The Perfect Tortilla Bowls

For Christmas I was the recipient of the Perfect Tortilla Bowls, a set of 4 bowls that you put tortilla's in and bake for a set amount of time to turn them into bowls.
This is picture blog of my first try with the Perfect Tortilla bowls.

They are all shiny out of the box and freshly washed and dried. Ready for me to fill them with tortillas.

 It took me a minute to figure out how to put the tortillas in the bowls but once I figured it out they fit right in.

 They said to put them in for 5-7 minutes, I started with 5 minutes but ended up leaving them in for 10 minutes.

 After the 10 minutes were up I removed them and let them sit in the pans for another 5 minutes per the instructions.

 After the bowls were cool enough to remove I filled it with my favorite goodies.
I started with a base of lettuce and refried beans, then I added taco meat, green olives, salsa, cheese and topped with sour cream.

Not only pretty but delicious as well.

It's a BOY!!

The newest member of the Willis family made his appearance on November 28th at 3:02 AM.

His name is Jacob Matthew, he weighed 8 lbs 12 oz and is 21 inches long.

Katherine holding her new brother for the first time, she was originally really mad that it was another boy. She fell completely in love with Jacob when she saw him for the first time.

Jacob is only an hour old in this picture, he nursed like a champ right away and still does at 12 days old.

Zane loves his baby and was happy that Mommy let him hold Jacob.

36 Weeks

Today I am 36 weeks pregnant, which means I could have less than 2 weeks or as much as 6+ weeks before baby gets here. I never know when baby will make his or her appearance, to be honest I am hoping for closer to 6 weeks. Crazy I know who wants to be pregnant that long, but the fact of the matter is that I am so not prepared at all for this baby like I should be. I need to get my head in the frame of mind of having a new baby, a 16 month old and a 7 year old, it will be a learning curve for all of us that is for sure.
 While adjusting to a new baby, we are taking the whole month of December off from school, which is why we started 2 weeks earlier than the public schools in our county did and we will not have a spring break this year because of this large break. Which will add up to be about the same amount of days/hours/weeks completed this school year.

Jokes

Over the years jokes have evolved from being cute and funny to dirty and hilarious depending on your age. Now that I have a young child I have reverted back to cute and funny jokes if I can find them. Sure there are websites you can go to to read funny kid jokes, but after a while they sound the same. The other day one of the facebook pages I like posted a few clean and funny jokes. I wish I could remember which one it was but alas I don't and the only joke I remember is this:

There were two fish in a tank, one turns to the other and says "You man the guns and I'll drive." 

If you don't get it read it again and pay attention to the word Tank. Now you see it. Funny right. This is the kinds of jokes I like to teach my children, the unexpected funny.  Another joke that is a big hit in my family, my 5 year old nephew J. loves this joke it cracks him up every time he says or hears it.

Why don't spiders spin webs?? Because they don't know how to knit! 

A family friend's daughter used to tell two silly jokes when she was my daughters age, she would say "Do you want to hear a dirty joke?" Which of course you did since it was a small child saying this, you knew it would be good.

Do you want to hear a dirty joke? Sure! "A Pig rolls in mud!"

Do you want to hear a clean joke? Why yes I do. "The pig gets a bath."  

A few other jokes I have recently heard are: 

I kept asking myself, why is that Frisbee getting bigger? Then it hit me!

Did you hear about the peripheral visionary? She could see into the future, but only off to the sides.

A Vintage Story

I recently read a book called  "The Secret Lives of Dresses" by Erin McKean, it is a fictional story however I love the concept of writing a story really a moment in time in the dresses life. So I feel like I should write stories of my own for each vintage dress or even hat that I own and sell in my shop. I am planning on telling these stories here along with a picture of the dress the story is being told about.

Do you make stories up of about the clothing you wear?

The Story Of Louis Pasteur

We have to watch this movie for school in a couple of weeks and trying to find it at my local library or on Netflix is near to impossible, however YouTube.com has it is 7 parts. Here are all 7 parts for you pleasure.

Part 1/7

Part 2/7

Part 3/7

Part 4/7

Part 5/7

Part 6/7

Part 7/7

What sparks your creativity?

What sparks your creativity? 

 Listening to music, taking a walk in the woods, sitting and listening to the sounds around you, getting a cup of coffee, talking with friend?

