happy birthday ryan!

it was a good thing that i had a long weekend this week because it was a crazy craftapalooza!! why? because 2 little boys celebrate birthdays this week! but before we start, here's a cute pic of bunks sunning himself and enjoying the temporary lack of a dining room table.

now ryan is my fav 13 year old. he's the hilarious older son of lan and it was his bday yesterday! when i asked ryan what he likes to do in his free time, the only answer i could get out of him was that he liked to play with his nerf dart gun. go figure. however, ryan is not all that aggressive, so i figured i'd help amp that up with some nerf dart gun jerseys to duke it out with his friends.

i printed these with the same technique as the zebra shirt except this time i did both sides of the shirt and used a slightly different kind of paint: fabric paint with a velveteen finish. i'll admit, it was only velveteen because i didn't notice the finish part of the label and was only aiming for black. i would not recommend velveteen finish because afterwards you have to fluff the paint with an iron. absolute nonsense in my opinion. i think ryan could care less if his shirt was velveteen or not. i expect dirt and grass stains on these jerseys!!! the 1st shirt has his last name with a 1 on the back. ryan happens to be extra short and skinny (i wasn't kidding when i said i only like tiny people, hehe). his mom is always trying to fatten him up (yeah asian moms!!!) and hinted to me that his favorite dessert is pound cake. plain pound cake. because he likes everything plain. 2 sticks of butter and 4 eggs later, we get this beauty of a dessert: come back in 2 days to see the "team long" jerseys (long is ryan's little brother and his bday is on the 15th!)!!!

heartbreak and red velvet cake

what do i do when my heart is broken? i bake a cake.

i'd been searching the city high and low to find buttermilk because the giant near me stopped selling it a month ago. why would you ever stop selling buttermilk??? how are your customers supposed to make red velvet cake? whole foods stocked it, but of course it cost twice as much as it would at a normal grocery store. but alas, none of this matters when you're sad.

so cake was baked this saturday. it's a red velvet cake without the red, because honestly what's the point of adding red food coloring? when the cake came out, it was pretty moist. unfortunately i never felt up to making the cream cheese frosting (with raspberry flavoring to go with the chocolate flavor of the cake) until monday, so the cake ended up being a little dry. as you can see, i'm not that great at frosting cakes. the frosting was tasty, but looked like mush. i sprinkled a little bit of coconut on top.

tasty, but i suppose its flawed state reflects my current mood

twinkle by wenlan

is one of the cutest clothing lines out there. the designer is wenlan chia and she is really into intricate details... my fav! so naturally, when i saw that she came out with a book called twinkle sews, with 25 sewing patterns included, my heart stopped. actually, no. i had heart palpitations. major. heart. palp. i. ta. tions. add that to my christmas wishlist! it's even on sale at amazon.com! hint. hint. hint hint.

she also has numerous knitting books. but we all know how i feel about knitting. sigh

k2 vs k2tog

um, didn't realize there was a difference between them. sigh. off to restart my cardi knitting project again for the 5th time!

or are we at 6 x's already?

why is your german chocolate cake so pale?

is the question i keep getting asked since the posting an hour ago. i didn't use buttermilk because giant stopped selling buttermilk (why would they ever do that?!?!??!?!), but thankfully "joy of cooking" recommended sour cream as an appropriate alternative. and appropriate it sure was, as the cake came out super moist!

so to answer the question, it was the sour cream that made it so pale

german chocolate cake!

last weekend, while working on a new embellished tshirt, i got frustrated and took a nap instead. what did i dream of? german chocolate cake! so this past weekend, i put my dream to work after the soccer game (that we won!!).

to this day, i still have no egg beater, so when the recipe calls for beating the egg whites on high, i just beat a little faster. when it asks for beating on low speed, i still beat a little faster because let's face it: my high speed beating is not as fast as an egg beater's high speed beating. sigh. instead of doing 3 tiers, i baked the cake in a new bundt pan that i wanted to test.

