We’re still having some cool weather off and on around here, so it doesn’t feel funny to be making wintery breakfasts on occasion. This carrot cake oatmeal I made this week was outstanding. It really does taste like carrot cake in oatmeal format. Plus it’s super creamy and packs in a whole lot of nutrition.

Finally, I’m ready to show you our house! Check out part one for the before pictures, and part two for a few shots of the renovations in progress. These photos were taken just as we were moving in.

The living room with its newly gleaming floors was painted in Benjamin Moore Whispering Spring. It’s a really soothing light muted blue. As you’ll see, I tend to go for dreamy pastels. I don’t know, I like dramatic colors in other people’s houses, but for myself, I just really like airiness and natural light.

I changed out the weird primary colored knobs that were on the fireplace built-ins for these simple clear glass ones. I like changing hardware, since it’s simple, cheap, and makes a big difference. And we were all about simple and cheap by this point.

We painted the built-ins, so no more pea green drawers. The dining room walls are painted the same color as the living room. Since the rooms are connected by a large open doorway, it made sense to paint them the same color.

The kitchen was painted Benjamin Moore Irish Mint, which is a nice bluish minty green, and all the cabinets were done in Simply White.

That big open hole in the wall is this really weird, deep shelf thing. It kind of sucks, because the fridge has to go in that corner, so it partially covers it. I’m planning to sew a curtain to cover it for now.

The back stairwell area is Wedgwood Gray. We still need to paint the trim back there. The yellow trim isn’t sticking around. We did manage to sand and paint the banister, though! The stairs were refinished/replaced as needed, so no more weird fake wood peeling up.

The hallway is painted in Benjamin Moore Cloudy Gray, which is actually a paint we had leftover from our apartment in Oakland. It’s pretty hard to tell here, but it’s a very very light dusky purplish-grey. The weird chandelier thing came with the house. It has plastic flowers on it. (?!?)

And this is my new dressing room! Because it’s an old house, the closet space is pretty minimal and there’s really no other place to keep my clothes. And with the bedroom being small and having lots of windows, there’s no other place to put my dresser. So a dressing room it is! I painted it Benjamin Moore Ecru, one of my favorite wall colors ever. We also had this color in Oakland. It’s a very light warm pink that is extremely flattering. Even though it’s not toally set up yet, it feels so relaxing to dress in here in the morning.

Finally, our bedroom. It’s hard to choose, but this might be my favorite room in the house. There is just so much beautiful sunlight in here all the time, and the doors out to the garden are amazing. I love seeing trees and flowers when I wake up.

Thus concludes the tour! I didn’t include the basement, since we haven’t been able to do much with it yet. I’m sure I’ll have more to share!

I’ll just show you a few in progress photos before moving on to part three, the after shots! See part one for the before shots.

As renovations go, I guess ours were pretty minor. There were two main things we wanted to do: Paint just about everything, and restore the floors to their natural wood loveliness. We did the painting ourselves, and the floors were done by a pro.

I really underestimated the amount of work painting would be. I’ve painted places before, but this was sort of insane. First of all, we needed to paint every single room, because we couldn’t really live with any of them. And second, I am partial to really light colors, especially in this wee little house, and the existing colors were really hard to cover. And third, I really wanted to paint the cabinets and built-in.

The turquoise room was probably the worst. I think I put four coats of paint on the ceiling alone.

In the kitchen, we removed all the drawers and cabinet doors, sanded down all the wood to rough them up, and painted all the wood white. Then another coat, then another, then another.

After painting, Jaime (our floor fellow) ripped out all the pergo and carpet. We didn’t really know what would be under the pergo in some rooms, like the kitchen and bathroom. Turns out the kitchen had hardwood under linoleum. The bathroom ended up not having any wood underneath, so we left it as is for now, and will put in some tile soon.

Ok, I’m keeping this short because in progress photos are sort of boring, and I’d rather show you the completed rooms. Next up is part three, the final result!

I fell in love with this house the moment I saw it. We’d looked at a lot of houses at this point, and we’d even tried to buy two of them (both had severe structural issues that we couldn’t afford to fix right away). There are a lot of cute houses here in Portland, but it seemed most of the ones in our rather low price range had some sort of deal breaking feature. You know, cute houses with giant apartment buildings overlooking the backyard, or with crazy renovations we’d have to undo, or a less than thrilling location.

But I saw the potential in this little cottage immediately. It’s in an amazing location, on a street with lots of pedestrian activity, but not a crazy amount of traffic. It’s across the street from a food co-op, and blocks from one of the best grocery stores in Portland. A couple blocks north are bars, restaurants, and a wonderful scandinavian-style sauna. There’s a farmer’s market practically outside our door every Wednesday. There are many other neighborhoods we can walk to, and it takes me about ten minutes to walk to my studio.

Ok, so the interior hadn’t been done to my taste, but the bones of the place are good. Fireplace, built-ins, a fairly spacious kitchen, a sunny yard, plenty of windows, french doors in the bedroom. It’s a small house, but I like the petite scale. It feels intimate and cottagey, or at least I thought it could with a little elbow grease.