For me it can be hearing the right words or seeing something that I have been wanting to do and just doing it, granted it can be a little hard to do somethings when your are almost 27 weeks pregnant. 

Recently much of my creativity has been put towards writing. I currently have 5 children's books written, 1 of which is getting published by Tate Publishing. I am waiting to see how that book does before contacting my editor again and sending in my other manuscripts to hopefully be published as well. For instance 3 weeks ago inspiration hit me to write another children's story, so I quickly wrote down the main points of my  book and went back to enjoying church service (which was really good that day).

House decorating and design comes to me while looking at pictures on Pinterest, Facebook and watching HGTV or DIY channels, I like certain aspects of what they are doing and then find a similar product or image and move on to that project. Like I said it can be difficult to do when pregnant, especially with a every growing baby bump to get in the way. 

Here is a little snippet of the book that is getting published, it should be available to the public around February/March time frame.

"My name is Honey, I am a Golden Retriever and I love to go on long walks with my girl Gracie who loves to go on walks just as much as I do.  Her brother Michael isn’t old enough to go on walks with us just yet, but next summer he will be.

We like to take long walks each day and that is how our day started. Gracie and I were walking through the woods when we came upon a doe and her twin fawns who were napping in a patch of grass and a beam of sunlight. Gracie put a finger to her lips and told me to be quiet so we could sneak around and not disturb them. I like chasing deer, rabbits and squirrels but I know Gracie wouldn’t give me my after walk treat if I chased these three deer into the woods and left her all alone to finish our walk. So I stay with Gracie and we continue on through the woods.

The next thing we came upon is the creek that runs through the woods we take our daily walks through; usually we don’t see much of anything in or around the creek. But today we see a mother duck with 6 baby ducklings swimming behind her on the creek. We watch them as they swim under the bridge and around the bend before we move on.  We also saw a few minnows, tadpoles and crawfish in the creek; we even heard a bull frog bellow his daily greetings."

Frozen Lemons + Water = Yummy Drink

       During my pregnancy I do not drink caffeine at all and those who know me know I am a huge mountain dew fanatic, thankfully my husband has found a caffeine free mountain dew for me to drink so I don't have to go without this time. I try to only drink 1 or 2 cans a day and drink water or milk the rest of the day. I am not a fan of plain water, it is boring and I just don't like it. However I do like to add a slice of lemon to my water, buying a single lemon is more expensive than buying a bag of them at the grocery store. I usually throw them in the fridge to keep them fresh longer but they still go bad quickly and I hate wasting good lemons.

Here is my very short tutorial on how to freeze lemons.
1. Wash the outside of the lemon first, think about it. It is going to be in your drink and you don't want dirt in your drink.
2. Cut them up into slices then cut each slice in half, you can get twice as many lemons for my drinks.
3. Put wax paper down on a tray, I used a  very small tray and could only get 3 or 4 sliced and halved lemons on it.
4. Put Tray in the freezer for a few hour until lemons are frozen.
5. Put lemons in a freezer bag and put back into freezer.
6. Do this until all of your lemons are cut, frozen and bagged.
I did this last month and still haven't been through the first bag of lemons yet, but I will use the same slice of lemon all day.

I will even put a small slice of lemon in my sons sippy cup just to add a little bit of flavor to his water, no sugar necessary.

How to make Display Trays

Back in March I participated in a Craft Show with my Vintage Shoppe, while preparing for this show I decided that I needed a couple of display trays to display brooches or earrings. However I didn't want to buy any because I was trying to keep myself on a budget.

One day while retrieving something from my basement I came upon 2 small window frames that originally belonged to a door, they were PERFECT size for my display trays. 

~A little bit of background on my basement, the man we bought our house from didn't clean the basement out at all. So there are all sorts of random things and treasures not to mention trash down there. My loving husband has been slowly cleaning all of the junk and trash out.~

Here are the instructions on how to turn an ordinary small window frame into a beautiful display tray.

This is what they looked like when I found them in the basement. Covered in grim, dirt and cobwebs.

I scrubbed them up really well with hot soapy water and let them dry for a couple of days.

This is what they looked liked after I cleaned them.

There is a big difference isn't there?

I liked the style but not the color, it is just wasn't what I was looking for so I decided to paint them.

I couldn't decided what color, but I knew that I needed to prime them first since they were stained at one time.