then off i went with 3/4 of the bundt cake to the usual sunday potluck dinner. only problem: my camera died. no worries, i thought. i'll just take a pic of the 6 leftover cupcakes with the coconut and nut icing on top. monday came along and of course i had to bring 3 cupcakes to lan, liane, and my boss. tuesday came along and of course i had to bring 2 cupcakes to my co-coaches at field hockey. tuesday night rolled along and andrew and i had finished that 3/4 piece of the bundt cake. so late last night, before diving into the last and final cupcake, i snapped a picture. i'll admit, i did a pretty terrible job frosting it. i was more concerned with eating it than its appearance. see, i'm not shallow! this icing is 100% deliciousness

tissue posy tee and debut of the duckie shirt

the recent jcrew catalog had amazing embellished tees. this particular one looked so simple and so amazing and jcrew has the nerve to charge $39.50!!! we weren't afraid though, because it looked incredibly easy to make. so, clara and i had our challenge ahead of us. off we went to h&m, where clara scored a very similar white v-neck tee for $5.95! i was less lucky. nothing fit. but no worries because i have a closet full of clothes where i found a simple black tee (that was super cropped because of poor laundering, but we could work around that...). we bunched really broad grosgrain ribbon as the petals of the flowers and i used a big jewel button as the center while clara went more artsy and exactly replicated the jcrew one by sewing down squares of the narrower satin ribbon. then we made stems with the satin ribbon, making sure to bunch the ribbon every few steps so that it would have more texture. i made one of my stems go diagonally across the shirt because i preferred the pattern to take over more of the shirt than just one side. and then we twisted small strips of the satin ribbon to make the leaf and voila! so so so easy! how did i deal with the fact that my shirt was super short due to frequent use of the dryer? i paired the shirt with a high waist pencil skirt and my fantastic suede fuschia belt from portland! i actually wore this as an outfit today. hehe.here's the one clara made. hers looks just like the jcrew one! sorry for the blurriness. i had to use my blackberry's camera because i didn't have my regular one on hand.
and all day yesterday andrew sported the duckie shirt for the 2nd time! (1st time was for my bday dinner.) i got him the hat ages ago from one of my fav stores in dc: propper topper!

zebra t-shirt!!

i absolutely love the jcrew crewcuts girl's zebra graphic tee. however, the zebra could be a little smaller and i didn't dig the $22.50 price tag. so naturally, i made one myself. i found some freezer paper stenciling tutorials online, traced a zebra onto the paper side of some freezer paper, cut it out on my new self-healing (!!!!) cutting mat, and ironed the negative onto an old tshirt. with some fantastic metallic purple paint, i painted in the negative of the stencil, waited all of 2 hrs (i was supposed to wait 24, but i got impatient), and then peeled off the freezer paper. amazing, no? the right eye is a little freaky as it has no pupil. originally i had a small dot, but i think it was too small and just in the wrong spot. since i can't change this, i just filled it in instead. i still have to let the paint sit for the rest of the 24 hrs and heat set the paint with a pressing cloth and iron, but in the meanwhile i figured i'd show off the goods!

my pimp coaching jersey

so i'm coaching field hockey this season. it's so much fun, but the coaching jersey i got was a men's small! it almost went to my knees and the sleeves went half way to my wrists. there is only one word to describe my emotional state: drowning.

i took matters into my own hands and shortened the shoulders, the sleeves, and the torso. the shirt i got didn't say field hockey on it (we ran out), so i beaded that on in white 10° czech glass seed beads. under the red is the name of the school, which already came embroidered on the shirt. i sneakily scratched it out so you won't know where i work! (actually you all pretty much know where that is.)the back was rather plain. so, i traced crossed field hockey sticks on white jersey cloth (ok i borrowed one of andrew's white undershirts) and stitched gold 10° czech glass seed beads down the middle. and ditto for the ball. even if the girls do sprint slower than anyone i've ever seen, we must win since their coach has the most piiiiiiiimp jersey! ok off to bed!

happy birthday to mommy and me!

last monday was my bday and last friday was mommy's bday. andrew took me out to eat the sunday before and monday evening. yes, i'm so special that we have to celebrate me twice! we celebrated mommy's bday on saturday in pittsburgh with the jimster. i tried my bestest to find her the perfect bday gift but failed miserably (i hate gift-giving unless i can find the perfect gift, sigh). however, mommy is a pie-lover and since peaches are in season, i decided to make her a fresh peach pie (non-custard type, since she dislikes custardy things). it was rather tasty, despite the slightly singed crust.

