Busy Bee

Too terribly busy with made-up work to even take pictures of it all, but here's the recent stuff:

Mini cheesecakes, half swirled with blackberry, the others plain, and...

...lavender earl grey cupcakes with lemon buttercream for Tim and Kaylan's joint birthday party. I made the cupcakes from this recipe. I added a step which was to heat the milk and steep some tea in it before letting it cool and adding it to the batter. It was pretty bergamot-ish before I put it in the batter, but the cupcakes still didn't have enough of the tea flavor for my taste. Next time I'd say more tea in the batter and less lemon in the icing (delish, but totally overpowered the other flavors).

I finished up an order for a toddler-sized kimono recently, too. Babymamma requested pink, which wouldn't have been my first choice, but I think I made it work. The kimono itself is about 23" long, just to give you an idea of the size. Besides the standard obi, I made a pre-tied bow that snaps on over a simple knot. Probably easier than retying a traditional knot/bow every time a diaper needs changing.

Selfishly, though, my favorite project (of this post, anyway) was one for myself that Faith helped me with this weekend. She and her dad built a sweet stand for her laptop a few months ago and I've been coveting it ever since. Luckily for her, it was the wrong size for my laptop. And luckily for me, it was way easy to build. It's totally perfect because it lets air get under the computer, but is also totally comfortable on your lap...don't get me started on commercial stand designs.

The most time consuming thing about making this thing was getting the color the way I wanted it–saturated, but with the grain showing through. It was essentially a matter of patience and possibly a little obsessive compulsion. I used watered down interior latex paint at about a 4:1 paint-to-water ratio, and painted on with a large artists' brush. After a minute or two I used a combo of dry and damp paper towels to wipe off excess paint and even out the coat. Once it's dry, you just polyurithane, sand, and repeat. The very least step was to glue the black foamy, rubbery, I-don't-know-what strips to the top of the riser pieces and it was donedonedone. I'm a little infatuated with it, I have to admit. It turned out exactly perfect (look at that yellow!).