Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from our family to yours!



Isn't that the most adorable photo up there of my grand baby? Photo was taken by a photographer in our area that my daughter connected with. Her photos are so beautiful as you can see and she has a client for life in my daughter. Visions Photography....we have been telling every one about her. You can find her on Facebook.

Bye!

peanut butter ball play

Every year at Christmas time I make my husband peanut butter balls. They are his absolute favorite Christmas treat of any thing else I make. I have experimented with them over the years and he always says he prefers the originals and not so much the ones I play with. Well how could I possibly let a year go by with this idea for changing the balls up a bit and not try it out? So I did. I made my same recipe as always from my trusty Betty Crocker Cook book and instead of going as normal from there I dumped a small box of chocolate pudding mix in with the powdered sugar. I wanted chocolate peanut butter balls. I also decided to dip them in white chocolate instead of dark chocolate.



Here are the balls layed out drying for a bit before dipping. I did a batch this new way and a batch of the regular style.





Done! And guess which ones are getting reached for first??? That's right, the ones with the pudding mix in it. Can you really go wrong with adding pudding mix to some thing?



Give it a try next time you make these and if you don't make them go and make some! Right now! They are so easy and delicious.

Bye!

*edited to say I am linking this post to Mommy by Day, Crafter by Night's link party. Click the button on the side to get to her blog.

Epic fail!

You heard me. A crafty failure has happened here. This is not uncommon but don't you just hate to see blogs where every thing is la la la perfect and no one admits to failure?

So my mom gave me this glass ornament a couple of years ago so I can try to do some thing with it. With the new grand baby this year I thought it would be great to cut out a stencil on the silhouette sd and paint Alec's First Christmas onto it. My first mistake was thinking it would be simple *ppffftttt*.







That was hard trying to get it placed decent on there and then to keep it from over lapping and making sure you can see the words still. Sheesh! I finally got it to where it looked just ok and then the glitter paint I used was almost non existent! I could hardly see what I did so I had to switch to a regular paint first and then do the glitter on top. I ended up doing 5 layers I think. Then to top it off when I pulled off the stencil it pulled a bunch of my painted letters off too ACK!!






So in the end I had to scrape every thing off and put it aside to decide on what to do with it now. I have a few ideas and when it is finished I will of course share what I decided on. It will still be an ornament for Alec I'm just not sure how I will go about doing it yet.

Bye!

working with vinyl

So I've decided that with the coming new year that I should blog what I am doing more. Maybe no one really cares but I think it's a lot of fun to go back and see what I've been working on and with what products I've used. Also, maybe I'll work on some of my stuff a little more and not be so, ummmm.... lazy. It's kind of shameful how few posts I have done in the last couple of years. That's ok though.

For Christmas time this year I had all these grand plans of making pillows for my couch and for gifts and a Christmas lap quilt and some sewy gifts, blah blah blah....then I got sick, and when I say sick I mean really sick. I can't even remember the last time I was so ill. My voice was completly gone. I could not sleep for a week and the coughing was so bad. I got lazy, and I mean real lazy so nothing got done. When I started feeling better I decided I wanted to do some of the stuff that I had planned so I axed the pillow ideas because I just did not feel like sitting down and sewing and chose to work with my silhouette sd. I love this machine. Who knew one could love a machine so much. It does so many cool things, the customer service is awesome...even calling me to help me figure out how to open my software on my new Macbook Pro. They also offer a free download once a week and through Christmas right now they are offering a free design a day! Oh happy day! They did come out with a new machine that looks very cool but I am so happy with the sd that I have no plans for the new one unless this one were to ever give up on me.

I had bought a bunch of vinyl in Christmas colors from Pick Your Plum and wanted to use that in some of my Christmas decorating this year so this is what I have done.






The nice thing about the silhouette is it will use the fonts on your computer! I also put snow flakes on the walls all around. I did forget photos of those but they are the same as the photo that says joy to the world.

Well I've gone on enough about this. No affiliation with the silhouette company, just one very happy customer here!

Bye!

Dresser re do, not quite done.

So I mentioned the dresser re do. Here's a little background on this dresser I decided to paint. It belonged to my great-grandfather. He bought it when my grandmother was a child if I remember correctly. Normally I would not paint some thing like this and I would let it be but in my younger days I had decided to sand it and try staining in only to find out it was not a wood you would really want to do that with so it has sat in my closet in shame for years holding some of mine and Dans clothes. The quality compared to todays furniture is superior but back then this was not quality furniture. So when we re did the house and finished every thing but our closet we sat for like 2 years with it unfinished. Finally I was searching Pinterest one day and saw people painting old furniture and it just clicked, I could do that with that dresser and paint it my favorite color! Blue! I love blue, most of my house is blue, almost my whole wardrobe is blue. I have decided to paint all my bedroom furniture different shades of blue, except for my bed of course. This is my solution to the horrid wall color I painted. I thought I would like it and I do not but with these blue pieces it will be cool. So this is the first piece I have done, my great-grand fathers dresser. The rest will be done in the spring because I am not freezing my butt off anymore for this, just saying. I am so pleased with the turn out. It needs some major touch up, or some sanding to distress it but I have all winter to decide.
So, did I get a before picture, you betcha, did I get one with all the drawers in it...of course not, only a normal person would think of some thing like that and as you know I am far from normal. So here is a before of the dresser and the drawers already outside getting ready to be roughed up for painting.







Here is it in place in the bedroom. As you can see it still needs drawer pulls that I will order. I will put some vintage ones that are similar to what was on it before. I think I found some I will like. We really like how it turned out. I love the color and it looks good with the wall. Who knows, by spring I may decide to repaint the walls but for now I am pleased.



I hope you like it!

Bye!

A total treat for you!

Ok, so maybe just my excitement to share with you what I have found buried deep, deep, deep with in my master bedroom closet.
Here's the scoop. Me and Dan started some major home remodeling a,most 3 years ago...(yes honey, as much as you would like to say it hasn't been that long, it totally has!). You know how it goes...you work your butt off and get tired and right when you are almost done you decided to stop and get back to it later...meanwhile 2 years has passed. I finally decided it was time to empty out master bed room closet and get the new floor in there. We went through every thing and took a lot to Good Will and gave a big box to our daughter of sheets and things she will need eventually and organized. Here is every thing we took from the closet.






I am not joking with these photos. I didn't even know we had that many clothes between me and Dan.

So on to the exciting part. I was going through a box and saving Dan's old baseball shirts and basket ball jerseys for when Alec is older and totally found this!!






This is a quilt I started about 16 years ago! Before I even knew what a quilt was and at this point I had only ever attempted to sew an apron at the age of 9 and a t-shirt in home ec in high school. I do admit that Dan wore that shirt while we were dating. He's such a good man!
I just took some clothes scraps and knew I wanted to depict my family and our first garden in our new house. I do not remember what I wanted in that other blank white block. I even started hand quilting it! Can you believe it! I am going to finish this. I think I will pull the layers apart and put a better backing on it. I'm not sure what is on the back right now. Seems like a cheap muslin to me. I'm thinking of using the white block to show off what I can do now but to toot my own horn I'm pretty pleased with how it is put together! So this is on my list for 2012 and I'd like to hang it in my room when completed.

I have more to share on the room finishing but will do that in another post. Here's a hint...I'm painting and it involves furniture! I have before pics and I should be done with the painting today.

Off to work on some Christmas ornaments just for fun. I have been in such a dumpy slump lately so I've been trying to get in here to work on some things and have been some what successful. I'll share that later as well!

Bye!