here's jimster and mom at her bday lunch!! it's a rather special sighting of the jimster, since he's rather elusive...

and here i am in my anthropologie bday necklace from andrew!!! yay andrew!!! (i'm wearing my glasses, which is not so cute, so i didn't want to ruin the photo of the necklace with my face!)

happy bday to mommy and me, happy bday to mommy and me, happy bday to mommy and meeeeeeee, happy bday to mommy and me!

bhutan and a new clock, all in a day's work

2 years ago, i led 7 high school students from the school at which i taught on a 15 day excursion of the kingdom of bhutan. where's bhutan, you ask? oh, in the himalayas! i was the only chaperone from the school and we met up with a tour guide in paro, a "major" city. he led us traipsing through the mountains. it was truly beautiful. everything was so clean and pure and the scenery was so out of this world. everything was handmade including handwoven cloth, which were in stunning bold colors with very geometric patterns. i bought a kira, a bhutanese women's skirt (think thick cotton woven into a sarong), which was not cheap, and hoped that one day, my purchase would come to use. below is an example of kiras on wikipedia.org:
also 2 years ago, andrew and i had just begun our fledgling relationship. he went around telling everyone that he had just started dating this girl, who then disappeared to bhutan for 2 weeks, and he wasn't sure where we stood. hahahaha. luckily for andrew, i decided to keep him around because he solved my kira problem unawares! you see, as a typical guy, andrew lacks a cool comforter. cool as in chic, that is. in fact, his comforter was pretty ragged. it needed a cover. fast.

seeing as the kira i chose was of a fairly masculine print, i decided to sew the kira down the middle of a solid-colored duvet for andrew so that the duvet would kind of frame the kira in a way. i chose a gold damask striped duvet (i mean who wouldn't want something framed in gold?) and started to hand-sew the kira to the duvet like a fool. i say fool because it took forever: i sewed down every 5th white skinny stripe with white thread and then around the top and bottom with black thread. now i'm only 5 feet tall, and this duvet was about as long as i am tall, so it was very, very tedious. i removed the side ties and cut them into short strips, which i then sewed to the shams to decorate the edge. i guess he knew where we stood after he got his new duvet and shams... we now keep this in the bright green guest bedroom, home to the long mirror with the reeds.

now to explain why clara and i were in capitol hill last weekend, where we spotted the stunning yellow anthro necklace (btw, a little birdie, named andrew, told me that i am getting that necklace for my bday!!! wheee!!! little birdie stinks at keeping secrets....). this march, when andrew and i were checking out the flea and craft markets at capitol hill, we stumbled upon this really hip and modern home decorating store, called homebody, that had pricy, yet reasonable, items over all of which i drooled. (now you guys think i drool alot! oops.) in the store, i found the most amazing wall clock that i envisioned would look perfect above the future breakfast counter/hole that my dad was planning on cutting into the wall. however, since the hole was not yet cut, i didn't want to get ahead of myself. so i waited. patiently. very patiently. well, now that the hole is cut and the wall painted, i sprang for the chance to purchase the beloved clock. and here it is in its rightful home!!! each ribbon of stainless steel is an hour. isn't it clever? and the red hands match the red utensil jar on the opposite counter!whew, that's quite a bit of posting for one day. all in a day's work, right bunks?

oh the humanity!

so i've been on the hunt for a gf for bunks. no, he can't mate. but, he gets lonely sometimes and likes to chase things or be chased (he's way too fast for me!!). so i think i found the perfect mates for him today on petfinder.com!

bunkins, meet sasha and malia!! hahaha that's right, someone cruelly named them after the president's daughters. oh dear, some people...

duckies, cooking, and baking

don't worry. i didn't cook or bake any duckies. but i did make a ducky shirt for andrew with cloth from knittin' kitten, the thrift crafting store in portland!

