Opinions and feelings......

A lot of art marketing workshops and books I have read; stressed the importance of not mixing business with personal life on your blog.  But my life and art are so tightly entwined I can't help it.  It's just the way it is.  I don't know why I wanted to make a note of that here.  Maybe it's because my balance has been off lately.  Where there is no time for business and no time for family.  There seems to be a missing part of the equation and I think procrastination and defeat have to do with it.  There are so many things on my to do list I get inundated just looking at it.  I have been getting some things done, but they are just menial little things.  Not the big life dreams I have been carrying around for so long.  Scheduling has always been difficult for me.  I feel so defeated when things get in the way of it.  So now I have a why bother mentality.

How do you balance your personal life with business to make it all happen?  Any secrets you would be willing to share?  How do you feel about having a blog for business and family?  Should people keep separate blogs?

Hope you all have a magnificent weekend!!!

Something to satisfy your sweet tooth~

Hoosier Sugar Cream Pie - From Nick's Kitchen in Downtown Huntington, Indiana.  Courtesy of Country Living Magazine

Makes: 8 slices.  Working Time: 20 minutes  Total Time: 1 hr. 20 min.

2 cups heavy cream
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar, plus 3 tablespoons for sprinkling
1/2 cup whole milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 (9-inch) store bought pie crust
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1.) Preheat oven to 350 F.  For filling: in a medium bowl, combine heavy cream, flour. brown sugar, 1/2 cup granulated sugar, milk, and vanilla.
2.)  Fit crust into a 9-inch pie pan and dot bottom with butter.  Pour filling into crust.  Combine cinnamon and remaining 3 tablespoons sugar and sprinkle on top.  Bake pie until set and center is firm to touch, about 1 hour.  Cool on wire rack.

What drew me to this recipe is that it has Quaker history and has been around since the early 1800's.  It has also been referred to as desperation pie because it is made with ingredients that were always on hand on throughout the year.  Hope you enjoy it!

Sayonara from my dinner plate.  Don'tcha just love it when your zucchini smiles back at ya!

I have been a baking fool lately.....

First off I think I found the best chocolate cake recipe.  I am more of a vanilla lover, but this cake may make me cross over.  I made it by altering this recipe I found at allrecipes.com. With over 800 reviews it couldn't go wrong

I altered it by adding coffee and using dark unsweetened cocoa instead of regular unsweetened.

This is their recipe with my changes.

Coffee Chocolate Cake

Ingredients:
1 cup hot coffee
1 cup boiling water
1 cup unsweetened Hershey's Special Dark chocolate cocoa powder
2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup butter, softened
2 1/4 cups white sugar
4 eggs
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).  Grease a 9x13 inch cake pan.  In a medium bowl, pour boiling water and coffee over cocoa, and whisk until smooth.  Let mixture cool.  Sift together flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt; set aside.
In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.  Beat in eggs one at a time, then stir in vanilla.  Add the flour mixture alternately with the cocoa mixture.  Spread batter in the 9x13 pan.  Bake for 35-40 min.  Allow to cool.

 

My mom and I made it for my grandmother's birthday.  I was our first time using fondant.  They make it look so easy on those baking shows.  We hand placed each of those damn little pearls all around the cake.

Oh!, I am forgetting the best part the frosting. To use underneath the fondant.

Sweet Butter frosting

Ingredients:

1 pound butter, softened
3 cups confectioners' sugar
2 tablespoons heavy cream
1 teaspoon of vanilla

Directions:
Combine everything in a medium mixing bowl.  Mix everything together on low speed until well blended.  Then increase speed to medium for another 3 minutes until totally smooth.

This recipe was actually made by mistake.  I accidentally put in a pound of butter instead of a cup.  At least it doesn't have shortening in it- *gag*.  I like it, but then again one of my all time fav foods is creamed butter and sugar. So it may not be for everyone.  It passed my families inspections though; so all is good.


My goals for this week are pretty much the same as last week.  I had a lot of other things pop up that took presidence over last weeks goal list.  Gotta roll with those punches. 

1. Finish canvas
2. Try to get stain out of dress
3. Vintage Thursday
4. Art Walk
5. Catch up on Kelly Rae's class
6. Gussy up my facebook fan page

This is the vintage dress I wanted to add my etsy site last week.  But on closer inspection I noticed that some of the red trim had bled a bit onto the fabric.  Does anyone know of a way to get that out?  Any stain remover suggestions?  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks Mom for modeling!!

Hope you all have a nice week!

Happy 4th of July!

 I was lazy again and decided instead of getting up in the attic and finding my decorations; I would just make some.

This is very simple to make with items on hand and adapted for any holiday.  I did something similar to this for Halloween.  To make the pleated circles, take 4 pieces of paper in equal size and fold them accordion style.  Glue the strips together and then glue all the edges together in the center.  For the red crepe paper use a running stitch along the bottom.  Next you want to gather and pleat the crepe paper and sew the ends together.  Glue on to your pleated paper circle.  I had these vintage Americana milk caps.  They were perfect to finish it off.  I added a little ruffle of white crepe paper and glued it all together.  I glued all the ribbon with Fabri-Tac.  I added the feathers to honor our Native American ancestors since our land was their's first. 

