photo site

last week i signed up for an account on flikr: www.flikr.com/photos/clearlytangled. i'll be posting more photos there of products that i am currently making available locally (and by custom order on etsy).

holiday preview

i start getting antsy sometime during september, always a little excited about what is soon to come: october. I love autumn. nevermind the fact that houston doesn’t really have a fall. i am not a big fan of halloween, but it marks the beginning of the holiday season. after living abroad for a couple years, i realized how much i enjoy the kitschy american commercialism of the fall/winter holidays. i thoroughly enjoy all the tacky store décor, along with all the useless seasonal goods, even though i rarely, if ever, purchase them. we have had a few fleeting moments of cool weather this past month (meaning, under 80F), and every time it has filled me with joy. this time of year always inspires me to bake all kinds of pumpkin based goodies, bust out the hats and scarves (not that I need them), and buy new winter shoes (once again, not that i need them). i also begin daydreaming about christmas. christmas trees. christmas treats. christmas music. christmas gifts.

to kick off the season, i decided to get a somewhat early start on my holiday cards for etsy, so, here is a preview of this year’s christmas cards. i will be posting them in my shop sometime this month or early next- i haven’t quite decided… thoughts? anyone?

featured on the front page

the best kind of surprises are the unexpected ones. after i returned from work today, i checked my etsy shop and noticed some unusual activity. i realized that i had gained 17 new store hearts, 31 new item hearts, and one more sale. oh, and not to mention, i had over a hundred new views from out of nowhere.
i did some research, and apparently i was featured this afternoon on the front page of etsy! my very first etsy front page feature! thanks to craftcult for keeping track of these things. see my flatware pouch? bottom row, middle.

yay.

faux quilted baby blanket

i wrote this a while ago, planning on posting it after my friend received her blanket just in case she checked my blog. i think she must have received the gift by now, but i'm not sure, and i can't wait any longer!! so i hope i don't ruin the surprise for her by posting it.
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babies. babies everywhere. in the past two years, i know at least eight couples who have had babies. five more are currently expecting. clearly i need to be avoiding whatever water they are drinking.

the nice thing about babies is they use tiny things. and tiny things are very cute. a couple months ago, i ambitiously decided to make my expecting friend a "quilted" baby blanket. had i ever made a baby blanket before? no. do i know anything about using batting and quilting? no.

so i googled. i looked at a lot of baby blankets. i read various experiences. and this is a tutorial i found: http://icraftblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/minky-blanket-tutorial.html afterall, why reinvent the wheel?

i discovered what minky fabric is. it's a very interesting type of fabric. first of all it is very soft. you immediately want to jump into bed with it. sometimes it comes with these little raised dots that you can push in, and then back out. very enjoyable. also it is as slippery as slippery can be. in other words, a real giant pain to sew.

making the baby blanket is pretty straightforward, as you can see from the tutorial above.
you just need two pieces of fabric- one minky fabric, one patterned fabric, and to faux quilt, quilt batting. i used alexander henry's apples and pears fabric and light green minky. i don't know what gender my friend's baby is going to be, so i thought a blanket with blues, pinks, yellows AND greens was a safe bet. i chose to make the blanket 35" by 35", so all my pieces were 36"X36". the tricky part for me was that i wanted to add some thickness to the blanket. google wasn't very helpful in this matter, so i devised my own faux quilting method.


i designed a little pattern of squares (see below). then i drew the lines onto my top fabric with my trusty dritz fabric pen, yard long ruler, and my right angle ruler. i positioned the batting under it, pinned it all together and sewed. voila. faux quilting.


then i pinned down the minky fabric, face down on top of the faux quilted piece. i used a lot of pins. some of them stuck me. i sewed the pieces together, leaving a gap on one side.. oh maybe 6 inches? unlike the tutorial, i didn't follow the edge of the cotton fabric because the batting was in the way and i feared the edge would be deceptively straight or crooked. the minky wasn't exactly perfect either, but it was a tolerable alternative. after i finished sewing around the edges, i flipped it inside out, pressed the seams a bit, and top stitched around (crookedly. i apologize to my friend. i blame the slippery minky!!)


