Month: July 2012

Crafting is INDEED a beach, and I have been terribly remiss in my Craft Wars recaps!! I wasn’t going to bother trying to catch up or keep up, but after receiving encouraging comments from two Craft Wars crafters and meeting two others in person at Renegade, well now I feel it’s my duty! Let the Craft Wars Re-cap Marathon BEGIN! Let me re-state that it has been a few weeks since I’ve actually seen this episode, so there will be a lot of paraphrasing fun! The craftestants for Crafting’s A Beach were BlogGirl, CraftMyAssOff, and PowerTools. BlogGirl has … a blog. The fact that she referred to her BRAND really stuck out in my mind. You may recognize the guy in the middle as the one who was like, “IM GONNA CRAFT MY ASS OFF” in the teasers for this show, and that’s something you can’t un-hear. PowerTools mentioned her helper was really handy with…power tools, and that’s the only thing I can remember right now. The 1 hour Pop Craft challenge: Make a bird house out of stuff from a junk drawer. BlogGirl took one look at that drawer and said, “What am I supposed to do with a drawer full of CRAP?” and proceeded to whip off her scarf cuz shit was about to get SERIOUS! CraftMyAssOff worked on LIGHTING his birdhouse. WIN! PowerTools wielding a power tool. I was seeing a LOT of glue gun here. I AM LOOKING AT YOU, BlogGIRL! Unfortunately, whenever Tori goes to speak to the craftestants, I feel like this is pretty useless footage. She doesn’t have the same nuggets of wisdom that Tim Gunn has on Project Runway, or that conversational zazz that Alton Brown has on Top Chef, and then the craftestants always look so hurried that they really can’t hold a decent conversation anyway. She does seem very caring and concerned, but it’s too bad she can’t give them little helpful hints. Now let’s get to the judging. Tori and the judges were very concerned about the fact that the birdhouses needed to be functional, i.e. water proof, sturdy, etc., like you would use these in REALITY. PowerTools was first with her playing card bird house. It also had a cluster of keys underneath for wind chimes. Stephen took issue with a bird house having wind chimes. Jo was very concerned about the playing card shingles and their lack of weather resistance. Ok, I didn’t know that Outdoor Mod Podge existed either. Preach it, Jo! (Jo actually always seems really nice, like you’d want her to be your grandma. I like making her sound super tuff, tho. OUTDOOR MOD PODGE. I BUTTAH MAH WAFFLES WIDDIT, SUCKA.) Next up was CraftMyAssOff with his nod to “mid century modern.” If you use astrotuf, you win in my book. I believe Jo did not think the v-shape of the roof was very practical for the rainy season. I didn’t take a screenshot of further commentary on this bird house because I was […]

  Last night, we went to dinner with my family at Wayfare Tavern to celebrate mine and my brother’s birthdays. His was about a week ago and mine is in about a week. Summer babies! I wore a polka heart shirt dress from F21, pink tights from We Love Colors, NastyGal x Jeffrey Campbell shoes, and my trusty Cicely Margo necklace. There has been a long-standing inside joke (that I don’t know that I am really inside of!) about my brother turning 30 and having a party where everyone wears pink. There’s something about how Asian men aren’t allowed to wear pink shirts until they are 30? I dunno! I went with it and also wrapped his present in hot pink wrapping paper. Looks grown-up, right? The awesome writing on top were hints about the presents. Someone also asked about how I did my hair. Whenever I “do” my hair, it’s a big experiment/accident. I am no hair guru. I just shove clips here and pins there and curl this and that and hope for the best. I started by putting up the top/sides of my hair with those claw clip thingies (watch out, it’s getting technical up in here!). I teased the crown and then shoved the rest of my hair to the side and secured it with another claw clip thingie, like a faux low pony tail (fo-lo, what!). Then I took maybe a third of that pony tail near my face and curled it up into a bun thing and secured it with 3 bobby bins. Then I curled the rest of the pony tail and also my bangs and some wispy pieces near my face. Done! Here’s the remains of my dessert. It was called “Summer Fare,” and it was a fancy funnel cake with red licorice gel, popcorn ice cream, and liquid caramel corn. It sounds kind of nasty, but it tasted really good. Nothing was overly licorice-y or corn-y. Delish! Here’s a shot from my brother’s bday dinner with all his friends where everybody wore pink. This was the night after the first day of Renegade Craft Fair when I had had no sleep. I was basically falling asleep at the table. Doh! At least I opened my eyes for some snaps! At last night’s dinner, my mom said that the one thing she wanted for us was that we love each other, so she was very happy. I think I made a yuck-face at that sentiment because I am not good with mushy stuff, but it was really sweet, and yes, I am cool with my bro. When he was little, I used to want a little sister instead. I used to dress him up as a girl, and we called this character Bumpy. Bumpy liked to wear purple and head scarves. Bumpy did not live long because this disturbed my parents, but my little bro was always a good sport!