This is the dining room as we saw it. It was pretty much the first thing I saw when I walked in the door, and I think it was the bulit-in that sold me. The whole room was painted a sort of pea green, and the built-in drawers and cabinets were painted to match. The floors are oak, and not in terrible condition, and the windows are large casement windows in front.

Here’s a photo without any stuff in it, pre-renovation.

Moving on to the kitchen. The floors here were covered in pergo, which just looked weird and fake. The kitchen had been totally renovated, so none of these cabinets are original. On the bright side, I won’t feel bad when we rip them out someday. The lighting choices in here (and throughout the house) make me twitchy.

The bathroom was actually decent as is. Other than the pergo and lighting, I quite like it. Especially the subway tile.

The second bedroom was a young girl’s room previously, if you couldn’t guess. It was painted a BRIGHT turquoise, with purple and lime green swirlies and things. Unfortunately, the ceiling was also painted turquoise, making this very small room feel quite cave-like. The fir floors were painted white. With the reflective shiny white floors and blue ceiling, everything in this room glowed blue.

The hall was nothing much. It was painted a sort of semi-gloss khaki color. Again, Pergo.

And, the main bedroom. Brown. Berber carpet. Again, they painted the ceiling brown, which made the room feel even smaller. But French doors are pretty awesome.

And the finished basement. The stairs were covered in this strange faux wood stuff that looks like heavy contact paper? I don’t know. The whole basement is painted orange and turquoise. Oh, and wood paneling.

Thus concludes part one of our house tour! Don’t worry, it will start to get better in part two (the in progress photos) and part three (the after photos).

Our new house is awesome. I’m dying to show you all photos. We did so much work on it over the last six weeks or so, and it is truly transformed. I have some fun before and after photos, but unfortunately they are housed on a computer that is still packed away in a box somewhere in our basement.

In the meantime, I thought I’d share a little bit of what I’ve been doing outside. I’m really into gardening right now. I’ve been growing veggies for a few years, but now that we have our own home, I can do some actual landscaping with flowers and edibles. This is thrilling.

I really enjoy learning new things, which I guess is why I love complex pasttimes like gardening and garment sewing. There’s always new stuff to learn, new things to try. A garden is never complete. It’s constantly evolving, always challenging you to learn more.

First of all… PEONIES! I was thrilled to discover that the little shoots we saw a couple months ago were actually peony bushes. We have three of them, and this gorgeous giant feathery scarlet one is the first to bloom. The other two are still buds, and look much smaller. I can’t wait to see what they look like.

And at the other end of the spectrum, we have rhododendrons. I really don’t like rhodies. I guess they just remind me of suburban office parks or something. And this color doesn’t thrill me, though in the photo above I do admit that they look sort of pretty and tropical and summery. And I also like their foliage. But the flowers just don’t do it for me.

Now, while I have some big plans for landscaping the backyard and transforming it into a pretty & productive kitchen garden, it’s definitely not happening right this second. Since we moved in right at the start of the growing season, I knew I had to get something thrown together quickly. My tomato seedlings were already getting pretty huge.

For reference, here is the back garden before. The thing in the middle is a water feature. To be fair, this photo was taken in February, so of course it didn’t look its best yet anyway.

And here is my temporary plot. Kenn pulled out the water feature, including tons of tons of gravel. I weeded like crazy, pulled up some of the lawn (I plan to get rid of all of it eventually), installed our small raised beds, added soil amendments and worked them into the heavily compacted soil, laid down mulch to control some of the weeds, and scattered some paving stones around to define walking areas so the soil isn’t further compacted.

Also… wow. Have you ever torn up sod with a shovel? It is back breaking work. I thought it would be fine to do manually since it was such a small patch, but I didn’t expect quite that level of labor. Now I know.

I love my bean teepee. I grow runner beans on it every year.

I put in the tomato seedlings I started in March! I’m growing six types: Pineapple tomatoes, green zebra, cherokee purple, black heirloom, beaverlodge (an ultra-early variety), and yellow pear. YUM. I marked them with these nifty copper tags.

I also plan to grow some squash in the remaining patch, some herbs, nasturtiums, and perhaps some fennel, lemon cucumbers, and/or beets if I can find spots for them.

It’s a small utilitarian garden, hastily thrown together, and not at all the garden I dream of creating someday. But I love it.

Another project I’ve been working on for the last few months was Cocktail Camp, an awesome local craft cocktail event spearheaded by my dear husband Kenn. I’m a little embarrassed to not have posted about Cocktail Camp before now, since it’s been such a big part of our lives.

Cocktail Camp is all about learning about spirits and craft cocktails from innovative distillers and bartenders, while enjoying tasty drinks and socializing. This was the second annual event and while last year was great, this year was much bigger, better, more polished and more fun!