I didn't sand them at all since the stain was so old and there wasn't any wax or clear coat on them.

I primed each frame twice with a basic white primer paint that I had laying around the house.

I was going to leave them white or just paint one with color but then I decided to paint them a very pretty blue, again this was paint I had laying around. 

The frame on the right in this picture only has 1 coat of the blue paint on it, I kind of liked the shabby chic look of the white peaking through. But it looked unfinished and sloppy to me, so I did two coats of the blue paint on each frame.

After I had finished putting the 2nd coat of blue paint and let them dry, I thought they turned out really well. Don't you?

I had to address the holes in the frame on the left, what could I do with those? I could fill them with putty, but I would have to buy some and I really didn't want to do that. So I dug through my jar of vintage beads that I have from broken jewelry, it took a while but I finally found 4 faux pearl beads that were all the same size.

I just used a hot glue gun and glued each bead into place.

Backing: I use cardboard and material for the backing, both of these I had just laying around in my house.

I measure and cut the cardboard to fit. 

I measured and cut the material to overlap the cardboard for a nice finished look. I ironed the material before cutting and applying to cardboard.

I used a generic Elmer's Glue to apply the material to the cardboard, I didn't use my hot glue gun because I didn't want it to become lumpy.

After I glued each piece of material and let it dry I then folded the extra material around the cardboard and used a little bit of glue to hold in place.

After that had dried, I used a staple gun to attach the cardboard backs to the frames.

 

The total time to make these was about 3 hours, but it was over the course of 4 days with waiting for the frames to dry.

Closer look of the right frame.

Items Used:

2 wooden frames

White Primer Paint

Blue Paint

1 1" paint brush

Hot Glue Gun

4 Faux Pearl Beads

Cardboard

2 pieces of Material

Generic Elmer's Glue

Staple Guns

All of these things were found around my home.

Cost of this project $0.00.

To check out my Website click Here or my Facebook Page click Here.

A Published Author

Several months ago I wrote a children's book about my daughter and our dog, but the story is told in the perspective of the dog. I decided to write it after going to the library over a period of time and seeing/getting children's books that were poorly written and for the most part didn't make sense. It was like the book they talk about in Elf with Will Ferrell, it is missing 2 pages and they wanted to publish it any ways, these books were like that.
 A couple of weeks ago I came across Tate Publishing through a friend of mine who's Mom is a children's book author as well (Connie Randolph; she writes Casper Joe books). I contacted Connie and asked her several questions about Tate Publishing and her experience with them, she replied that she has been very happy with them and hasn't had any problems considering she has had 4 books published with them.
Well I went ahead and sent my manuscript to them, I received the customary email that they will let me know if a couple of weeks about my book and all that jazz. On Monday I receive a call from Tate Publishing saying that they would like to offer me a contract and publish my book, I haven't been this excited about something in a while.
It is a dream come true for me, I honestly never thought it would see the light of day on book shelves in a book store or library.

50 Shade of Pure Crap

I am an avid reader, I read just about any thing. From great works of literature to new books that are all the rage. I am unbiased in my reading, or I like to think. In my book case you will find westerns, romance, contemporary romance, inspirational, comedy, mystery, drama, historical, non-fiction just to name a few genres.

So being an avid reader the other day I picked up the second book in the 50 Shade of Grey trilogy, so I could see what all the fuss was about. Most books in a trilogy or series you can pick up any book and get an  idea of what happened in the previous books, Janet Evanovich is great at this in her Stephanie Plum Number Series (which is at book 18) you can pick any book up and she gives a short background in each book so you can read them out of order. This author not so much, it takes place 3 days after the first book ended. It is poorly written, honestly my 6 year old probably could have written a better book. There was F bomb droppings in places that didn't need a F bomb dropped, the dialogue was short and broken. Granted this book is an erotic romance but to be completely honest I have read better scenes in a dime romance novel.

Why is this poorly written book making a wave I keep wondering. My one sister who is an 8th grade teacher and is a prolific reader like I am, said that poorly written books are making huge waves because so many people do not read anymore. As she stated that the Twilight series is also a poorly written series yet there is a huge following. I haven't read those books mostly because the idea of a vampire sparkling is just wrong especially if Edward is as ugly as the actor who portrayed him is supposed to be.

I am causing waves today and I really don't care.