 

The pic's aren't the best.  I swear my camera's begging me to get a better one.  

Linking up to the wonderful weekly wrap up at  

Recent vintage finds........

Vintage lace in a rainbow of colors!

Velvet, satin, lace, and woven ribbon!

and some abalone and bone buttons!

Better Homes and Gardens makes it so easy

They share some super easy ideas here. I love the side table they made out of an old ladder and frame and I have to make a butterfly canvas like the one the have here. The boys wouldn't like it, but I would.

A Home Decor Makeover with Crafts

Love is in the air and apparently strep throat too.....

Well, it is officially summer here.  Kiah's last day of school was Thursday.  The prior Saturday he started complaining of a sore throat, but I didn't really think anything of it since he is prone to allergies.  So we went ahead and took my sister and her boyfriend out to Santa Cruz.  It was the cutest thing seeing them go down the boardwalk hand in hand.  Her in her scooter and him in the wheelchair.  Ahh, young love.

 Kiah was not better by Monday; still a sore throat, a tummy ache, and a slight fever.  I set him up for an appointment early Tuesday.  He wanted to go to school even though he felt crappy because he didn't want to miss the last three days of seeing Nina, his 2nd grade sweetheart.  It turned out he had strep throat.  Go figure.  As soon as he took the first dose of antibiotics he started to feel better.

I am amazed at how many people commented on the giveaway.  Thanks to everyone who stopped by and a special thanks to the people who decided to follow.  You all made my week.

I am taking another one of Susan Tuttle's workshops.  I haven't had much time to do it, but I did do a couple pieces. The bokeh texture was made from some pics I took of bubbles purposely making them out of focus.The stained glass and Venus de Milo photos are from morguefiles.com.

She had a lesson on adjustment layers .  I never messed with adjustment layers before.  I made the above photo's background more pink by messing with the photo filter adjustment layer.

Next time I have some vintage finds to share.  Hope everyone has a good week!

~Giveaway - Yeah!

I am doing a giveaway, since it is the cool thing to do nowadays.  My brother claims it is shameless self-promotion - but, hey I call it good fun.  From now until June 15th 12:00am PST comment here for 1 entry.  For the second entry you have to become a follower of my blog then post back here again.  The winner will be announced June 17th at 12:00pm.  I will ship world wide depending on where the winner lives.  It includes vintage: book pages, milk caps, buttons, labels, photos, game cards, a greeting card, and a stamp.  Plus a while you were out memo paper, carnival tickets, shells, a doily, a Mucha illustration, Cavallini & Co stickers, a lace flower, a remember stamp,  a today stamp, a butterfly and a ornament I made out of a vintage chandelier crystal.

Well, my hopes of submitting to Stampington were dashed.  I waited till the last minute.  8:30pm rolls around and I am a scatterbrain trying to figure out what to type as Chris is distracting me by claiming, "Come on we still have to go to Target."  "I thought you wanted to go to Target."  " Aren't you done yet!"  Yeah I was frustrated and near tears.  That seems to be happening a lot lately.  And as soon as I hit the send button, I noticed a mistake in the first sentence.   Thanks Chris.

Kiah and I walked to a couple garage sales yesterday.  I got a ton of vintage craft supplies: buttons, trim, Holly Hobby appliques, fabric, scarves, and fabric transfers.  I also got this cute shoe kit where you can make your own shoes.  It is called the Suburban Gypsies Shoe Kit.  Isn't it cute.

My treasures from yesterday

 

This is a pic of  all the goodies I found at the flea market yesterday.  My favorite Peter Pan and Wendy from 1925, two sets of vintage buttons, a vintage flower frog and the cutest little hor d' oeuvre picks. 

Sometimes I wonder if I will ever lead a life with all the pieces in the right place....

It has been one of those months.  You know the ones where no one listens, everything goes wrong, and when you finally get a smile on your face you start your period.  We have had a lot of problems this month with my Grandma's social services and social security.  Which is really stressful because we had her work in on time and they are still giving us troubles.  I am so grateful for the assistance we do receive for her, if we didn't have it we would have to pay for everything on our very limited income.  That on top of everything else has made it a hard month.

One of the hardest problems this month has been my computer problems.  My photoshop elements isn't working and I can't upload pictures.  So I have been having to use my camera phone.  This picture is the one I am going to use for the Echo group and this was supposed to be my echo but all that other stuff just came out. If that is what the picture prompted out of me I guess I will go with it.  Next week I am going to team up with Becky Dorcsh for the Dim Challenge.  I hope I have my computer working better by then.  My camera phone takes okay pics but is not the same.

Art by Chrysti

Ilka's Attic

All my decorations were in storage so I made these out of scrap paper. The book column was made by folding all the pages in half and then gluing the covers together. The moon face came from the Matthew Mead Halloween magazine