Category: Blog

So this is what I wore on my bday! Minus the Koala Hat. I made that for Esther since I didn’t see her on her birthday! It matches her Koala Scarf! Out fit run down: Dress by Dainty June Miss Pandy Necklace by KidPirate Leggings: F21 Shoes: Stonebridge (bought in Toronto) I also made a present for Elysse. She had always loved the little radish scarves, and she also commented at the Renegade Fair about how neat neckwarmers were for people who rode bikes (and didn’t want to deal with the long flappy ends of a scarf). So I put two and two together and whipped up this! Finally, here is a pic of my fabooo bday cake made by Debbie Does Cakes!. It was super amazing and a huge surprise that Hairy and Manda concocted!!!! It’s a cake modeled after my Layer Cake Tissue Cozy….so it’s a real cake that’s supposed to look like a fake cake. It’s awesome. Apparently, at Aziza, there is no shortage of sparklers to put on bday desserts!! The food was ridiculously good at Aziza. There was SOOOO much of it, too. We got a fixed 4-course menu for over 8 people, and we were bursting at the seams….and there was SO much variety!! So cray-cray!! I started to take pics of the food, and then I sort of got lazy and forgot. It was really good, though. Big thumbs up! Plus, the cocktails were yummy. I got a nectarine something or other with prosecco and it was delish. We did hop over to 1984 for a second. It was already almost 1am when Hairy and I arrived, but it was a nice hour of people-watching. My favorite bartender bought me a bday drink, so that was nice, too. All in all, excellent bday!!!!! Wait till I show you the DVDs I got. They were all kind of a joke, but I am dubbing them my Self Improvement Dvds…including something by Deepak Chopra. I plan to watch them all (even guitar lessons by Esteban) and do a review for each. Good Friends & Good Food,

Yup. Went to the DMV last week….two weeks ago…? to renew my drivers license. I have been renewing by mail for years. This is the first time since I was 18 that I’ve had to go in and get a new photo. Funny! I had like 3 hrs of sleep the night before, and I can’t believe they didn’t ask me to take my glasses off? So weird. Anyway, thought you’d enjoy the two photos next to each other. The top photo is totally from 1994. I barely had email then. HAHAHAHAH. A/S/L?!??!?! 18/F/CA,

Hairy and I went to see this the other night at the Metreon after eating chili dogs. We were going to see Bruno, but Hairy seemed to insist that I thought I wanted to see 500 Days of Summer more (not necessarily true, but, whatever, I’d see either one.) I don’t think that Zoey Deschanel is a great actress at all, but she is my tv girlfriend, so I must see her movies. I was prepared to dislike Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but, as it turned out, he was not as annoying as I thought he would be. All in all, I enjoyed the movie and thought it was a nice quirky little flick about a relationship. It’s not super cheezy or sappy, so don’t go into it expecting such! I give it two thumbs up for wardrobe, both his and hers. Also, after the movie, I wanted to take a picture on the coin-op train. (It did not turn out being a great picture. I had no idea I was walking around with such flat hair.) Then the security guard yelled at us and said it was “closed.” If it were “closed,” you probably should’ve “closed” it off. I don’t know. That seems….logical?

Check out Shrinkle’s latest blog entry for more pics of my booth. She kept making me stand by the fridge and pose with it. She’s cruel. p.s. check out the lady behind us. Hahahhahah!

Yesterday, I got an email to help a friend of a friend get an emergency birthday present to somebody, including gift wrap! I didn’t have much time, so I used what I had around the house: banana wrapping paper, handspun yarn, and pastry weepuls! Also, I wore my early bday presents from my bro and his lady. Super cool jelly bean earrings I once featured in my Round Up: by Roscata on Etsy Little vintage teal dress from Shrinkle‘s vintage finds. Raindrop bow leggings by Nicole Lindner on Etsy which I bought a little bit ago….with a matching dress. Wait’ll you see that! I know. The belt wasn’t really working. But I seem to not have a lot of belts in my closet. Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose. It was a cheap belt that came with some other dress. It ended up popping open at the vet’s office while I was sitting on a bench, waiting for Bibi and Bunny to come out, so I decided I had to ditch it. Exploding out of your belt in public = not a fav. FYI, Bibi and Bunny both tested negative for heartworm, and also Bibi is now SIXTY FOUR POUNDS!! SHE IS HUUUUUUUGE!! We knew she was huge, but we didn’t have any idea she had gained over 10 lbs since January. Holy cripes. We already cut down her food, but now we need to more. If she is still huge, the vet will test her thyroid levels. In laptop news: it is back in the Apple hospital. Something about the logic board being messed up? I dunno. Whatevs. Just make it work!

