Easy Canvas Print? Heck Yes!

I was contacted by a representative from Easy Canvas Prints a while back asking if I would like to review a product. I would get to choose a one of my photos and have it made into a canvas print. I jumped at the chance!

After much debate, I decided on this photo that I took at the Vienna Prater when I visited Europe a few years ago.  There are a few more photos from the park here.

And here's how it translated to canvas.  Please, as always, excuse the crappy lighting. 

I am very pleased with the canvas! I should also add that the website was a snap to use and it shipped quickly. 

I decided to hang it with a few other travel related pieces on my "Wall O' Art".  One, a photo my sister took in New Orleans. The other is a painting that I bought on the Charles Bridge in Prague....it's my favorite souvenir ever!

Here's how it looks on said Wall O' Art. I know it seems like a sparse collection right now, but someday I want to fill this entire wall with more photos, paintings, prints, etc. In addition to the three above are drawing of my dog Mya, a gift from my dear friend and phenomenal artist, Mary, a Natasha Wescoat print, and a Shag Tiki Room print, a gift from my husband. 

They are currently running a 25% off sale with free shipping over at Easy Canvas Prints! Thanks again, guys for giving me the opportunity to review your great product! I think I'm gonna need a few more to help balance and fill out this wall!

Best Oven Fried Chicken (no, really!)

Fried Chicken. Sigh. I direct you to my first(and only) slightly sad attempt at frying chicken. I almost got it right, and probably could have eventually gotten a handle on it if I'd kept at it, but I gave up.  I know.  I should be ashamed. I'm Southern after all, and from Kentucky...the Fried Chicken Capitol of the World! But me and fried chicken, we just don't jive. 

So here I am, four and half years after starting what I thought would be a cooking blog and I still can't fry up a chicken and I'm still not much of a cook either. This may explain why my cooking blog has morphed into a random craft/sewing/apron/quilting/ blog where I occasionally share a recipe. 

Which leads me back to the chicken...

I found a recipe for oven "fried" chicken that was a snap to make and tasted great! This recipe comes from the book Eat What You Love by Marlene Koch.

Best Oven Fried Chicken

What you'll need

• 2 large egg whites
• 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1/2 teaspoon onion powder
• 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1/2 teaspoon ground sage
• 1/4 teaspoon dried thyme
• 1 1/4 cups corn flakes
• 1/4 cup plain breadcrumbs
• 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 lbs skinless chicken

***My changes due to lack of ingrediets: 1/2 cup egg beaters subbed for egg whites; paprika subbed for cayenne; Italian seasoning subbed for sage & thyme; I used precut chicken breast tenders.

What You'll Do

1. Preheat oven to 400. Place a wire rack on top of a baking sheet and spray with cooking spray.
2. In a shallow bowl, whisk together egg whites with  garlic powder, onion powder, caynne pepper, sage and thyme.
3. Place the cereal in a plastic bag and crush thoroughly with a rolling pin. Place in a shallow bowl and mix with  breadcrumbs, pepper, and salt.
4. Place flour in a third shallow bowl.
5. To bread the chicken pieces, first dredge the chicken in th flour to coat. Next, dip each piece of chicken into the egg white mixture, followed by the crumb mixture, making sure to cover all surfaces. repeat until all the chicken is coated.
6. Place the chicken pieces on the prepared rack and bake for 45 minutes, or until the chicken is  golden brown and reaches 180 degrees.

I'll admit to being a bit skeptical of any recipe titled "BEST" anything, but this was good stuff, y'all!  The chicken was juicy inside and crispy outside--just the way I like it! It was truly the best oven fried chicken I've tried....and I'd bet that cooking it on the wire racks is what made the difference. Give it a try and tell me what you think!  And I'd recommend you pick up a copy of this cookbook, especially if you're a cooking novice like I am. It has lots of familiar recipes(without exotic, hard to find ingrediets), made healthier.

UFO Sightings

Now that Summer has finally arrived and I get a few weeks off work, I have big sewing plans! To keep myself motivated and inspired to finish at least one of them, I've filled my design wall with bits and pieces of my current UFOs.

UFO's pictured:

• Picnic Quilt made from vintage sheets.
• A 30's Sampler
• Grey zig zag quilt.
• Moda Sweet  Quilt---pictured above the yellow pinwheel star block. It came in a kit and is WAY over my skill level.
• Pinwheel Sampler(this is a BOTM quilt, so no hurry, I just love looking at these bright blocks).
• Wonky log cabin quilt(yes, another one).

