Summer is officially in full swing around here.  This summer we are busy doing projects around the house (I will post with our home improvement update hopefully next week) and we are going on some local trips to places we love and some places we have never been to. There will be lots of summer celebrations and I had a cake stand sitting here and I thought I would paint another Americana Cake Stand. I painted this cake stand with a American...

    I know I should be thinking about Easter and Spring and be painting things like Easter Bunnies and Colored Eggs but I just have not been feeling that.  Instead I have felt like painting for Halloween.       I had a couple of wood candle holders and decided to make them into Halloween Decor.  The first one is the Mean Jack-o-Lantern.   Mean Jack has been sculpted with paper clay to look menacing. There are...

    I had been in a painting slump for a while.  I suddenly felt like getting some of my half finished projects done.  One of those is this Bat Wing Mantel Clock.  I had it almost finished for a while and it was just sitting so it seemed like the best thing to complete first.  I really love this clock design and when you see it in person it is a pretty impressive design.  It has a wingspan of 20 ½ inches and is 7 ½ inches tall....

Brandon’s favorite cookies are his grandma’s Molasses Cookies.  His grandma would make them each year and he loves them.  When we got married I tried to get the recipes of things he liked to add to my collection of recipes.  A few years ago, Brandon’s mom made me a cookbook for Christmas and gave me a few family recipes – his aunt’s peanut butter cookies, his aunt’s pie crust, his grandma’s banana...

If you missed my last post, this year I decided that our gingerbread house would be modeled after the Disneyland 2011 Haunted Mansion Gingerbread House.  You can check it out at the Disney Parks Blog. After a lot of hard work and finagling our gingerbread house is completed!  It was a bit nerve wracking after completing the house to see if the electronics and animatronics were going to work with the weight of the gingerbread, icing and...

This year’s gingerbread house design was a no brainer for me.  I fell in love when I saw the Disneyland Haunted Mansion gingerbread house for this year as soon as I saw it on the Disney Parks Blog.  I thought it was awesome and this was what I wanted to build this year! I was so excited when I saw it that I asked Brandon to watch the video to see if he could help me make mine open and close like theirs and he said he could. The...