~Kristen

Zane the eater of floor things

Each day is a new day, a fresh slate so to speak. With that goes my kitchen floor, every day usually twice a day I have to sweep my kitchen floor to keep Zane from eating whatever was dropped or in his case thrown on the floor. During the times that the floor does have random things/food on it he will make a beeline for it, I have caught him eating things such as the ends of popsicles, popcorn, chips, fruit, bugs and my favorite thing dirt,
I know the saying that goes "God made dirt, dirt don't hurt," it is the grossest thing because I never know if it is truly mud or cow poop or dog poop or even mud from a dirty ol' coal mine with miniature chucks of coal. YUCK!
So every day I make sure to get my floor clean so I can hopefully avoid having to fetch something gross from Zane's mouth.

On the upside to this, he has started to walk a few steps here and there. He will be 10 months old in a couple days and I so proud of how grown up he has become.

Life as we know it

Our lives change daily regardless if we notice it happening or not. It is the small things that change us and mold us into the people we are today and will be, change for me is a good thing (most of the time) I embrace it each day. If it is a change that I am not happy about I either accept it or try to change it for the better if I can, death is one thing I have a hard time accepting even though I have gone through the grieving process to many times to count. With death comes new life and life is what I am talking about today, but first I am going to tell a story of an amazing man.
 Back in March one of my husbands good friend and mentor passed away, it was one of the most amazing calling hours and funerals I have ever been to or will ever be at. Michael passed away a week before his 52nd birthday, and in his 51 years touched more lives than I can only hope to. I heard from our pastor who officiated the funeral said that more than 3000 people made their way through the calling hours line, isn't that amazing? And those were just the people that could make it or had heard that Michael passed away.
The next day the church was filled to the brim and there was standing room only during the funeral, we arrived an hour and half early and already the seats were over half full. In my life I have never seen and never will see again so many people (mostly men) crying for the loss of a brother, friend, confidant, father, uncle, son, boss, business partner, etc. The processional of vehicles to the grave site was over a mile long and the loss of a man who was a pillar in our community palatable.

Through this loss the miracle of life was found, on April 2nd Josh and I found out that we are pregnant with baby #3. This baby is due around Thanksgiving and will be only 16 months younger than Zane.

So change is good and sometimes it takes awhile to accept, but in the end it is inevitable.

It is ALIVE!!!!!!

What is alive you may ask, well I just might tell you. But I will hold off for at least a few minutes. hehe.

As you know I have been working with Larry of My Local PC Pro in building my website, we have worked really hard on this project for about 4-5 months.

Getting it set up just right and of course adding my hundreds of items I have listed on my Facebook Page and taking new pictures of a bunch of items now that I have a fantastic camera a Nikon D3100 that my loving husband got me for Christmas. It has made my life so much easier than using my camera phone, Yes that is what I had been reduced to using to take pictures with. I had been using my husbands camera but it didn't take good close ups of jewelry and the photo always looked blurred, which I hate because you really lose the beauty of the piece especially brooches and rhinestone earrings.

So after months of hard work on our part my website is now LAUNCHED or ALIVE if you will.
Please go check it out at
www.kvclothing.com

I was featured in a Blog

I had the privilege of being interviewed by French Press Vintage and her blog Caught Frenching ( I love the name of her blog).
You can read my interview Here, Amber did an amazing job and I am so excited that she asked me to be a part of the blog experience.

PSA

Dear Parents and Soon to be Parents of the World.

I know you have the cutest name picked out for your little one, it is unique and different, a mix of two names or something like that.
HOWEVER when you pick a name for your children you need to remember that they are going to be an adult some day, working  in a competitive industry where off the wall weird names are not hired especially if no one can pronounce it. There have been numerous studies done about children with "unique" names, here are a couple of studies.
 Names really do make a Difference

Good Bad, Baby Names have a long lasting effects

Not only have I read several studies (I've read more than I posted) but I am on several pregnancy and parenting groups/pages and I see the names people come up with and I am shocked on how (to be quite honest) are stupid. I feel sorry for these children with name that are so off the wall and weird, that they must have come for strange Sci-Fi book or show.

Here is a good example of why strange names shouldn't be used.
Someone I know was doing her doctor residency in an ER in downtown Atlanta Georgia, one day a Mom brings both of her boys in. My friend looks at the charts and can not believe her eyes, the one boy's name was Shithead and the other Lemonjello. However when she called their names the Mother got very mad "Their names are Shetheed and Lemangelo not Shithead and Lemon Jello"

So be nice and give your children nice normal names. I prefer traditional timeless names, a name that when people look at will have no idea how old my children are when they are adults.