Other UFOs and crafty endeavors I'd like to tackle this summer:

• Decide how to finish off my Wonky House quilt top.
• Piece a backing for this quilt, and this one, and this one too.
• Finish a baby quilt I started three years ago. I couldn't bring myself to finish a simple patchwork baby quilt, Y'all! Sheesh.
• Make a wall hanging for my mom...we bought the fabric last summer.
• Update my etsy shop with aprons, bags, and monsters.
• Enter a quilt in the county fair, hopefully one of the three mentioned above.
• Make a toy or doll to entier in the county fair.
• Learn (or begin to learn) to paint with watercolors.

And although it's not crafty, I'd like to get my cooking mojo going and try out some new dishes.

Would love to hear your crafty goals for the summer!

A Trip to the Quilt Show

Goin' to Jockey

It's been a while since our last trip to a flea market, hasn't it? Now that summer is right around the corner, I think it's the perfect time! In the summer months, this flea market, also known as Jockey, is held every Tuesday morning in the buzzing metropolis of Greenville, Ky. It has been for as long as I can remember. As a kid I went to Jockey with my Aunt Rosemary and my cousins Keely and Sandy a time or two. We'd eat junk food and wander around the grounds(being silly, no doubt). I'd marvel at all the junk, not to mention the goats, chickens, ducks, and other small animals that were sold and traded. This was before my love of all things vintage kicked in, mind you, and I can't help but wonder what kind of wonderful treasures I walked right past back in the mid 70's and early 80's that I'd be drooling over today.

Over Memorial Day weekend, Mark and I hit up the Greenville flea market, er, Jockey. It was uber hot so I lost interest in taking photos after the first 30min. or so! But I do have a few to share. So, let's see what they've got today...Is it just me, or does something evil seem to be lurking behind those eyes?Favorite photo of the day.
You can't really see them in the photo but there were also GOONIES , GREMLINS and PAC MAN lunchboxes! Ridiculously expensive, however.
That little tiger...I wanted it....badly. And that Little People A Frame house? Totally had one.Wondering if the vendor meant to be funny by putting the elephant on the scale...it tickled me.I'm strangely drawn to rusty old junk like this. Apparently ET will talk to you when you get close enough. Thank the Lord his batteries were dead.This was actually pretty darn cool...can someone convince my husband to clean out our garage and fill the walls with these old signs?More rusty junk.Mark haggling with a vendor.This quilt was lovely....as was everything in this little booth.
Only at Jockey. What's sad is that someone probably used this cookbook. blech.
And even more rusty old junk. En Masse.

I bought several things. Two sets of vintage pillowcases, a set of vintage sheets, two vintage aprons, some pin up girl playing cards from 1955--they've been mailed to a swap partner, so no photo. I did take photos of two of my favorite finds of the day.

This lovely little candy dish.
And this fabulous picnic set for which I will be making matching placemats and napkins! Perhaps we'll have a picnic on our next flea market outing!

And that concludes our trip to Jockey, folks. Hope you had a good time and will come back and join me for my next flea market adventure!

Bloggers Quilt Festival!

Hello to those of you who are taking part in the Blogger's Quilt Festival! I'm so glad you are taking the time to stop by! I'm Kellie...I haven't been quilting for very long...maybe 3 years. Three years sounds like a long time, but for me it's been three years of sporadic quilting at best.

As of late, however, I've become more and more enamored with this pastime! I've joined an online quilting bee, which I'm really enjoying and I've even joined the local quilt guild and am going to try my darnedest to complete two quilts for the club sponsored Quilt Show at our local Fine Arts Center.

The quilt I'm sharing with you is one that I've blogged about it before, but it's my best quilt to date and the one I'm most proud of so far, so I hope you don't mind a little repetition.

I made a couple months ago for a gal at work having her first child( a sweet baby girl named Zoey). I'm a sucker for a pinwheel quilt, so the choice of what quilt to make was pretty simple once I saw the tutorial at the Moda Bake Shop. This is Miss Zoey's quilt.

One thing you should know about me is that I have a tendency to be an all or nothing type of gal. If I can't do it right, why bother doing it? And for someone who isn't an experienced quilter...and I suspect for someone who is...perfection is just not possible. Being only my second attempt at machine quilting(and I haven't really pieced that many quilts, either), this quilt reminded me that I need to take that perfectionist mentality of mine and toss it out the window.

While it was not an easy thing to do, I had to go with the flow. I eventually realized there aren't quilt police who are going to come and haul me away for committing crimes against quilting. I had to simply accept the wonky seams, the weird stops and starts on the back, and the not-even-close-to-straight quilting lines and live with them.

A few random thoughts I had while making this quilt:

• Slow Down!
• "Straight", for me, is a relative term.
• I should have taken the bindings class I took two days after sewing the binding on this, before I sewed the binding on this.
• Longer stitches look better than teensy ones.
• I ♥ the walking foot.
  
