03 July, 2009

Fish Star Book

I recently did a workshop with Melaine Terasaki at the North Suburban NeedlesArts Guild Summer Seminar. We made star books. I spotted the paper above for the cover and how could I not use it! My boys are big into fishing! So, I printed out a number of pictures of the kids & Bill with fish and added them to this book.




I even managed to a picture of the Blue Marlin Bill had caught some time ago. Here you can see clearly the picture that I printed onto cardstock to use as the background image. It was a picture I had taken of a pond that had hundreds of Koy fish in them. When you threw food in, they would swarm.



This is what the book looks like when you open it & tie the covers back. This is where it gets it's name of Star Book.

01 July, 2009

Taste of Chicago

Yesterday Bill and myself went to the Taste of Chicago. This was the first time EVER that I had been. It is something that I've been wanting to do for a long time but we just never seemed to be able to get there.

It was an overcast day which actually worked out well as it was also cooler than it had been. So much cooler that I had to wear a cardigan!

Before we left, we had picked up a map so there were two things we wanted to try: Bill wanted to try the corn and I wanted to try something called Pork filled Banana Dumpling.



Here is Bill eating his corn. It wasn't too bad.

For my Pork Filled Banana dumpling (which I'm trying to eat here) I was actually a bit disappointed. Maybe I was thinking more of a Chinese dumpling. It wasn't too bad but it didn't really seem to have much taste.

Here is a close up picture of it.



We walked around trying all sorts of different things. New this year is what they call "Taste". For between 3-4 tickets, you can get a small version of one of the items that the stall offers. Where we could, we did get this. It allowed us to eat more things than we would have otherwise eaten. Actually, from what I could see, it was a big hit as most people were getting the Taste version. Unfortunately the stalls didn't have all of their items in a taste portion, otherwise we would have stuck to that size.

We had a great day. I'm glad we did it.

Here are some pictures of some of the other items we ate:
Potato pancakes with apple sauce
Pulled Pork Sandwich
Sweet Potato Hashbrowns
Funnel Cake (this was not as good as I would have hoped for as it was a bit tough. While we were sitting on the curb eating it we figured out why, in the back of the stall they had boxes of these that were frozen. They were not making these fresh but instead heating up pre-made funnel cakes. Funnel Cakes are ALWAYS best when made fresh.Here is a picture of Bill taking a picture of the food for me. I was making such a mess of my eating that he took the camera away from me :)