In one week, I’ll be turning 36! Pretty weird, right? I’m not a person who makes plans, like 5 year plans or 10 year plans or “Where do I want to be when I’m __ years old?” I kind of just … be. If I’m happy, and the people I’m around are happy, and I’m not hurting anyone or breaking the law, then all is good! (P.s. I finished this tissue box cozy for a little photo shoot in my back yard, and it will be going up on Etsy very soon!)

I thought I would show you a few more photos of the Pocky Paintings. Unfortch, they still aren’t great quality. We didn’t realize that our camera has been set to a crazy high ISO for who knows how long, so everything has been really grainy for a long time, and I didn’t have the knowledge to know why! Thanks to Erik Hansem for solving the mystery! Anyway, onto the pics at Big Umbrella Studios!   When I got to the gallery, the pink painting had already sold. Way cool! Hello, Rilakkuma! Hello, Gloomy Bear! You can’t really tell from these photos, but the blood on his face is a bit metallic and sparkly. Here’s a bit of a side view. I wanted to show you guys the 3-D-ness. The Pocky lettering was really fun, but a little unwieldy. I wanted them to kinda look squished together and chubby, and they kept springing back out all over the place. It would have been a good time to have four hands! As you may or may not know, I often start all my work with rough sketches in photoshop. Sometimes your project doesn’t always pan out the way you thought, but, sometimes things like TIME just get in the way, so you have to adapt. Clearly, I did not end up with as much lettering as I’d wanted, but I still think it turned out ok!                 There was also the issue of how to cleanly render the text ON TOP of the Pocky sticks. I considered beading, altho that probably still would have looked lumpybumpy, but I may still try it later on. I may come up with a few more fantasy flavors to make paintings for the Etsy shop, since both of these sold already. I’ll put some other photos from the gallery – including me eating a big sandwich – under the cut!

    It’s been a while since I’ve been able to give myself a mani! Our internet has been really awful the past few days, so I decided to take a break and get some paint on these nails. A few of you may know that I used to be extremely faithful to Orly’s “Blue Collar” as my go-to candy blue nail polish. But I feel like the formula has changed, and the polish dries too dark now to be my favorite. It has been a long journey to find something to replace it, but that journey is over! Meet Barry M‘s “Turquoise!” In sunlight, the polish is much lighter in the bottle, and I was afraid it would be TOO light, but it’s actually perfect and covers in 2 coats.       I’ve also been wanting to try gluing googly eyes on my nails for a little while, but I’ve never gotten the chance…UNTIL NOW!   I never paid much attention to googly eyes before, but I was surprised by how many different sizes there are available at Michael’s! I decided to go with the 5mm. On Twitter, I asked if I could just super glue these suckers on to my nails, but then I was told about NAIL GLUE. OF COURSE THERE IS NAIL GLUE. I used 2 coats of Barry M Turquoise and then dabbed some nail glue on my nail. The bottle says you’re supposed to glue directly to the nail, so I don’t know how well this will work on top of polish.  Then I carefully placed the googly eyes. You actually have some time to move around and arrange the eyeballs, so don’t freak out too much. Then I busted out some nail art pens to draw the mouth and some polka dots and hearts. The Sally Hansen nail art pens are more spendy than I’d like, but they make drawing on your nails so darn easy! I finished off my other nails with some Deborah Lippmann “Happy Birthday” and this other glitter from an indie nail polish company that I didn’t really end up liking. Pardon my strange Jimmy Dean E.T. fingers and horrible cuticles. I have come to terms with not being a hand model for some time now. Also, I am really the complete opposite of ambidextrous, so the heart on my right hand appears to have a leak on the bottom, plus my polka dots have shadows that I could chalk  up to camera blur but I won’t. If you decide to glue eyes onto your nails, may I suggest making sure that BOTH thumbs get a face, because it’s really fun to watch the googly eyes google when you type on your smart phone. Here’s a short stupid video I made of the googly eyes in action. Happy Friday!  