• How in the blankety-blank am I supposed to stop and start a line of stitching and keep from getting knots on the back OR the thread from pulling out?
  
• Aaaargh!
  
• Why is it that I am nearly finished before I finally start to figure things out?
• I hate basting.
  
• The quilt police aren't really going to come after me. After all, the fashion police have yet to find me and I've been committing crimes against fashion for years!

In the end, those mistakes I mentioned earlier didn't amount to much. The quilt got plenty of "oohs" and "aahs" at the baby shower and more importantly, the Mom-to-be absolutely loved it. And really, that's what mattered.

Thanks so much for stopping by my little corner of the blogosphere! I hope you'll become a follower or at the very least stop by and visit again sometime. I've been taking somewhat of a vacation from blogging lately, but now that it's summertime and I have two months off work, I'm feeling the need to get those creative juices flowing again!

Now, I'm off to check out the quilty goodness that is the Bloggers Quilt Festival!

Block Head!

This may be the most quilt block heavy post I've ever blogged...just call me Charlie Brown!

But, I do believe my sewing palate is officially cleansed and I am ready to move on to other projects! Before I do, here's just a few more of those wonky-scrappy blocks.
And what to do when you accidentally cut a wonky-scrappy too short? Make a coaster for your sewing table, of course!
And speaking of quilt blocks...here is the one I got from Debbie in the Quilt Block Swap for December. My requests were any style of block done turquoise and/or aqua and red with some white thrown in. It's a cool pattern which looks too complicated for this block head to attempt! But some day...Debbie requested pink and brown for her block. It's showing black on my end, but I promise the dark fabrics are brown. Note the lack of triangles and matching points in the block I created. I hope she will like it! It's called crossing paths(or something like that) and is one of the patterns we used during the Block of the Month group I participated in last year through my local quilt shop.Yep. That's a lot of blocks. Now...for some apron talk!

I'm in Val's Cheap Hot Mama Apron Swap and it's gonna be a fun one! Cheap, because swappers are not allowed to purchase fabrics for their partner's apron. We MUST use fabric from our stash and we don't spend a dime on the little extras we send along. I love it!! We were given a couple of themes to choose from and my partner requested the theme "Old Man Winter". Luckily I have a couple different fabrics that fit that theme! My dilemma? Which to choose? I'm leaning toward the first set of fabrics pictured...only because the only matching fabric I had for the second was a solid and I never know what to do w/solids! What do y'all think?

Let's do Lunch...Bag.

A while back, I decided to make a new lunch bag. It turned out to be big enough to hold a small apple and perhaps a very thin slice of cheese. It's blogged here.

On Wednesday, my sister came up and we had a girls sewing day. Besides having a great time hanging out with my sis, I managed to make another bag using the leftover fabrics from that teeny tiny Friendship Bag. This one is actually big enough for a sandwich and chips and I had plenty of fabric left to make a cute little matching napkin. I enjoyed this one because it gave me a little quilting practice to boot! I even tried some free motion quilting(don't look at it, it's weird) on the bottom portion.I'm not finished with lunch bags yet, though. I definitely want to make one using these fabrics.My sister used this FQ bundle to make hers and it was adorable. Besides, I still haven't perfected this lunch bag thing...the size is never quite right...and the lining??? HOW do you keep from having floppy linings? Stiff interfacing?Because Jackie and I sew in the kitchen when she comes over, I managed to get my sewing corner organized before I brought the machine back in. I love when it doesn't look like the fabric and craft store threw up! And I said I organized the corner...I never said I swept the floor!
That's it for now...ok, where did I leave that Swiffer?

Since I mentioned it, now I have to show you the photos.

OK, so I mentioned a certain World Tour concert in my last post. It was freakin' incredible people! U2 is an amazing band. I'd never seen them live before, but they have been one of my favorites since the first time I saw the video Sunday Bloody Sunday on MTV. That was, of course, when they still showed music videos on MTV.

This was a stadium tour...and I've been to several concerts before but never anything on such a large scale! Every minute of it was exciting! And singing along with nearly 70,000 other fans...it was so much fun. I have a whole new appreciation for the band and their music now.

There's a video posted that shows some highlights from the tour.

And now for the photo sharing portion of today's post.

These are from an afternoon spent in Napierville IL. the day before the concert, our day in Chi-town, followed by the awesomeness that was U2:

My brother and me at Giodorno's in Napierville. Best pizza I've ever had. Ever.

My sis and her husband Scott.
There was a guy playing showtunes on the bells at the top of this tower in Napierville. It was creepy-cool.