Fiesta

Despite the black blog and gray type, in real life, I'm a color fiend. Fiend, I tells ya.

It runs in the family. We tried for years to be a respectable oatmeal-carpet-and-midtone-wood family, but then something snapped and my mother painted her bedroom taxi-cab yellow. It looks fabulous. It's been all downhill from there.

She painted the computer room teal. I painted my room Nile green.

I'm also an Art Deco/Streamline junkie, and seem to be having trouble adjusting to modern aesthetics. The close proximity of two large antique malls and the existence of Judi Rothermel's Aunt Grace line of calicoes are complicit in my failure to adjust: I've got a Victorian white iron bed, a 1940's Deco side table, and several dresses made from reproduction 1930's prints. Flapper-style dresses, with dropped waists.

I'm the person that the marketing team over at Homer Laughlin dreams about at night: A dedicated anachronist who thinks beige is for losers.

I don't even have my own kitchen. I don't need my own plates. I sure as heck don't need fifteen 5-piece placesettings (plate, sandwich plate, cereal bowl, saucer, teacup). But I have them. In as many different colors.

Scarlet (bright, true red)
Rose (candy pink)
Apricot
Persimmon (coral; saturated orange-pink)
Tangerine
Ivory
Sunflower
Chartreuse (bright yellow-green)
Sea green
Juniper (dark, bluish green)
Turquoise
Sky blue
Cobalt (deep blue)
Heather (purple)
Cimarron (maroon)

And you know what? They're gorgeous.

They're also microwaveable and dishwasher-safe. Style and simplicity!

One of the newer colors is Shamrock, a saturated kelly green. I was going to skip it, but I saw it again in a secondhand store and liked it. It almost stands in for the old Medium Green.

I've committed myself to semi-reproduction colors. So far, those include Cobalt, Ivory, Chartreuse, and Turquoise. Sea Mist is also reminiscent of the original Light Green. I hear that Marigold (maize yellow, more like the original yellow) is supposed to come out in June 2011; if it does, I'll use it to replace Sunflower, which is nice but is a little too bright-sunny-lemon for me. If they ever come out with an orange-red more like the old atomic red, I'll replace Scarlet with that. I'm trying to get my mitts on a secondhand set of Pearl Gray, too, which was a copy of one of the 1950's colors.

I also intend to make napkins and placemats, but I haven't decided if they'll be solid colored or if they'll be prints in matching base colors. Hmm. Or possibly solid colors with period-looking appliqués.