light tent

I got a new camera for Christmas.  It is really nice and I'm really excited about it.  I can now try to take even better pictures of the things that I make.  Today, I made a light tent to use as a background for my items.  Here are some pictures of it...

the box with a light.

David puts a scrabble tile in the box.

still working on making the lighting perfect, but not to shabby.

I hope everyone and anyone who reads my blog had a great Christmas or whatever other holiday you may celebrate!!!

Saturday night's all right for playin'

David was asked to play a Christmas song for a small show in town Saturday night, so we put together a little somethin' and played.  David was on the bass guitar and lead vocals while I played keys and his regular drummer Landon drummed and sang as well.

This is the clearest picture I have of us... with random Emily's head at the bottom.

Merry Christmas!  I hope to blog again before Christmas actually happens.

goin' bananas!

I thought I was going bananas when I was writing that novel last month, so I made my first attempt at bananas foster.  I didn't flambe anything.  I had to use rum extract since David is weird about eating liquor-based foods.

Anyway, when you're looking for a good recipe to try... check out allrecipes.com.  

Here's the bananas foster...

in the pan.

a la mode!

butter.

For the past 7 years, I have enjoyed a baking day during the holidays with my friend Bethany.  We used to bake ginger snaps and other fun sweet treats, but this year we got together with a couple more friends and decided to make pumpkin butter and apple butter.  The pumpkin butter ended up with a better consistency, but they both had a great taste.  Here's how the canning went...

Robbie and put the butter in sterilized jars.

The jars go back into super hot boiling water... ouch!

I got the hiccups so I stopped to breathe deep and slow... it makes your hiccups go away instantly!  Has never failed me.

All done and ready to label and give away!

Let's pose for a picture...

I look like a sleepyhead... wait, I am!

give me your scrabble tiles!

Since NaNoWriMo is over, I can finally blog again!  Whew!

I've been seeing these little scrabble tile pendants all over Etsy.  I like them so much, I figured I'd try to make some myself!  Here's what I ended up with...

they look better in person.  I need a better camera... or better lighting.

How can you resist a fat cat, nonetheless?

I won!

After some intense writing today, I completed my novel.  

53,436 words.  69 pages.  whew.  Now I can blog again!!

where is my camera cable cord?

I am having blogging withdrawals.  I lost the cable that connects my camera to my computer so I can't blog about anything fun... until my boyfriend sent me this link... click here.

His friend found this site and said she immediately thought of me! 

If you're not much of a clicker, here's something to possibly make you want to click even more...

NaNoWriMo!

It's November!  National Novel Writing Month.  

I've been thinking about doing this for the past couple of years and then November always sneaks up on me.  Then I think, "maybe I'll just do it on my own during another month." Another month keeps passing and I keep procrastinating.  I think I have so much to do but I might could swing it.  So the goal is to write a 175 page novel with 50,000 words in one month.  Crazy, frantic writing... taking risks... making it all up as you go (well, I will be anyway).

Let's see if I can get it done by November 30th at midnight!

witch fingers... yikes!

Tonight my friend Ashlee Jean came over and got me to help her make a Halloween treat for her to take to work tomorrow.  We decided to make witch fingers.  They taste similar to a sugar cookie or a tea cake but they have almond extract in them.  yum!

here's our creations...

fingers ready to bake... creepy!

baked... ready to serve.

grab a band-aid, our witch started bleeding!

peas and curry

Sometimes I just need some spice in my mouth... so that's when I decided to smell up David's house with the flavorful aroma of curry. I found a recipe for chickpea curry a long time ago that I love and decided to pull it out of the archives and make it happen.... here's what went down.

sauteed onions.


spice.


chickpeas... and yes, Bush's contributed to my Indian recipe!!!


rice, more spice, a totally 80's plate, and a fork.

Indian food makes you drink plenty of water... so when dehydrated, eat more curry!!!

yay smoothies!!

I have so much to blog about right now but right now but I don't want to just give it all away at once... it leaves no room for the times when I'm feeling not so creatively juicy. Soooo I'm going with my latest weekend passion. Strawberry-banana smoothies. Yes, a little trite in the realm of smoothies but I have perfected smoothie making. Check this out...

