Monday, April 10, 2017

Spring has Sprung! (Sort of)







Just some photos of  what I like to call my "Goth Garden." Its a work in progress. I think this year is the year that it will look like the picture I have in my mind. Of course since I live on the Illinois Wisconsin border it is too early to do anything else right now. 

Saturday, December 24, 2016

My Love/Hate relationship with Pinterest

Here is what I have to show for my hard work. Only 4 cookies. NOT time well spent.
A few years back I seen some beautiful camel sugar cookies on that damn Pinterest. I was determined to make them. My long suffering husband found this vintage cookie cutter on Ebay. 

This product is not bad. It drys hard. Reasonably priced. Easy to use.

 I hate almost everything about sugar cookies. The taste, texture and most of all the mess. One year I thought I would avoid the mess by signing up for a cookie exchange at the high school. The bad part of that is you have to share what you made. I was really turned off by receiving cookies made by children's grubby little hands and they are far from the beautiful camel cookies on Pinterest that I aspire to. I know this makes me sound like real scrooge. At a different time in my life I would have liked that kind of thing. 
My idea this year to avoid the mess was to buy already made cookie dough. This did not work. as you can see, its a far cry from mess free. I had to add so much flour to keep it from sticking in the cookie cutter. There is a real learning curve to using this molded type of cookie cutter.



The unbaked cookies look pretty good.
This was too thin. that was probably why it broke when I tried to hold it in my hand for a photo.



I had the dough to thick on this one. Those rectangle shapes are from the handles of the cookie cutter.I did not notice that on the raw cookies. If I decide to make these again I will do some research on line. I am sure there is a recipe for these type of molded cookie cutter cookies. There is a lesson here.

Remember that anything worth doing is going to take longer than you think.


Tuesday, November 1, 2016

"Day of the Dead"

I just started collecting Day of the Dead figures. They are small clay figures called Muñecas.
 I don't know alot about them except that I like them. 



The Blue Devil is from "Incipient Wings Studio"
www.marfibradford.blogspot.com
I love him!

These are made by the Mexican Folk Artist "Josefina Aguilar"




I do not know who the artist is of the smaller ones.
I wanted to show this one with the head in the basket.
Not sure what it means? Maybe we all morn in our own way?

This does have some initials on it. My husband wanted this one.
We did not realize he had been
broken and repaired. My husband was a little angry about that.
He is not the same scale as my other ones but I let him buy it anyways.

I know this is not Day of the Dead but I wanted to show him off. This was given to us by my husbands aunt.
It is signed but I had a hard time reading it.
I think the artisit is also well know. I will have to look into it.
I hope you enjoyed my Day of the Dead post. 

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Haunted Humpday 6 Horror Movies and Bad Parenting or It was the 70s

Growing up during the 70's did not offer much in family TV. There usually wasn't much choice of what you could watch compared with today. Lets just say they did not overly cater to the children. I went to spend the weekend with my father. I was pretty young. Maybe the 4th grade. He put on his favorite horror movie "Night of the Living Dead." So not appropriate. To top it off, he would keep sneaking behind the couch and jumping out and yelling at the scary parts. 


Our parents would take us to the Drive-In Movies. In theory this is a great idea. We went in our pajamas. There was a swing set in the front that we played on before the movie started. The family movie played first. By the time the children fell asleep the adult one would play. I did some research and I think the adult movie was  "The Vampire Lovers." I do not know how they rated movies back then but the way I searched for it was by typing in the words. "Vampire movie where woman gets bit on the boob." because that is what I remember. The movie poster says not for the mentally immature. My husband just said to me some things never change. No one asked him.

One of the girls in the neighborhood stole the book "The Exorcist" from her mother. We were at that age when you kinda of know how sex works but still kind of foggy on the exact mechanics of it.. We took turns reading it to each other especially the really shocking dirty part. One night I heard pounding outside my bedroom. I ran down to my parents bedroom hysterical because "Captain Howdy" was trying to get me. My parents yelled at me to go back to bed. It was a loose board on the roof. So I got myself busted for reading the book. I'm the oldest of four. I begged my younger siblings to walk me to the bathroom at night. They all refused except for my baby brother. They have never let me live this down. I have never watched the movie and I never will. I don't even like looking at this picture.
I have not done much better then my parents. I came home one day and my husband was letting our six year old son watch "Child's Play." I said "that's not for kids." My husband says "its a puppet and its not even scary." It didn't help that I had an old ventriloquist dummy from my childhood and we put it in his bed.  He made us give it away to our friends four year old who loved Chucky?
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Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Haunted Humpday-My Halloween Decorations


Haunted Humpday 5 - My Decorations


This is really old. My mother gave it to me. I think its for the outdoors.
This is a Radko collectible.

Garage sale find.
Radco collectible.


The witch is fed up with the vampire neighbors. Just because your over 300 years old doesn't mean your yard needs to look like its 300 years old. 








This looks better in person.



Bathroom. The pumpkin is another Radko.

I love this towel.

Master bath.




I bought this for my mom. I thought she would get a kick out of it.

I made this. Its cuter in person. There are Black roses trimmed in purple glitter in it but you can't tell.
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