Summer Cottage Style Kitchen Old Fashioned Summer Decorate with Me

Hey everyone! I am so happy to be back. In today's video we are going to be in the kitchen doing a little summer decorating with an old-fashioned vibe and a bit of baking as well. I have tons of styling ideas to share so let's get started. I thought we would get started with the cabinets in my breakfast nook. I like to change out a few pieces here and there seasonally. All of the white ironstone and other white dishes remain in here year-round but I do like to add in a few different pieces for the different seasons. Like I said I am so happy to be back. I went a little longer than I like to between sharing videos. I was terribly sick after we got back from the beach and then my daughter got sick as well. I was sick for probably over two weeks. I finally took myself to the doctor and got some medication and it just took me a really hard time to get rid of the upper respiratory infection that I had. Anyways back to the cabinet styling. Most of the pieces I have collected over several years and I store my seasonal items in the closed part of the cabinets below and just rotate things in and out. I actually just edited these cabinets and the dishes below which was necessary every now and again to keep things manageable and to keep things within reason. I love blue and white in my home and highlight more of the blue dishes and pottery during the summer months in these cabinets. This is a space in my home where I keep some of my collections like my ironstone and my vintage flower frog collection. A lot of times when I am styling these cabinets I have to move things around, close the cabinet, step back, look at things, and adjust. So it takes a little bit of time to get things exactly where I want them but to me that is the fun in decorating. I would love to hear from you all in the comments. Do you decorate your home for summer? What are some of the things that you love to do to welcome summer into your home? Recently I have enjoyed adding seasonal touches to the light that hangs above my kitchen table. It adds the perfect touch of whimsy that I love so much in my home. I added the fern garland that you see here with the dried baby's breath back in the spring. For summer I am adding in these little red and white daisies. I just tuck them into the branches of the garland and that's it. Fresh flowers are a must in my home even if it's just a small picture of them on the counter. Chamomile is one of my absolute favorites for summer. It is so dainty and sweet plus these bunches were only six dollars a piece which makes it very affordable. I am patiently waiting for all the flowers in my garden to start blooming. Stay tuned until Cozy Chats this week. I do have a garden update to share with you. I really do have an old soul and all of the decorating I do in my home leans into being old-fashioned and that is very much on purpose. I have loved the style of decorating all things old, worn, as well as antiques long before it was trendy. I find this style to be comforting, homey, relaxed. This old-fashioned style of decorating brings me back to a simpler time when things just slowed down a bit and I'd like to just get lost in that feeling sometimes. In my last video I did share the other side of this project in my living room and here is the faux wall side of it that I had mentioned that my husband created for me using some feed board and scrap wood for a peg rail. I like the little bit of separation it creates between the spaces and makes the main level of our home feel a bit cozier. Whenever I can support small businesses I always jump on the opportunity. I'd much rather support them than a big box store. Stacey from Oak Street Candles shared her amazing candles with me and I to share them with all of you. Stacey has a website and an Instagram which I will link in the description for you. All of her candles are clean burning and free of toxins and they are also very reasonably priced. The lemon pound cake is my favorite. It smells amazing. It's perfect for summer as well as the tomato mint scent that she sent to me as well. It is a bit of a lighter scent. The white teen sage is the scent that could be used in your home all year round. So if you are in the market for some new candles be sure to check out Stacey's Candles. I really think that you are going to love them. Anytime I am decorating my kitchen I like to include a baked good. I have a beautiful cake stand where I love to put baked treats for my family. Today I have some simple banana muffins that I am going to be making. I have some bananas that are way past their time so we are going to use those up. We are going to get to baking those here in just a minute. First we are going to style the kitchen island. I thrifted this rectangle tray a couple months ago and it reminded me a little bit of the baskets from Pottery Barn that have those really beautiful braided handles. The set of dish towels that I am going to be using in the styling was also thrifted. I paid $2 for the set. I have a set of three of these goose bowls that I found on Marketplace a while back for $15. They are my favorite. They have become a staple in my kitchen and I just kind of rotate in and out what is in the bowls. Sometimes I just display them empty but I just love them. I really do think that is what is at the heart of creating a home is just featuring those pieces in your home that you just love. You don't always have to be changing things out or buying new things. You can keep your favorite pieces front and center all of the time which is something that has become very important to me in my home because there are some things in my home in spaces that I have them where they just work well and there is nothing wrong with leaving those pieces there all of the time. So here I am just putting together some very simple banana muffins. Nothing super special about these muffins. I do actually really like this recipe so I will link it for you if you are interested. I made one adjustment to the cooking time. What I did with my muffins was bake them at 425 for the first five minutes and then I reduced the temperature to 375 for the remaining time and they came out so perfect. I was so happy with their rise on them this time. I was having a little bit of trouble with my oven and just trying to get things to rise properly so I was very happy with how these ones turned out. I hope that you all are enjoying seeing a little bit of color in my home as much as I am loving incorporating those pops of color into my spaces here and there. I am just enjoying the feeling of how happy and cheerful, not a ton of color, but just little pops here and there are making my home feel. Red has really been my go-to color. It just adds this freshness to my spaces that I am loving. I am always using tomatoes in the summer for meals so I thought I would add a bunch of them that I picked up at the grocery store to this really pretty bowl on the counter. I actually just planted a container tomato plant to see how growing my own this summer goes. So if you have any good tips for growing tomatoes in containers please drop them in the comments below. I do not usually grow vegetables. I tried to grow them one year and it was an epic fail. I tend to just stick to my flowers but I thought I would try just one tomato plant and see how things go. Growing my own flowers gives me so many options for decorating even when it's not flower growing season because I dry many of the flowers that I grow. I even dry my grocery store bouquets of roses or chamomile. I'm going to add some dried chamomile to the baby's breath that I already have in these little hanging baskets in my kitchen. Sometimes decorating is about making tiny additions not necessarily a huge overhaul of a space. So I am all about adding those pieces into your home that have meaning. We collected these shells while we were in the outer banks so I am adding just a few of them to this thrifted hanging basket. I have just a few more finishing touches and I think the kitchen is ready for summer. So while I was decorating my kitchen for summer, I was thinking about the summers I had when I was a kid. So I grew up in the 90s and I just remember summer being that time that I really looked forward to. Counting down those days until the last day of school, endless hours in the swimming pool, riding bikes with my friends. We didn't have social media. It was just kind of a different time and I find myself kind of reaching back into those memories sometimes and reaching for that feeling of just simpler times. I wish that I could bottle up that feeling and just have it all over again. I am constantly trying to recreate that for my girls and in my home as well. Here is a final look at how everything came together. The garden is coming along. Each day I come out here and something new has sprouted. I come out with my coffee every morning to a water and I'm always amazed how much things change in just a day. I added a bunch of new perennials this year to include azaleas, lambs ear, little lime hydrangeas, and lilacs. I also added some new cut flowers as well. I can't wait to share all of them with you as they start blooming. As always, I hope that you got some inspiration for your home here. If you are new, I hope that will subscribe and stay a while. Thank you all for being here and I will see you in the next video.