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!).

Alchemy

I've known about Etsy's Alchemy for a while, but never really checked it out until a couple of days ago. All of a sudden I'm making bids left and right for all kind of things. Mainly it's been graphics or print production stuff but I've bid on fabric-based projects as well. For those of you who don't know, Alchemy is a service where a person places a wanted add for something, with an ideal price and shipping date. It ranges from the very specific (a yard and a half of a particular fabric) to the very general (a present for my mother). Anyone with an Etsy account can bid on the job with a description of what they can or will do, a price, and their own shipping date.

Three of my bids have been accepted, so I've got some real (read: paid) projects to work on. One is a custom Pillow Monster, another is a kimono and obi for a toddler, and the third is two fabric reward charts for kids to keep track of their chores and earn goodies. All of them are going to be fun, but I've already discovered that I should bid high, rather than low. Once I've figured it out, I'll be able to make more of the reward charts, but so far I'm afraid I've spent a terrible amount on supplies because I haven't got all the details worked out. I did pick out some really cute fabric, though. There are a couple of bids that I really hope get accepted because the projects are super fun. Keep your fingers crossed for me. Also, if you've got anything you need made, designed, printed, or whatever, you should think about putting up a request. I'm considering using Alchemy to get a coat tailored.

The weekend is nearly upon us and though I didn't get all of my chores done, I at least opened a bank account and mailed out a pillow that I sold the other day. Plus I put together a design portfolio of sorts on Flickr, with mock-ups of some of my buttons and other design stuff. Still no tags, though. Apparently it's going to require getting a North Carolina driver's license. It's been a while since I had one of those. Maybe my picture will be better this time around.

p.s. I put up a new Often Awesome Army skin on Personas. Check it out.

Bonus

• My bad luck rubbed off onto the School for Girls, apparently, but as a pleasant surprise, I managed to leave Birmingham before half of the house fell off. Nice.

• There's an old metal trash bin in our powder room with a faded illustration/print. Similar ones were all over my grandparents' house, and I think I remember that my grandmother had decoupaged them all sometime before I was alive. I've seen this one a thousand times, but I just realized that the image on it was really cool. It turns out that some clever soul (my grandmother, I guess) also pasted the text that went along with the pic from wherever she found it. It seems it's a piece by this guy Georges de Feure. Probably the dude is way famous and I'm an idiot. No worries, though. I've been loving on some art nouveau for years now, so I'm stoked to know of another artist I like.

• And in other news of random discoveries, one of my quilts was on the the front page of Etsy today. Sweet!