Freezing it

You know how they say hindsight is 20/20 in any situation? Well I took that saying to heart when I was pregnant because I didn’t want to be the new Mom again who didn’t have time to make dinner for the rest of her family because I was breastfeeding all day long. With that I started making food to put away in our freezer and let me tell you our freezer was jammed pack full of premade foods that I made, not out of a box or tv dinner no these were made from scratch kind of foods.

There are a ton of things that you make that can go in the freezer and they freeze really well too, here is a small sample of things you can freeze ahead of time.

Casseroles

Stuffed Shells

Lasagna

Waffles

Pancakes

Left-over roast beef

BBQ Chicken

 Mashed potatoes

Meatloaf

Chicken enchiladas

Chili

I used a cookbook called Freezer Pleasers; it is a cook book that basically has you make two of everything so you can freeze the second dish. Most of the recipes are super simple and they have something for everyone. I bought some of those aluminum baking dishes so I wasn't using all of my casserole dishes in the freezer, it saved time and was an easy clean up...thrown right into the trash can, now who doesn't love that? 

Remember many times you have left over cooked meat such as roast beef, meatloaf, BBQ chicken and instead of letting it go to waste in your fridge put it in a zip-lock baggy and freeze it for another time, one very super quick meal that you already made. 

A new face

The other day I was reading a book about how to change simple items around your home to look a bit more rustic, now I am not a rustic type person when it comes to decorating my home. However I did love the idea to change items I already had on hand to meet my personal decorating style, in the book (I can not remember the name of the book, I should have written it down) it talked about changing a regular face clock to look more rustic by painting it red and changing the actual face of the clock to something more simple. Well I took that idea and put my own spin on it.
 The only thing I changed was the face, because the color of the clock matches my kitchen already.

Here is the original Clock.

The back of the clock against the cardstock I am using for the new face.

To keep things simple I traced the original background onto the cardstock and used a stencil and pencil to write the numbers on the clock. I then filled in the hole I need for the hands and used a very sharp knife to cut it out.

Comparison.

The finished product.

It's not perfect but it will work for now until I decide to make another one.

Wordless Wednesday - Art & Sayings

Simple non chemical way to clean silver

I was perusing Pinterest the other day, when I came across a picture of several silver utensils with the heading. "How to clean silver with baking soda and aluminum foil." This peaked my interest as I have a few pieces of real silver utensils I have purchased at a secondhand store called 'Granny's Attic' and I have yet to find a good way to clean them. So this is the story of how I attempted to clean them, I am writing this blog as I do this experiment.
I got the recipe for this experiment Here.

What you’ll need:

• large pot
• 1 tablespoon baking soda
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 4″ (approximately) piece of aluminum foil
• tongs or something similar to get the silver in and out of boiling water

Here is a picture of what they looked like before hand.

          The first half that is while Boiling

You can see the difference, on the left is the tarnished half on the right is the clean half. I still have to wipe down with a clean cloth to get the baking soda and salt off.

the other half for 3 minutes

The end result, I am pretty happy with how they turned out with very little effort on my part and not having to purchase anything extra. So that was a plus as well.




I used this to clean a few vintage brooches as well and they turned out fantastic, so simple and easy and will not damage the integrity of the piece. 

Wordless Wednesday

Children's Books

Why oh Why is it so hard to find well written children's books? Honestly out of every 10 books Katherine gets out at the library only 1 is truly worth reading, there maybe 2 or 3 that are so so. But most of them aren't even worth the paper they are printed on, the other day I was reading a book to Katherine and it didn't make sense whatsoever. I had to read each page twice because it was so poorly written not to mention the story didn't flow at all. So with that in mind I have decided to start writing short stories for Katherine and I am going to have her illustrate them for me.
I have had many different women as me why I buy my daughter used books from the library book sale, I do it for 2 reasons.
1. I get a whole grocery bag of books for a $1.00 (honestly who can beat that?)
2. Because I find well written books, that have a fantastic story line and are beautifully illustrated.


                                                                                                                                                                                     
.
For instance several years ago I found "Taking Rides with Aunt Lucy" it is one of our favorites books to read.