Allison was the other big force in putting together this event. She is an amazing, tireless project manager, not to mention a lovely lady and talented bartender.

Kenn and Allison did the organizational work for this amazing event, while I handled the visual design, including the program above. We had a lot of fun shooting the photos for that.

This was my first time designing an event (other than my wedding, of course), and it was a lot of fun, as well as a lot of work. But I managed to put everything together on a very low budget, thanks mostly to having a wonderful venue. It’s made me think about other types of events I might like to put together.

I think all three of us had an amazing time, and the feedback has been wonderful! I’m excited to plan the next Cocktail Camp, and we’re even thinking about expanding the idea a bit. Keep an eye on the Cocktail Camp web site!

About six or seven months ago, I took up running. Portland Winters are wet and gloomy, and I’d started to feel a little stir crazy being inside all the time, so I picked up this excellent book called Outdoor Fitness. I highly recommend it. It’s not about running per se, but more about integrating exercise with your natural environment. In any case, it inspired me and led me to running more.

A couple months later, I picked up this wonderful book by one of my favorite fiction writers, Haruki Murakami: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. It’s thoughtfully written and gave me insight into the personality and psyche of a distance runner. And somehow, I saw myself in it.

I have never been an athlete. Growing up, I always preferred making things to running around playing group sports or whatever. Even though I was a vegetarian (and still am), I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to my health and ate a lot of processed foods. Needless to say, it showed.

It wasn’t until I moved to New York that I discovered some fun in exercise. Like most people who live in New York, I walked everywhere, and my commute added up to several miles a day. I also learned to cook for myself, and started reading about nutrition and taking more of an interest in my health. I lost some weight, felt great, and found out that I loved exercise. That was 10 years ago (gulp!) and I’ve been a regular exerciser ever since.

But back to the book. Like I say, I never saw myself as athletic. I am not particularly competitive and not a natural joiner. But reading that book, I began to see that not all athletes are the same. Murakami describes himself as not very competitive with others, but highly competitive against himself. He is extremely disciplined in achieving his own goals, to the point of maybe being a bit obsessive. He likes to be alone. He spends a lot of time inside his own head, and feels ok with that. I began to feel like maybe we had some things in common, and perhaps lone endurance sports could have a role in my life.

But I think what inspired me most about running is how limitless it seems. I mean, I trained for two or three months to run my first 10K, and it was hard. But some people run twice that (half marathons) or four times that (marathons) or even 100 mile ultra-marathons, if they are particularly insane. There are 80-year-olds running in the Boston Marathon, for goodness sake. It really makes you questions the limits of the human body. It’s awe-inspiring, and it makes me want to go further.

Anyway. I ran my first race last weekend, and it was a blast. The race was Bridge to Brews, the day was perfectly crisp and sunny, the scenery was gorgeous, and there was beer at the finish (though I did not partake). My goal in training was to run a 10 minute mile, finishing the race in just over an hour. I was a little worried beforehand because I was sick for the two weeks before the race and had to slow my training a lot. But even with the slightly diminished lung capacity, I ended up running a 9:56 mile, finishing the 6.2 miles in 1:1:40. Pretty cool, huh?

Afterwards, we went out for chilequiles, and took a drive to the beautiful Multnomah Falls. I was a little too tired to do much walking around, but we took in the gorgeous scenery and planned some future excursions. All in all, a good day to be alive, outside, and in a healthy body.

Hi friends! You may have noticed that things have been pretty slow around this blog. On top of working on a million different things for Colette Patterns, Kenn and I have been engaged in another huge undertaking… buying our first house!

It’s taken us many months to find one, but we’re both excited and absolutely in love with what will become our new wee little home. We actually came close to buying two others over the last six months or so, but both turned out to have major prohibitive problems. It all worked out for the best, because this one definitely feels right. It’s also half a mile from my studio, across the street from the local food co-op (and smoothie cart), and a few blocks from some great bars and restaurants. We really lucked out.

I’m sure that in the near future I’ll be posting up a storm as we fix some of the cosmetic issues, sew up my own decor, and dip my toe into really landscaping with edibles and flowers.

In the meantime, we are going to be very busy for a few weeks, so I’m going to continue my little break from blogging and come back in a few weeks, hopefully feeling refreshed and creative. Of course, I’ll still be blogging over at Colette Patterns if you want to see what I’m up to sewing-wise!

I meant to post about this a few days ago. I did this lovely last minute Colette Patterns shoot for Valentine’s Day with some amazing women.

Anja was the photographer, Jade and Rachel modeled, and Caitlin and I styled.

I really like Anja’s style as a photographer. Not just the result (which is awesome), but the way she composes each shot rather than taking many similar shots and weeding them later. Not that I think one is a better approach than the other, I just thought it was cool to watch.

You can see more of the set over at the CP blog, and even an accompanying video!

While in Vancouver, we also ended up at a cavernous shop called Salamagundi West, which was just full of odd little treasures: old photos, toys, musical instruments, beads, ribbon, old tins, and other pretty little things.