So heeeeere’s the booth! I’m sorry I only have bad phone pics! I didn’t take a real camera! The idea was to create “Twinkie Chan’s House,” and while we sat at the table, it would look like we were sitting in the couch. Manda sewed the walls out of heavyweight shower curtain liners from Target, and then I outlined the drawings in yellow Sharpie (which the paint didn’t cover up!). I was reminded how sucky of an artist I am, and I couldn’t draw a straight line! I needed Manda to stand back and guide me while I drew, to make sure all the proportions were approximately right. I was like, “HOW DID THE MASTERS DO IT?!?!?” And then she, Ben, and I painted the walls the night before the show at my parents’ house in the driveway. We were painting until like 1 or 2 in the morning. Then I drove home (about a 45 minute drive) to pack up the other booth stuff, take a shower, and then nap for a whole 20 minutes before I had to get up, get dressed, and drive back down to my parents’ house to take apart and pack up the booth because it needed those few hours to completely dry. And then drive back up to the city to get to Fort Mason and set up the whole thing again. The show started at 11am. I don’t think we were done setting up until like 1pm because we had arrived pretty much an hour or two later than we had planned. C’est la vie. I was freaking out because we were late, the paint was peeling off the walls, we brought the wrong Astroturf for the floor covering, it was 80billion degrees in there, and I felt like everything was going wrong that could possibly go wrong! In the end, it turned out ok, but I am sure the sleep dep was not helping! I had not gotten hardly sleep any week for a few days. I am surprised I could form sentences still!   Our booth was pretty much always busy. A LOT of people came through on Saturday, and by the time we were able to drink the Frappucinos that Hairy had brought us, they had returned to a liquid form. I hadn’t had any time to plan out the table displays, so we just sort of winged it. One of the legs on our small table ended up being wonky, and we were afraid that it would fall over the whole time. My usual red checkered table cloths were still in LA from Anime Expo, and I didn’t have time to shop for fabric for new ones, hence, blank white wrinkly table cloths! I did somehow make time to create this odd little holder for the new honey bear coffee cup cozies. Here’s the blog entry about them in case you missed it! So, we have 10 ft by 10 ft for our booths. My house was 10 […]

Don’t miss it! See you there! Booth #179 🙂

Okay, not so random. Remember when I made these extra short cupcake scarves? This is where one of them ended up! I don’t normally make scarves for kiddos, because I like for grown-ups to have the fun, and kiddos get all the good stuff already, but when it’s your cousin’s kiddos, you make exceptions! Ok I’m gonna go print more photos for my booth!

So we are going to debut these Honey Bear Coffee Cup Cozies at Renegade Craft Fair this weekend. He was going to have a red cap, but then he looked too much like Winnie the Pooh, so now we gets a white cap! I was afraid nobody would know what he was supposed to be, so Hairy suggested I make packaging for it to make it more clear. However, I can’t put every cozy in a package, because displaying them in the booth might become kinda weird. So I ended up making one little cardboard stand for show. Hehe. Kinda janky but kinda cute. I am going to see if Kinko’s will laminate it for me cuz Manda jammed up her laminator! I will put this guy next to another cozy on an actual to-go cup.          

