Back to work....

I'm getting read to get back to work....how strange it has been being off this long! I have really enjoyed it--we all got together at Momma & Daddy's house on Christmas Eve, ate until we were stuffed and exchanged gifts. Momma and Daddy gave me a big mirror that I hung over my mantel, some candleholders that hang on the wall, Michael Buble CD, pajamas, jewelry and a Christmas serving platter. We drew names & my sister got my name....she gave me an architectural piece that I picked out in Pigeon Forge. We went to my husband's brother's house on Christmas day. Kenyon's parents gave me a coffee maker with a grinder/timer and some money. We have had lots of coffee since then and its so good freshly ground! Kenyon & I exchanged gifts on Christmas night....he bought me a pedestal sink, faucets & some little stuff for my studio bathroom (I helped pick those out!), a sterling locket and one of those bath tub caddies that fits across our claw foot tub.

Jan. 2 is my birthday and we had our annual Denise's birthday/New Year's party today. I got more gifts today! ;) And after Christmas I picked out my b'day gift from Kenyon....a fireplace screen! I have been wanting one since Pumpkin caught his tail on fire last winter! I haven't been able to use the gas logs much because I'm scared it will happen again. Now I don't have to worry about that! I bought myself a big frame that holds 18 different pictures. So we have re-arranged the living room twice now! Once after I got my mirror, etc. after Christmas, then again today to hang the new picture frame. Hopefully we won't have to do it again for a while!

On Saturday I am going to help transport 8 dogs to be rescued....I am so happy to be helping out! I'll be sure to take pictures of the doggies to share with you. I think I'll be in for a fun trip with a van full of 8 dogs! I have my van that I take to shows all cleaned out already, so I am going to take them in that. This is something I have always wanted to do.....I can't wait! I'll be picking them up in Chattanooga, TN and meeting someone in Gadsden, AL. They will be coming all the way from Chattanooga, TN to Fort Worth, TX!

I guess you have noticed the lack of photos on this post....I promise I'll be back with more photos very soon!!!

Its almost here!

Merry Christmas!!

  I'm planning on taking off now through my birthday (Jan. 2). I'm not sure if I can stay away from the comptuer that long!! I won't be blogging as often until then, but I am going to try to get back here every few days. Tomorrow will be a day for cooking and cleaning. We have dinner at my parents' on Christmas Eve.I'm making macaroni casserole, grape salad and maybe a pecan pie..... I'll try to share my recipes if I get a chance! We usually spend the night with them on Christmas Eve. I guess Momma will need some help cleaning up too! On Christmas Day we are going to my brother-in-law's home to spend Christmas with my husband's side fo the family. I'm making that delicious baked ziti, punch bowl cake and, if I don't make the pecan pie on Christmas Eve, I'll take one then. Maybe some cheese garlic biscuits too!

Today we shopped for my studio and I got to pick out some of my presents! We got a pedestal sink, faucets, tile board for the shower surround and some other things. Can't wait to get it all put together!  I think that's what I will be doing during my "vacation"!! I'll be back with new pictures of my freshly painted studio!!!

Check out my skinny tree....I love it and can never get a good picture of it. But it looks like it should be in a Dr. Suess book to me!!

And if I don't blog again before then, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Makin' Gingerbread Cookies

 

Last Friday night, I spent the night with Momma. My 2 nephews & niece spent the night too. We listened to Christmas music, baked & decorated gingerbread cookies and made hot chocolate mix for gifts. Before we went to bed, my niece said "this is fun...we should do this more often!" I agree!

Our finished product....how creative they all were! We used icing, chocolate chips, color sugar and marshmallows to decorate our cookies!

   

Christmas Pooch

My sister bought her fiance this little lab for Christmas....Isn't he the cutest? They named  him Drake!

Kitty Pictures

One of my favorite hobbies is taking pictures of animals...and I have plenty of models around here! I've had Sweet Pea since he was 1 day old and I took pictures of him daily until he was grown because I was so amazed at how much he changed and grew from one day to the next. I guess that's when I really got interested in taking pictures of animals. So I'm sharing some of my newest pictures that I love....you can tell they are used to posing. haha!!

Sweet Pea

Strawberry....

Sissy....

Naughty or Nice?

