hands & dishes: a completed project for our future kitchen

I know, I know…  We don’t even have our future house with our future kitchen picked out yet. 

Why I am doing things for it already?

Because I’m a dork and weird like that.

This project is actually just a variation on something that we already have and use everyday – our mainstay kitchen towels.

The impetus behind it – my MIL in fact.  Way back before there was even an idea that she would be my MIL, Will told me a story about how when they were growing up, she was particular about keeping the dishtowels used for hands separate from the ones with which they would dry the dishes.  Made sense to me so after I moved into my own place (where we now still live for the time being), I found a local woman who does embroidery out of her home (Regina of It Takes A Stitch – lovely lady to work with) and had 2 sets of hand towels stitched with “Hands” and “Dishes.”

We’ve used them A LOT over the ensuing years for their intended purposes (I’ve actually been told that it makes certain people nervous to use the towels in case they grab the wrong one – ha!) and as such they’re getting pretty grody.  I thought I had taken a picture of them as my “before” but I can’t find it and am too lazy to do it now.

So I decided that I wanted new clean ones for our future place.  And then I went a little nutty and decided that I wanted all different colors that I could mix and match for various seasons and holidays.

Unfortunately, this was not going to be a small or cheap project in the end.

Here’s my list of seasons/holidays and the colors that I thought each one needed:

• Christmas – red, green
• Thanksgiving/Fall – rust, brown
• Easter/Spring – pink, light blue, lavender
• Summer – turquoise, magenta
• Halloween – orange, black
• Valentine’s day – pink, red
• St. Patrick’s day – green
• Patriotic holidays – red, royal blue

I decided that I needed a total of 13 sets (one “Hands” and one “Dishes”) including 2 sets of red for a total of 26 towels.  Well, the Williams Sonoma towels that I started with and like so much come in packs of 4 so I added one more set of neutral khaki to round things out.

Um, that’s SEVEN packs of towels.  Oops.

I got a lot of help from the in-laws on the towels with a birthday giftcard. 

While in the store, I decided to try my hand at the old “it can’t hurt to ask” bit and asked the salesgirl if I could get a discount since I was buying 7 packages of towels. 

It actually worked!!

I got a 10% discount.  Lesson learned: It really doesn’t hurt to ask.

Next step (and really the end of the whole process), meet up with Regina to have the towels embroidered.  It took about a half hour to pick out all the thread shades for each color but then I just had to wait for her to finish them.

Some of the final product:
 
They came out great! 

I’ve packed them away for use in Colorado but I’m super excited to be able to coordinate with the seasons and holidays.

Did I already mention that I’m a dork?