SooooOOOOooooo. Here’s the story. While I’m prepping for Renegade Craft Fair, I realize that the berry basket I usually put my strawberry rings in is in L.A. (from Anime Expo). I either need to buy a new berry basket or come up with something different. The berry basket is cool…cuz…you know…berry rings go in the berry basket … but I notice that they don’t always sit perfectly in there and sort of start to pile up on each other. I like the idea of using a regular ring display with the little slots that the rings go in, but they are usually pretty boring. You can find lots of tutorials via Google search for DIYing your own ring display from scratch, but I don’t have a lot of time to spare. Craft fair is in  3 days and I have a million other things to do. So, I decide to buy a regular black velvet ring display from Michael’s, some Martha Stewart green glitter paint (I think green will set off the strawberries nicely), and invoke all the awesomeness of your fancy velvet Elvis paintings. The color I choose is a nice, bright, yellowy springy green called PERIDOT, which, by the way, is my birth stone, and I always thought it was ugly and the worst birthstone ever. This should have been a clue for what’s to come…     HIDEOSITY!!!!! I don’t know. I mean. It’s not horrible, but it’s just not what I had been envisioning in my head. I thought it would be really beautiful and cute and glamorous, but it’s more like, gross, ugly, tacky, and weird. Like the Hulk disco-barfed on a street gutter. At this point, I realize, I can’t stop now. I NEED TO PUT MORE STUFF ON IT. Embrace that tackiness, make it weirder, make it uglier. Enter: green elastic ruffle trim I just happen to have because I love ugly things. You’re probably like, “UH, by the way, it’s still ugly.” I DON’T CARE. For some reason, the ruffle trim saves the whole project for me. I was going to also add a pearl trim and some bows, but, I decide to stop here, while I’m happy with it, and just let the rings stand out. I’m really pleased with how it turned out now. I’m a happy camper. If I were smart, I would have first painted the velvet with a regular green fabric paint and THEN gone over it with the green glitter paint. However, what you’re looking at only took two coats (just one bottle) of glitter paint, so, this paint is pretty good, and now I can go do the other eleventybillion things on my to-do list. *high-fives Martha Stewart*

Yesterday Manda came over to my parents’ house and we spent the day improving the craft fair booth structure and trying to make it more stable. Check out the humongous pipe-cutting tool that Manda is wielding. We were trying to decide whether or not this would be a worthy investment…AND IT WAS. IT’S OUR NEW FAVORITE THING. It makes cutting our pipe so much easier than with a PVC saw. It’s kind of scary, and you could probably cut your hand off, BUT WE LOVE IT. When we were looking at it at Home Depot, this big muscle-y dude walked by and was like, “That’s impressive. That even impresses ME.” SOLD. Also while in Home Depot, I was walking through an aisle and saw some random monitor/screen turn into a camera displaying video of me walking, so then I started jumping and dancing in front of it in case someone was monitoring it, and then I kept walking and noticed an old man staring at me, disturbed. Thanks so much to a friendly stranger on Facebook for  messaging me with ideas for making our structure less wobbly! It’s awesome! We now have 4 days to complete this thing. It seems impossible to me, but we’re going to keep trying!

I have been flying back and forth between my house and my parents’ house and not really planning outfits at all. I went to the J-Pop Explosion art show opening tonight and wanted to put a little more effort into my outfit than tshirt and jeans, but I was in a real rush and had no idea what the heck I was doing. Hence, this: Obviously, there is NO RHYME OR REASON to any of this!!! I don’t know what I was thinking! First I picked the dress. It’s cheery orange with cute carousel horses on it and my beloved peter pan collar, from ModCloth. Then came the shoes, NastyGal x Jeffrey Campbell, which you can’t even see anyway. Then my hair felt very unadorned, so I slapped my YumYums coin-purse/hair clips onto my head. DONE. YIKES!

I am freaking out, guys! If you are in the Bay Area, please remember to visit Renegade Craft Fair July 21-22, 11am -7pm at Fort Mason in San Francisco. We’ll see if I manage to finish everything I hope to finish! EEEEP! In the meantime, here’s a crappy phone pic of the postcards I made for the show. They just arrived today! I was kinda trying to evoke actual postcards that are like, “Greetings from Palm Beach!” I know I need to take more updated photos one day. After Hairy set up his man-cave, my lights and backdrop moved to the garage, and I never really got into the habit of shooting in there. It’s cold!  Anyway, I need to work on that! Here’s the back: If I run out of these discount cards at the show, I’ll start putting them inside the packages I ship out. These are part of the grand scheme I hope to pull off for my craft show booth. Cross your fingers! Hold onto your butts! I can’t wait to show you, if it works!

I’ve been living in a sleepless crochet-haze the last 5 days or so, working on these crochet paintings for the J-Pop Explosion art show at Hairy’s gallery. Here’s the little Q&A I did on their blog. Sorry I didn’t get to blog about Craft Wars yet! Not only was I working on these crochet paintings, but I’m also planning for Renegade Craft fair, and I’m also house-sitting right now! EEP! I’ll post better/more pics of the Pocky paintings after Friday, when the show opens :). I’ll also post my initial sketches and progress pics, and you’ll get to see how things don’t always go as you planned :P. At first I was going to have parts of a 3D Godzilla on the edges of the canvas biting into a a big box of Pocky which would be the canvas itself, but then I decided to just focus on the Pocky instead! Still turned out ok, I think! Actually last night I was freaking out because EVERYTHING WAS GOING WRONG, and I thought I had to deliver the paintings in an hour. I was really sweatin’ it! Luckily, I got one more day to work on it, so I drove back home today from housesitting to get them finished up. I hope to have time to make a few smaller paintings for the fair as well!