 

That's a question I used to ask every year...but I waited until Christmas Eve to ask it!! Momma loves to tell the story of me, as a little girl, crawling into bed on Christmas Eve, then asking her if I had been good enough for Santa to come. So I'm thinking ahead a few days this time...I guess I've been pretty good this year. I've probably been just a little bit naughty, spending too much money instead of trying to pay off those credit card bills, slacking on my laundry. But nothing major. Hopefully the good outweighs the bad....Maybe I'll get a visit from Santa this year!

How about you? Tell me if YOU have been naughty or nice! Will  you get gifts from Santa or will you get a bag of hickories or lumps of coal in your stocking?

Pumpkin's Pictures

What's for supper?

Have you ever wondered what a typical dinner would be for us Southerners? Well....tonight we had homemade biscuits, macaroni & cheese, turnips, mashed sweet potatoes and a peach cobbler! Of course, sweet tea for my husband to drink, coke for me. (And coke isn't necessarily coca-cola....its any kind of soft drink!) We don't eat like this every night, but my husband loves it when we do!

I'm almost ready to start painting some rooms at my studio!! Here are the colors I chose...if I don't change my mind again! I have already bought the Robin's Egg Blue and the Pink for the bathroom, so I can't change those now! So I am going with Robin's Egg Blue in my office, studio and classroom. The lighter cream color is for the trim, doors and kitchen cabinets. The mustard-y color is for the laudry, where (hopefully) all my fabric will go. The dark red (called Roasted tomato!) is for the music room. We have new floors in the bathroom and beadboard on the wall. If my husband is off, we'll go tomorrow to get more supplies and maybe I can start painting this weekend! Its hard to believe things are moving along so quickly now! I'm sure there will be some bumps in the road along the way, but so far, so good!! I cleaned out the fireplace the other night. I got 3 wal-mart bags full of dirt out of it! It had been closed up for no telling how long.....but with that cleaned up, it looks so much better. I'm trying to go over there and do something every evening. Today I finished patching up most of the nail holes in the office.

 

I wanted to share some photos of my Christmas photos....and my kitties! Pumpkin is amazed by the tree and the mantel decorations. The only way to get his attention away from them is the laser pointer, so I keep it by my side all the time. The tree that Sweet Pea is in front of had to be taken down (last picture). They just couldn't leave that one alone!

   

Project in Create & Decorate!

Check out the new issue of Create & Decorate...my Snowman Shadowbox is in there this month! He's made from paperclay & handpainted.....a lot of fun to make! Its always fun to see my designs in a magazine, I am always excited! If you can't pick up a copy of the magazine, I will have the pattern on my site this week. I would love to see your versions of this pattern too. Email me or leave a comment with a link to the picture of your snowman shadowbox for everyone to see!

Baked Ziti & Paper Clay

I've been working on some paper clay figures using recycled bottles as the base! I've used both plastic bottle and glass bottles. I'm not sure which I like best--they both worked well. So here they are after I sculpted them from paper clay (over the bottles). It took a while for them to dry and they cracked, so I just kept filling the cracks until they looked smooth, then sanded them....

Then I painted them...they're kind of boring at this stage, not much detail! Everything on them is sculpted from clay, even the hats, scarf, Santas' beards & mustaches are 3-dimensional.

Next I antiqued them and added some details with colored pencils....

And here they are all finished (except the angel in the back--I'm still working on her!)

Okay, now I am going to admit something.....I am obsessed with seeing every episode of the Sopranos! I have all the episodes on my list at Netflix and when I get one, I can't stop with just one episode! I am watching season 6 now, so it will all be over soon. But something good did come out of this obsession....all that food on there looks SO GOOD! So I searched the internet for an authentic Baked Ziti recipe. I tried this recipe this week and it is wonderful! It made enough to send some with my parents, for us to eat for a couple of days and put some in the freezer! So here's the recipe, the way I made it.....try it out! Don't buy the cheeses already shredded or grated....especially not parmesean. It is so much better when it is freshly grated! Now what to drink with it?

Authentic Baked Ziti

1 lb. Ziti pasta

1 lb. fresh mozzarella (not part skim, not shredded!)

