I told you I would share my flea market purchase. This is so much more than a flea market purchase. This is a dream come true in a Pennsylvania Dutch plate, no? The dream goes something like this.....I wake up in my countryside home, that is situated somewhere between the green hills of Tennessee and at the foot of the mountains of Greece amongst the olive groves (which can happen in a dream, even if in real life that would put me in the Atlantic ocean)...how do I wake up you ask?? The rooster of course. Every ground floor window in the house is actually a French door, that opens up to a different garden vignette of flowers, herbs or vegetables. All the children (dressed in white or burlap-brown) are happily occupied chasing butterflies in the 12 acres that never needs mowing, and Jeff is building furniture in the wood shed (okay it gets fuzzy here, he's doing something manly).
After an espresso, I put on a long white apron over my charming but not too fancy red calico dress with piping on the pockets and walk barefoot to the kitchen garden. I am instantly greeted by the beautifully plump and ripened tomatoes and I gather up half a dozen or so in the lap of my apron. I walk into the kitchen to look for a suitable resting spot chosen from several wooden bowls and find one painted with gorgeous blue and tomato-red flowers that's just perfect (yay! that part is real!) I go on of course to make a lunch of fresh pasta with lemon, sliced tomatoes, brick oven bread, and oranges picked from the trees the night before. (In the dream we all cheered for Eleni who was tall enough to reach her first orange).
N'kay, dream over. I've been hunting and gathering for our kitchen for over a year, very slowly finding suitable finds that speak this dream to me. When we first finished the remodel it was hard to focus on details, largely because our eyeballs were popping out of our heads at the cost of it all. I always think the details should happen more slowly anyway. When I first set things on that mantle (which is about 150 years old!) it was all very symmetrical and basic by default. Lately I've been playing out color with those little creamers and such. I have a tendency to go completely overboard on color without thinking about it, so I put restraints on myself sometimes and do the simplest thing first...well aside from the aqua Italian tiles on the backsplash. I don't know what my style is or what the end goal is, I just get inspired or not when I see something.
I found a palette in this plate that was identical to that slipcover on the kitchen stools and the paintings in the kitchen. And its not that I ever want things to match but I was so happy to see someone else had combined color the exact same way in a completely different way decades ago. Not to mention I have a weakness for slightly folk-y things, so I brought it home. Who wouldn't for $5? In real life it will never hold fruit or anything else, but will rest on the wall.
Never mind that I don't know what it says and that even though I know its Dutch, it looks German, which maybe is the same, (is it the same?), maybe me thinking that might offend either a German or a Dutch, I can't remember how that works. I can't remember my own history let alone the world's. In my daydream, Greek, German, Dutch, English all get along beautifully, as they do in my kitchen and in my blood.
xoAM