Hey gang! I had this idea for my Renegade booth to put product photos in picture frames and sprinkle them throughout the booth (it goes with the general theme). But all the photos I have are mostly of ME, and I don’t want to bombard my booth with MY FACE. I know you some of you guys have sent me photos before, but if you could do it again, so I have them all in one place, that would be awesome. The higher resolution the better, for a better print out. The photos won’t be humongous. I bought some cute 4×6 frames from Target for them. If you don’t want your face in my booth, I totally understand! But if you do, that would be rad!! You can email them to me at twinkie @ twinkiechan.com or leave a link here in a blog comment or my contact form. Thanks, guys!!!!!

Email sent to Manda early in the a.m.: Sorry about all the typos. I think I sent it at like 6 in the morning after crocheting a painting all night. Txt sent to Manda early this evening: So I have this dream idea of what I want my booth for Renegade SF to look like. I had a few options. Buy an already-made set-up and customize it (for more money), or try to build one from scratch (for less money). Manda and I got really ambitious one day and decided to try starting from scratch. At this point, I feel like maybe this was not the best choice…but… we are 2 weeks out from the event, and I think we have to stick with the plan! I am going to buy fabric to make walls tomorrow, so I wanted to try to put up the PVC frame in the backyard and trim everything that needed to be trimmed. On the internet it’s like, “PVC is awesome and you can just cut it with a saw!” I found it really difficult! We are using 1 1/4″ pipe, and after trimming 8 poles, I never want to saw through PVC ever again! I didn’t have a great set up, though. I was on the ground in the yard, sticking the end of the pole over a dirt ditch, sawing with my right hand, holding the pole with my left hand, kneeling on my right knee, using my left foot to step on the pole to stabilize it while I sawed. I wish I had a photo for you guys, but I was by myself! I tried putting the frame together. And realized that 8 feet tall is REALLY REALLY TALL, so I trimmed the vertical poles down to 7 1/2 feet so I could at least reach the top on a step stool. However, I couldn’t figure out how to put the whole thing together alone without having poles fly everywhere. At some point, I tried to roll it over on its side, and all the poles started going every which way, and, as I mentioned above, some of it crashed into the lemon tree. At this point, I decided to stop!!! So I still have no idea how strong or how weak this thing is. I don’t want it to come crashing down on people at Renegade!!! We’ll keep working on it!

I was texting my buddy Alek yesterday (apparently he was in Daiso, and clearly that means you text your Asian friends with pictures of Asian things), and I mentioned I had this blog entry queued up in my Drafts, but I hadn’t hit “publish” yet, because, while it felt good for me to write it,  it also seemed like a RANT that nobody else would give a flying fishfinger about. But that’s sort of what the whole blog entry was about, too….so I decided to push the button! Anyway, it’s Saturday. Most of you are probably outside enjoying the real world! *** In the very early 2000s, I had a deskjob. I was an assistant, and I answered phones all day, took messages, faxed things, wrote letters, and read manuscripts. I’d often be the only person in the office, and I’d listen to my CDs quietly – Kitty Craft, Dressy Bessy, the Gerbils, to set the scene. I was a very GOOD employee. I didn’t surf the net on personal adventures, and I hardly used the computer at all. But I remember Yahoo’ing something for work (we used Yahoo then not Google!) and randomly stumbling across somebody’s Diaryland diary. It was bland, written poorly, and completely inane. I WAS HOOKED! What was this? People sharing their personal lives on the internets? Everyday, boring-ass people nobody would care to read about? You ate chicken today? I FIND THAT VERY INTRIGUING! I was in publishing. I was looking for GOOD writing not CRAP writing, but I was totally intrigued by the REALNESS of blogging. Who was this person? Why were they eating chicken? Would I blog about eating chicken? I signed myself up. My blog had a bright yellow background, plain black Times New Roman text, and no pictures. We didn’t have pictures back then. Blogging was about writing. My best friend at the time had moved away. I thought this blogging thing would be a cool way to K.I.T. with all your pals. You could share a story once and keep it fresh and funny and not have to repeat it over and over to different people. I was an English/Creative Writing in Fiction major, and blogging also seemed like a good way/excuse to exercise the muscles everyday, even if you were writing about the stupidest things. Well, I’ll tell you: NONE of my “IRL” friends read my blog in the beginning. It just became something I did to entertain myself, make myself laugh at my own self, and maybe draw strangers in to laugh with/at me. It was fun to form little blog posses (that word looks really weird right now…did I spell that right??? POSSIES?? POSSEEZ?) and keep up with the adventures of your invisible internet buddies (Carlyn of Canada….WHERE ARE YOU NOW!?) who were probably all 45 year old men. Back then, I was trying to out-me me. I wanted to be the funniest, smartest, wise-crackingest me, the cleverest me. I’d write about a night of drinking on […]