so to review the steps:

1. cut top fabric, minky fabric, and batting 36" X 36"
2. draw faux quilting pattern on top fabric
3. faux quilt the top fabric and batting together
4. sew around the edges of the new faux quilted piece and the minky piece with their top sides facing together, leaving a gap
5. turn blanket inside out
6. top stitch all the way around (making sure to tuck in that seam where the gap is)
7. wash your blanket



there you have it. faux quilted baby blanket. soft. fluffy. and living in finland now.

mint-filled brownie cupcakes

my friend's birthday was last week and i wanted to surprise him with something delicious. i wanted something that would be somewhat durable in the texas heat, in case he wasn't home, so i could just drop it off on the door step. who doesn't like to come home to a bundle of treats?

i was pretty certain that i wanted to go with cupcakes. the problem with most cupcakes is that they have icing, which would not hold up in 100+ F degrees. naturally, i went to my martha stewart cupcake cookbook (where else?!) and found an interesting recipe for mint filled brownie cupcakes. i had no idea if my friend likes mint, but i took the risk and went with it anyway!
the best part of this recipe is that it can all be done with one bowl! if you don't have the book, you can find the recipe here.

the ingredients (note the special, genius, yet simple filling):

making the brownies:
final product:

taste test: the husband loved it. i loved it.

i bought some pretty boxes from michaels (also martha brand) for packaging and carted them on over to my friend's house the next day. he was pretty surprised. and pleased. i think. he also claimed to love the brownies, so i'll consider this recipe a success.

gifts and new products

i've been busy...

gifts for friends:

more badge id obsession:

i LOVE making these fabric covered button items. it's so satisfying.

i haven't posted any badge ids in my shop yet, and i'm not 100% sure i will. i've already sold a few badge ids and key fobs kind of by accident. i will most definitely sell all three of these at the craft fair i am participating in coming up in december. well. almost most definitely.

chilled avocado soup + honeydew and cream ice pops with pistachios

sometimes i go through spurts where i enthusiastically try several new recipes a week for weeks on end. this has not been the case for the past month or so- i’ve been on a “let’s eat cereal for dinner” or “let’s go out” kick lately.

however, last week i spotted a couple interesting recipes in my martha stewart living magazine- chilled avocado soup + honeydew and cream ice pops with pistachios. this weekend, the husband and i decided to test both out.

we started with the chilled avocado soup. the ingredients were simple enough- half an avocado, 1 cucumber (peeled, seeded, diced), ½ cup buttermilk, 1 small garlic clove 1 tb lemon juice, salt, pepper, plus water for thinning if necessary. all we had to do was whirl all of it in a blender and then chill for an hour or so.

unfortunately, the avocado was a little raw. i had put it in the fridge earlier in the week and completely forgot about it. however, my brilliant coworker, who apparently knows everything there is to know about avocados, gave me a tip to put my avocado in a paper bag (and since i don’t have any paper bags at home, to wrap it in newspaper), and stick it in the oven (with the oven off). apparently this method works best if you leave it in there for at least 8 hours, but I only had about 2… and i really do think it was slightly softer when i pulled it out. i wrapped the avocado in a page of the sunday comics :).

taste test:

pretty good- a little tart. we had doubled the recipe so we had plenty of soup leftover for saturday. fairly filling and the flavors were more involved on the second day. i bet it would have been even better if the avocado was actually ripe.

saturday we made the ice pops. the recipe can be found here.

we didn’t have any ice pop molds, so we used silicone cupcake holders and ice cube trays.

various prep stages: chopped pistachios, honeydew before pureeing, honeydew after pureeing + other ingredients (looking remarkably like the avocado soup):

filling the molds:

finished mini popsicles (ignore the crooked toothpicks):

our thoughts on the ice pops? me: DELICIOUS. husband: pretty good