Furniture Re-vamp

Do you ever get so excited about a project it starts to consume your every thought? I'll admit it happens to me often. I obsess on an idea or a project and I just can't get it out of my thoughts.

The past month my dining room has been my obsession. I have driven to furniture stores all over the state looking for a black dining room table and hutch. They are outrageous expensive! I just can't spend the money required to get a quality set. So, my mind shifted gears and I started wondering if I could create such a set.

I've spent hours and hours researching how to paint furniture, looking at furniture on Craig's list and talking to the experts at Lowe's and Sherwin Williams.

Last weekend, I dragged my family to a town about 30 miles away to purchase a small hutch on Craigslist. It's now sitting in the garage, just waiting to become a beautiful piece of re-created glory. I have all the supplies, all the tools.

But, my excitement is starting to wane, and I'm terrified I'll screw it up! What if I ruin a cute little piece of $50 furniture and my new vision for my dining room is not going to work??? I know I have to get over this sense of fear and just get out there. I do. I understand that.

Time for the internal pep talk and to change into painting clothes.

Blog Combination

I was feeling too schizophrenic trying to keep up two blogs. Should decorating items go with food or quilting???

It was too complicated to figure out what I wanted to put on each one, so today I combined them back both into the one Lyme Ricky blog. I won't delete the Quilted Patch for a while, but I imported all the posts here -- that's why you may see a bunch of unread posts in your reader account.

Sorry for any confusion or heartache this might have caused all of my regular readers -- I apologize.

Homemade Chicken Things

We made Homemade Chicken Things last night and they were great! I highly recommend them. The entire family ate them and enjoyed it! Now, in this house, that's really saying something!

I changed the original recipe a bit. Here's what I did:

Homemade Chicken “Things”

2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken breasts

2 cups milk

2 tablespoons vinegar

5 drops Tabasco sauce

3/4 cup complete (just add water) pancake mix
3/4 cup water
1/4 teaspoon garlic salt
1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon black pepper
Oil for frying

1. Trim chicken breasts and cut into desired size nuggets or fingers. I cut mine into 3/4 inch cubes.

2. Soak chicken pieces in milk mixed with vinegar and Tabasco for 3-4 hours.

3. In a large bowl whisk together pancake mix, water, salt & pepper. Add more water to thin if needed. (Note: You want the mix to be a little thinner than you would for making pancakes, but not very much.)

4. Heat oil in a fryer or in a medium-sized pot. Add chicken pieces to the batter and stir to coat completely.

4. When oil is hot, use a fork to transfer chicken from the batter to the oil. Don't put too many pieces in at once or it will lower the oil temperature and they will not cook as well.

5. Cook about 3 - 4 minutes per side, until batter is browned and chicken is completely cooked.

Entertainment Center

I've been going crazy in our house changing things around. It's like a switch went on in my mind, I looked around and said, "I just can't take this!" It's nesting worse than I ever had when I was pregnant, and I'm not pregnant. I just got fed up.

The entertainment center above is a perfect example. It's been a great piece of furniture. My parents gave it to me for my birthday the year we got married. We've used it for ten years. It's really met our needs until lately. The TV has started to go on the fritz, so a flat screen is now imaginable in the future. This entertainment center doesn't fit in our basement, and has been put in a corner where it has caused trouble opening the doors on either side. We really just needed a change.

I finally became motivated enough to get off my duff and find our new option. It's a great piece of furniture at an extremely reasonable price -- and it's not even press-board! It's a wonderful change and we love it!

We love you new 'TV console'.

Pinwheel Progress

I've been working on my quilt this week. I'm finally getting back in to sewing now that school has started. I think it's looking pretty good! I took a Snippets turnover and then cut my own 6" squares and then cut them in half. I've got a bunch of these that I'm going to make into several quilts.

I did notice when putting up this picture that I had put a few orange next to each other. When you look at the quilt straight on, it doesn't seem quite so drastic. I think I'm going to start taking pictures BEFORE I sew the blocks to make sure I have the right balance in the future.

Snippets Pinwheel

I've been working on my Snippets Pinwheel quilt this week. I'm loving how it looks so far. Hopefully my version will end up looking like the one I saw that started my whole adventure: