telling her to paint it white, she decided to strip back the bricks to see what was underneath using a fabulous paint stripper made from soybeans.

First of all the fireplace looked like this

and then this

and it stayed that way for a very long time because removing the paint was really quite time consuming and tedious.

And then a friend announced that she would be coming for a visit and the owners of the fireplace decided that it really should be finished before she came.

So they set to work with a vengeance and got it looking like this with just one week to go before adding the final touches.

And finally the fireplace was finished.

Yes, after all the anguish and elbow grease we decided to paint it white after all, and are delighted with the result. I’m wishing we hadn’t spent quite so much time and effort coming to this conclusion though, and I promise I will never, ever ignore you guys ever again.

There’s still much to be done, but finally I’m really starting to like this room. We’ll be talking paint colours next week.

Diptych

February 9, 2008 By Paola 7 Comments

The new rug is in da house

Two Countries Separated by Common Bed Linen – Part 2

February 6, 2008 By Paola 8 Comments

As an amusing postscript to our previous discussion about the difference between a duvet and a comforter, Metafilter asks, ‘Do British people use sheets?’. Cue lots of Americans horrifed by insanitary British habits.

My pink chair

February 2, 2008 By Paola 6 Comments

It seems like ages since I’ve given you any update on what we’re doing with the house, mostly because nothing at all has been happening.

But I’ve started to get traction again in the last few weeks, so I’ve a got lots to tell you about.

This is where we’d got to last week. Note fabulous new Emma Gardner rug has arrived. Note that very heavy glass coffee table is not on top of fabulous rug, because we are terrified of making deep grooves in said rug. Note that horrendous nursing chair and egg-yolk yellow walls are still in place.

If you remember I wanted to replace the nursing chair with a curvy chaise longue. I also wanted the chaise longue to be in raspberry sorbet pink but could only find it in various shades of beige.

So imagine how excited I was to find this little beauty in very hip Seattle store Inform (which appears to have a very groovy looking sister store in Vancouver, BC) in exactly the shade of pink I was looking for.

The chair is a ‘Little Rock’ by Canadian company Bensen and is wildly comfortable. We clearly have a thing for pink rocking chairs.

The chair is accessorised with a glorious cushion from Swedish designers Adam & Viktoria made from raw linen with very dark chocolate cutouts.

I’d never heard of them before but they’re actually featured this month in Elle Decor. I love their stuff and am going to look into getting some of their cushions in for ‘mirrormirror’.

I was pleased, but also a bit worried to see in Elle Decor that chartreuse – the colour of the rug, together with the Ikea curtains and Crate & Barrel runner in the background – is the new colour for spring. I’m worried because it will clearly be tremendously passe’ next year – and we certainly can’t afford to replace the rug, like, EVER.

Stay tuned to find out what our new coffee table looks like, when I’m going to organise those shelves a bit better, why we haven’t finished the fireplace *blushes*, and what colour we’re going to paint the walls.

Tune in next week also for an update on the colour scheme for the Minx’s room – somewhat embarrassingly featured today on Ohdeedoh.com (which appears to be the new name for Apartment Therapy Nursery). I wish they’d waited until we’d painted the walls a colour I actually like!

The Tree That Keeps on Giving

January 29, 2008 By Paola 2 Comments

Not only does our cherry tree look like this in April, and like this in June, but it also means that we can eat this in January.

We made two pots of cherry jam using this recipe in the summer, and I swear it is the most amazing stuff ever committed to bread. Yes, right up there with Nutella. To be eaten only with a sourdough ficelle from Macrina and lashings of creamy unsalted butter. I wonder why I need to go to WeightWatchers?

Here’s what the tree looked like a couple of days ago. I spy buds!