i dismantled one of andrew's old, stained shirts (no shocker) and used it as a pattern for tracing on the ducky cloth, but keeping in mind that the old shirt was too long and too narrow at the chest. i underestimated how much cloth was needed to make the shirt (sarah's only took half a yard, so i figured a yard would do for andrew's) and thus had to rely on this navy linen cloth of which i had bundles at home. for the bottom hem, i trimmed with bias tape that i made (after googling how to make my own). bias tape is also used to trim quilts! hmmm... next project? note: i call this a ducky shirt because those little dots are mini wood ducks! see the 4th pic of this postlast night was very productive because after i finished the shirt, i decided to bake these local peaches that andrew picked up while on the way home from fishing in rural virginia. they were tasty but starting to go, so i had to come up with a quick solution! to the joy of cooking i ran! since i had never made a custard, i opted for "open faced peach custard pie." it was so easy to make! before heading into the oven:

i made dinner while i was waiting for the pie to bake (took an hour and a half total!). pita bread with spicy black bean dip, asiago cheese, and fried eggs. i'm not much of a cook, but it was tasty.

and finally, the pie was done! it was so good! the custard was sweet and the peaches were soft and a little tart. hurray for summer fruit!

the most stunning necklace ever

my friend clara and i were having brunch after spending the morning and afternoon at eastern market, a huge flea market/craft fair that is held every weekend in the capitol hill area of dc, and we saw a woman wearing this "stormy sea necklace" from anthro: we drooled. we were so distracted to the point where we kept staring at the poor woman and i think we weirded her out. she wore a white dress and a white cardigan with it so the yellow really popped. the yellow was a little deeper, more goldenrod-ish. it only costs 48 bones. should i splurge or should i attempt to make it? i think the beads, especially the big gemstone ones, will cost quite a bit at craft stores, especially if i want ones that don't look cheap. hmmm. my bday is next monday. maybe andrew will miraculously read this blog and get it for me for my bday. keep your fingers crossed because mine certainly will be!

happy birthday bunks!

yesterday was the 2nd birthday of dr. bunkins. yes, we picked the day arbitrarily, although i was told that bunks was 6 months old when i got him (so that would make his bday in july, but i like aug 10 better). since we didn't celebrate his 1st bday (oops i think i forgot), we had to do his 2nd bday in style!

i started the day off by making carrot cake cupcakes from scratch with cream cheese frosting (only the best for the bunks). naturally, a little carrot garnish was necessary. after a quick jog and some field hockey practice with my friend sonija (i'm coaching field hockey at school this fall season!!), she was put in charge of creating the carrot juice, blood orange italian soda, and gin concoction! we used gin because that's all we had, hehe. it was actually quite tasty! for dinner, the humans had udon noodle soup with peas, beef balls, dumplings, and yu choy (chinese kale) as the entree and baked spaghetti squash stuffed with tomato sauce and cheese as a side dish (andrew's creation). we went for a diverse meal, since my mini rex bunny is of a diverse background. then it was time for the bday bunny's dessert, since he was losing his patience waiting for us to finish dinner. andrew made quite the concoction for him: pellet-stuffed raspberry with 3 blueberries and carrot juice (pure with nothing added!). after the birthday song, bunks dove in. no attention to manners, whatsoever. at the end, bunks licked his bowl clean. sonija and bernardo witnessing the action: finally, we helped ourselves to the carrot cake cupcakes, each with a candle in it to celebrate the bday bunny. note to self: do not hold bunnies near open flame. he was not a fan and scrambled to free himself from my clutches. muhahahappy birthday, bunkies!

taking the shirt out on the town!

sarah debuted her bday shirt!!! here she is with her friend mike out in boston. ain't she a beaut?!?!

a baby bunkins

this was bunks when he was first adopted, at 6 months old. he was so short! we rescued him at the montgomery county humane society rescue shelter. his previous owner was a little boy who had to move to brazil and could not take the bunks with him. in his past life, bunks was known as stanley. he was so shy back then. and this next photo was from when we moved into the condo, a month after he was adopted. he looks so timid!!! and now, now he's just a devil bunny.

great minds think alike!

for lan's birthday, liane bought lan a teal version of the anthropologie grape clusters scarf that i used as my model in creating my navy silk one (except her scarf had grapes that were smaller and further apart)!!! either we both know lan well, or we're fantastic and on the same wavelength!

and the decision is...

to not reupholster the leopard print scalloped chair!! oh and andrew loved it. so for what project should i use the blue velvet? hmmm...