Hey guys! Now that it’s summertime, it’s your last chance to grab a crocheted chain link neckwarmer or heart chainlink sweater from the collab by me and Michael Shirley of Doctor Couture. You’ll have until July 11 to put in an order, and then they will  go bye-bye forever!

Longtime blog readers will remember that that TWO years ago, we did a giveaway for JujuChan Texture Powder Styler when it first launched. Now we’re doin’ another one in case you missed it the first time! If you’ve ever been curious about dry shampoo but never committed to buying it, this is a great chance to try it for free! As you can read in my previous giveaway blog entry, Jules “Juju”Chan is my hair stylist and has been for a bazillion years. I followed her around all over the city from salon to salon. When Texture Powder Styler first came out, I really only wanted it to take the oil out of my bangs, since they got oilier before the rest of my hair. But to be honest, I now use it ALL OVER! This powder/dry shampoo is designed to give your hair texture (hence the name), which is what I CRAVE, given that I have stick-straight, super coarse, FLAT Asian hair which I call “Pantene” hair. So if you want slick, shiny, smooth Pantene hair, this may not be for you. If you want texture  and volume and body – plus getting away with an extra day without shampooing, which is a blessing for those of us who color our hair – then you need to check this out! I use the light/blonde formula in my pink hair. I have tried a few other brands of dry shampoo (not all of them, mind you) since our first giveaway, and so far, this is what I prefer about JujuChan’s: – It’s small and cute! You can carry it in your overnight bag or even your purse. It’s great for traveling. – You get a lot of bang for your buck! The Bumble&Bumble spray-on dry shampoo is, I will say, pretty awesome, but I used up a whole can in no time, and it just wasn’t worth the big price tag. My little bottle of JujuChan lasts a few months, and I use it a LOT. – It doesn’t have “make your hair shiny and flat” stuff in it. I tried some other brand and wondered why my hair wasn’t getting the texture I needed to tease and fluff my hair.  Oh. It had “smoothing” or “silkening” proteins in it. NO THANK YOU! I want rock n roll hair! – It isn’t smelly. It has no scent. Some hair stuff out there SMELLS REAL BAD. – I get to support my friend, a local & independent business lady, talented hair stylist, and overall supercool person! So here are the giveaway deets! Jules is giving away two bottles so we can have two winners! There’s a light/blonde formula and also a darker/brunette formula. If you win and are unsure of which formula is right for you, you can tell me your hair color and texture, and Jules can recommend the right one for you. I’ll be using Rafflecopter again, because it seemed to work best for most people. The giveaway will […]

So I used to work in publishing. When you work in publishing, the joke is that you never actually read real books because you are so busy reading manuscripts. When I left publishing, I thought a new world of reading would open up to me, and I could fall in love with books again. WRONG! Working for yourself means you might have ZERO free time. (I know, I know, “make time!” but what I’m saying is, I don’t.) So the only time I really read books is when I’m getting my hair bleached and colored, but even then, if I have a pressing work deadline, I’m the nerd sitting under the hair-heater with a yarn bag, crocheting away. One of the things my brother wanted last year for Christmas was the Kindle Fire. I was a bit inspired by this request and also decided I wanted a Kindle (albeit Fire-less). So then he gave me an Amazon gift certificate to cover part of a Kindle. Truth be told, I kind of kept forgetting to order my Kindle…..UNTIL NOW. SIX MONTHS LATER. But don’t worry. It’s ordered now. It’s done. I’m getting it. July 10! And now comes the even MORE fun part! Shopping for a Kindle cover! On Etsy, of course. There are cool ones made out of real books, like this: Ooooh, The Giving Tree! Yes please! Are you guys really reading a lot of werewolf smut? My Neighbor Totoro in vinyl: Oh my. “Cute Hamster” indeed! Okay, this embroidered Kindle cover is nothing short of AMAZING. The whole shop is amazing. This Chewbacca one makes me giggle. Ok, I’ve skimmed through about 70 pages of Etsy listings and am a little burnt out! I might end up making my own, but due to having LOTS of projects already, I may still keep hunting around!

