I never got an answer so I'm just gonna post what I found out on my own.

I decided that instead of listing all of my products on one page, I would create a page for each category.  This worked great because I could choose the default category for each page to display.  I created a page to show my featured items as well.  The product details of an item that was on this featured page would for some reason appear at the bottom of the products list.  What I did to work around this was created a product list page.  I put a catalog module on the page and pointed my featured products to this page for display.  That made it so each featured item was detailed on the products list page all by itself.

The website is htt://plainjaneco.com

Now, I want to change the background color of the featured products template.  I've already got the color changed on my local machine, but I haven't got a clue how to get the file into the directory without re-installing the whole store module.