knitting kitchen

My weekends go from Friday to Sunday night, so I have an entire extra day to get things done. Spoiled?  You bet! But not as much as I’d like to be.

Mark and I patched, primed, and painted the kitchen. There’s still a lot to do. As you can see in the photos, the center parts of the windows are still pearl grey. I have to open the windows and stand outside to paint them effectively (so they won’t be painted closed) and it was snowing on and off all weekend. The black trim looks amazing but we’re both still recovering from the red paint debacle. (I’d primed and painted one window with two coats of dark red enamel. When I went to remove it, the paint remover turned it all into pink gum that smeared across the woodwork and them balled up into little bits and stuck to everything.)  The color on the walls is actually Benjamin Moore/Pottery Barn Chestertown Buff. It has very little to do with buff, and more to do with a golden color.

Speaking of Goldens, Deb came by yesterday. She loved the colors very much. She and Mark put up the diningroom light fixutre. I couldn’t watch. I had seen the frayed fabric electrical wire that went from the old light fixture and disappeared into the plaster ceiling. I busied myself by painting our corner hutch black to match the woodwork. No bad words were said, but I was informed later that Mark used some piece from the previous fixture to conceal the hole in the ceiling.  End result is quite fabulous and I thank Ikea repeatedly for knocking off Pottery Barn where it is warranted.

In Yarn News, I hauled my “Dale” Box out of my office and finished up Mark’s cross country ski socks. I began them last April after a trip to Grace Robinson’s in Freeport, ME.  In between house stuff, we’ve been managing to ski every day (okay, Mark skis, I shuffle). This weekend, we went to a place in Brookfield twice. It’s mostly ice although when you get to the shady, extremely cold side of the hill, there is a little bit of soft snow. The third and fourth times we went back, I brought Chloe and her leash because even I was running out of creative ways to verbally vent my frustration.

There are problems with the socks. I’ll attribute most of it to the months that intervened between sock #1 and #2. Mark is happy with them and I love how he looks like my knitted Sven doll when he goes skiing in knickers, an icelandic sweater, his llama chullo, and snowflake stockings.