Did you guys catch Craft Wars on TLC last week? Since tonight is the 2nd episode, I thought I would show you what the first one was about in case you missed it. In a nutshell: it’s not bad, but it’s not great. The show tries really hard to squeeze drama out of something that is not that dramatic. I am interested in what the crafters end up making, but the editing of the show seems weird to me, like a lot of things that people say sound canned and rehearsed and pre-written, and sometimes too catch-phrase-y and pun-y. I think if you watched the show on mute, you would still enjoy it. The show is hosted by Tori Spelling, who is apparently a long time crafter with her own craft line. I never watched Tori & Dean, so all I know of her is DONNA MARTIN GRADUATES! Truth be told, I don’t keep up with the who’s who of the crafting world and haven’t heard of the judges or their companies (aside from Michaels, obvs), but then again, judges on a lot of cooking shows are not household names to me either, so I don’t hold that against these guys. There are three contestants, and the show is divided into two parts: the Pop Craft challenge, which is like the Quickfire Challenge on Top Chef, and then the Master Craft Challenge. In last week’s episode, the pop craft challenge was making a duffel/sports bag out of sports equipment in one hour. They also have access to a bunch of craft supplies sponsored by Michaels, as well as a construction zone with wood and stuff outside. The Michaels wall had shelves that went way up high to the ceiling, and people had to climb on ladders to reach the stuff they wanted. This seemed very scary and dangerous to me!!! The crafters got to bring a helper, who ended up being all men, two husbands and one dad. A huge point of dramadramz seemed to be HOT GLUE. One lady was making a gym bag with a tennis racket on the bottom for ventilation, and she was hot gluing the racket to her bag, to which Tori seemed extremely concerned, as the judges DO NOT LIKE GLUE STRINGS!!! NO THEY DO NOT. To which the crafter replied: I thought E6000 was the duct tape of the crafting world? Ok, here are the bags. This first one was very colorful and full of balls, plastic toy balls accenting the shoulder strap, and pom pom trim also accenting the shoulder strap. One of the judges commented on this, and I can’t remember exactly what she said, but it was like, “I just don’t want all these BALLS FLYING IN MY FACE!” The big no-no on on her bag seemed to be that she used ballet shoes as pockets (those yellow things on the sides of the bag), and that they were NOT practical because stuff would just fall out of them. You […]

A couple months ago, my brother asked if I’d be interested in seeing part of the U.S. Olympic Gymnastic Trials in San Jose.  I said sure! As it turned out,  I went with my mom, Manda, my sister in law, and her mom, so it was a ladies gymnastics weekend. I am one of those people who love to watch gymnastics in the summer and figure skating in the winter, so it was really neat to be there, watching it all happen! My mom is super funny and will point out which boy gymnasts she thinks are cute or handsome. Unfortunately, none of her cute or handsome favorites made the team! I didn’t really take many photos or videos, as I’m sure you can find that online or on TV. I haven’t been keeping up with gymnastics at all, so this was a great way to get acquainted with the names and the faces and make watching the Olympics more fun! At one point, while we were waiting for them figure out who was going to be on the ladies gymnastics team, the crowd started doing the wave. When you were younger, did you ever dream of being in the Olympics? If so, in what sport? There was a moment in time that I wanted to be on the equestrian team, since I used to ride horses up until I went to college. So that’s definitely one of the reasons why I’m glad that NBC is livestreaming all the events. The equestrian events don’t often get a lot of coverage on regular TV. Longtime blog readers (LJ!) will recall that I was lucky enough for my Taiwanese friend to hook me up with tickets for the 2008 equestrian events in Hong Kong!