3/4 c. freshly grated parmesean

salt & pepper

crushed red pepper flakes

2 T. extra virgin olive oil

1/2 lb. sweet Italian sausage

1/2 lb. hot Italian sausage (I used mild)

1/2 medium onion, diced

4 cloves garlic, minced

28 oz. chopped tomatoes

6 oz. tomato paste

2 sprigs fresh thyme

1 sprig fresh basil

Sauce:

Remove casings and crumble sausage. Add olive oil to pan & brown. Add onions & garlic & cook until onions are transparent. Add tomatoes, thyme & basil. Salt & pepper to taste, add a generous pinch of red pepper flakes. Heat to near boil, then cover and simmer on low for 5 minutes. Add tomato paste.

Boil pasta to not quite al-dente (it will cook more in the oven). Cut mozzarella, half in 1 inch cubes, the rest in really thin slices. Remove herb sprigs from sauce and discard. Spray a casserole dish with cooking spray, then add pasta, sauce, cubed mozarella and half of the parmesean. Top with sliced mozarella and remaining parmesean. Bake at 350 about 30 minutes, or until golden.

Try it....your family will love you for it! Tell me how good it is and thank me later! :)

Christmas Ornie Swap

Remember how I love swaps?? I participate any chance I get! This time I swapped with an ebay group called A Time for Primitives. (Go to ebay and type in ATFP and see what comes up!!) We were supposed to use a clear empty juice bottle, put the ornaments inside and mail them that way. What fun! I mailed my swap partner a bottle full of little muslin snowmen with sticks for arms. I got a bottle with 2 bags of fixin's and clay bowl fillers, a christmas tree ornament, little primitive bag, red ticking snowman, rag balls and a little star! I hope I didn't forget to photograph anything--I was so excited when I got everything, I put it right on the tree, then decided to take pics later! Check out the photos to see what I got....Lisa at Skunk Hollow Country Store sent these to me....Thanks, Lisa!

 

My tree is now full of hand-made ornaments from different artists. It is such fun decorating my tree every year and thinking about who made each one.

Have you ever wondered what goes on here late at night, besides me sewing, painting, working on the computer and watching "The Sopranos?" Check out these Lazy cats.....a lot of sleeping goes on here in my studio too!! That's okay though....there is nothing nicer than seeing a content, sleeping cat (I swear he's smiling too!)

   

Christmas memories

With Christmas just around the corner, I was thinking about some of the great (and not so great) gifts I remember from my childhood. One of them was Baby Alive! I must have been about 4 or 5 and was so excited when I woke up on Christmas morning and got a Baby Alive! Look at all the neat stuff you got with her! I found one on ebay with all her accessories! Of course the first thing I did was mix up some of that gross looking food and feed it to her. I was surprised to find out to make her eat, you have to press her chin and then her mouth would move up and down and it made this weird grinding noise. It was kind of weird, but I could overlook it. So I mixed up some kind of green food for her and fed her. But I was shocked when I realized that food was going to end up in her diaper!! I did not want to clean up that mess!! I remember Momma standing at the stove making gravy and biscuits and I showed her. She said, "she's your baby, you have to clean her up." I don't know if I ever even fed Baby Alive all of her food. I just didnt' want to have to clean all that up!

Then there was the shaving Ken doll. I don't know why, but I was excited to get a Ken doll who shaved. Plus, he had actual hair, not the molded/painted on kind. (And I thought this was a good thing.) I never wondered how it would happen, but I imagined his beard would really be like hair and I'd really get to shave it off. But when I opened him, I realized his beard was drawn on with a marker. And his shaver was actually just a little sponge that clamped in a plastic handle. You wet the sponge and shaved (or washed off) his beard! How disappointed I was! Then, to top it all off, his hair was kind of long and bushy and just stuck straight out after you took the plastic off his hair!! I felt so bad about not liking Ken all day long and Momma had to sleep with me that night because I "didn't feel good." Finally I said, "I don't like that Ken doll." She asked why & I told her his hair was too long. She told me we could cut his hair tomorrow, so I felt better getting that off my chest. And the next day he got a haircut and looked better.....

But there were some really good gifts:

Easy Bake Oven

My bicycle with the plastic basket with big flowers on it (the basket was the best part and I still have it!)

Little People house and little people (the smaller wooden kind, of course!)

A Kermit the Frog doll from my Papa that I still love

Dukes of Hazzard digital watch that played "Dixie"

Shaun Cassidy record (from my Papa--for my b'day)

Bradley  Dolls (my sister cried when she tried to clean hers and her eyes washed off!)

Gingham Girls paper dolls