If you use frozen strawberries in lieu of ice, it makes your smoothie have much more flavor and you don't have to add as much sugar... or any, really. But hello? Why would you not put sugar in it? Here's the rest of my most recent smoothie experience...

fruit in... just add a little sugar, a little dairy and...


off we go!!!
it looks kinda gross... just bear with me.


ok much better.

I actually made a movie with David and John about smoothies this past weekend talking about things we like. Maybe I will blog about it. Two smoothie blogs in a row?? That may just be too sweet.

dress up time!

So the first chance I get to dress up for Halloween... bunko with my friends in Montgomery. Thanks to Blakely, I stole this pic from her blog, Rockin' Smockin'. She's in the middle outdoing us all in her completely homemade costume. My sister-in-law as Sarah Palin complete with Alaskan accent and all... and I'm the mime!
Check us out...

Sarah, Witch, Mime

oh, Patti Labelle... a singer and a recipe artist!

I haven't made anything this week so I figured I would go back a few weeks to the most fattening day I had had in a while. Patti Labelle has a recipe for a baked mac n cheese. It is soooo good and I don't even really care about mac n cheese that much. I add more cheese than she calls for so my servings are super fatty! So you have to want it on a day that you don't care what you're eating!
Here's my version right before I took it out of the oven...

delish.

beads!

what better to do with old glass seed beads than to make bracelets with them? So that's exactly what I spent the last waking hours of this past weekend doing!

it's kinda fun to wear 7 bracelets all at once!

recycled vinyl.

So a few years ago, my brother gave me two big boxes of old vinyl records some random guy gave him to try and sell on Ebay. The guy kinda dropped off the face of the Earth and my brother was stuck with the records and well, that's where I come in to take them off his hands.

This weekend I finally decided to recycle a few of them (some shall remain in my vinyl collection... but I figured I would sacrifice some for the sake of craftiness! So here is my start to recycling the vinyl...

a few random records.



a very hot record!



my finished product... holding some bracelets I made this weekend as well.

After all that melting, it's time for some fun with album covers. Maybe not the most novel idea, but definitely a good time!

high fructose corn syrup?

tonight I went to the bookstore to look at magazines and see if I could find some cool ones to cut up and turn into cool recycled stuff to potentially sell on Etsy. So after skimming a couple of magazines to just say "eh" to, I found a little gem called Hi-Fructose. Lots of weird stuff... kinda like a weird art magazine. I just got finished with a deep skim of it, and I figured I would write about it since it will be contributing to my craftiness. I was going to post a picture of the cover but I liked this picture better... so here it is... fresh off the hi-fructose website...

p.s.
I hate high fructose corn syrup... even though it's sweet... and yes, I've seen the new commercials about it. I'm still skeptical.

more bangles and the cookies I hate.

My weekend consisted of a woodburner, bangle bracelets, decoupage, and David making no bake cookies.

We'll start with the cookies... I'm sure to many they are delectable. Not my favorite treat...

I bought a woodburner to try some things out on the bracelets... for the ones I screwed up, I just decoupaged on top! you can't go wrong with decoupage.

woodburner... Zoe was interested but I wouldn't let her sniff it.

unfinished bracelet on my knee.

my bracelets for the weekend!
woohoo!

bangle sale!

I couldn't resist buying out all of the wooden bangle bracelets marked 90% percent off at my local craft store last weekend. I busted out the Modge Podge and decided to decoupage the bracelet with an old magazine I wanted to cut up.

So here you have it! I may even list it on Etsy!!

shrinky dinky dinky doo!

My new found love... shrink plastic. I bought some plain clear PolyShrink and have been playing with it the last few nights. Here is my first project I made...

before: 2 weird looking trees on plastic.



after: 2 little hard plastic jewels ready to be turned into earrings!

Fun times! You can get PolyShrink here.

buttons + fabric = super duper!!

I've been playing with the button maker a whole lot lately and decided to not use the clear plastic coating and throw some fabric on them... this is what I came up with.

how can you go wrong with cartoon owls?

Birmingham Folk Festival

It was weekend before last... I'm finally recovering from it. Made a little money... here's what went down...

found my stake...

Got all set up with Katie...


check out some close ups of my stuff...





and Katie's stuff...

a link to her store...

honeypie designs

Other stuff at the festival...

Robbie and Dana's hoops... they make for fun times!


Emily's stuff...

Emily looks like a dude in this pic... weird.

and David's band...

It was a hot day. It was a fun day. I'm glad it's over... leaves more time for blogging.