I was going to make these for the Renegade Craft Fair for my table, but I totally ran out of time. Instead, I made them for the joint bday bbq my brother and I had at my folks’ house on Saturday. They look REALLY cute, but I would say that eating them was not the greatest. The ice cream cones end up kind of soggy/stale from being baked and having something liquidy in them! In other news, Manda got all her hair chopped off and then colored! She is lucky she has the natural wave/curl which makes her bob look so cute (it’s less curly in these pictures). I have to use a curling iron every morning! We also watched Hairy Potter on Friday night. I don’t read the books because it’s very difficult for me to suspend my disbelief while reading. Fantasy/sci-fi really doesn’t work for me in print. But I have seen all the movies. It just seems like pop cultural homework! Why is Draco aging so quickly!?!? We picked my laptop up from the Apple store on Sunday, and it worked again for like an hour, and then all of a sudden, it demanded to be restarted, and then wouldn’t start up again. BUMMER. So we are taking it back today. What a burn!!! No bbq video montage! Today I continue to pack orders and ship, but this week, my goal is to finish a very cool project for someone else’s book. Fun!

Thanks to everyone who bought something!! I think this is the most packages I’ve prepped in two days!! I still have to go buy boxes to package up the tissue box cozies. I am going to need to make a few trips in and out of the post office!!! I also have a LOT of international orders, which is always exciting. This could be the first time I’m shipping to Belgium? I can’t really remember. Anyway, thanks so much for your support. It really means a lot to me. I tried to take a pic of myself in front of the packages but I kinda failed…. In other news, Hairy and I went to Target the other night to buy toilet paper, and I came home with these: I have a really hard time taking pills. I’m also a tiny bit on the Vitamin B anemic side, and I do have a great B12 chewable supplement, but I’ve always been looking for a multivitamin. These don’t taste bad at all. You need to take one twice a day. It doesn’t have iron or calcium, but I take an extra calcium supplement anyway (dark chocolate Adora…it’s good!). It has decent B’s and D’s, so for now, this is my multivitamin of choice! Gummies…for adults! Here’s me failing to take a pic with Bunny: Aaaaand here’s me failing to take a pic with Bibi: Here’s some gingerbread cookie brooches I worked on tonight for the winner of my giveaway at LovelyLittleDeer’s blog (she has a new cute giveaway right now!). Friday is all about post office trips, Office Depot trips, and simultaneously tackling some outlining of my book, some really old special order commissions, and planning for new items in the shop! Also, my bestie is driving up and we’re all gonna go see Harry Potter! (oh my gosh, I just typed Hairy Potter….) xoxo

Hey gang, Finally, I got the craft-fair leftovers up on Etsy!! A lot of stuff has already sold even before I got the chance to announce it! I am continuing my lowered craft-fair prices for ONE WEEK only! That means, next Wednesday, all pricing will return to normal. Most of the crocheted items are up to 45% off. Tees are regular price because they are all new designs! Thanks for checking everything out!!!

It’s 3:30 am and I am still working hard to update stuff to Etsy. It always takes me so long! How do people do it? I still have a bunch of stuff to post, but people are already starting to buy things, so I thought I’d give you the preliminary warning that stuff is going up. I will make another announcement when everything is up and ready!! Check out what is there right now!

I wish I had taken more video and more photos! Oh well! It was kind of a whirlwind weekend. The night before the fair, I was finishing up my t-shirts, heat-sealing the ends of ribbon over a cupcake candle, printing photos for my album, and Hairy and I even dragged out all the big pieces of booth furniture into the garage to figure out how to lay everything out! I think the booth turned out pretty well for not having been planned very well… 😛 There are things I would change and futz with. I would want to focus more on how the inside of the fridge was displayed and organized, but all in all, I think a lot of people were really delighted we even had a real fridge! I had a difficult time figuring out how to display the ice cream cone scarf in the freezer and still have it look cute. It’s a small, deep space, so it didn’t highlight that scarf very well :(. Also, I’m so sorry I wasn’t able to put my customer pics on the fridge. I discovered that the inside of the fridge door is not magnetic!!! I could have taped all the faux-laroids to the inside of the door which was visible, but I didn’t want to ruin the pics, either. I have to think about how to deal with that later! Here’s me and Nel/becausemaybe. I’d never met her in person before, but we are internetz buddies! There she is being goofy in her salad cowl/neckwarmer! Okay, that’s a terrible photo of me, but I had to get a picture of these guys. They are awesome! They are Jules’ god sons. We talked about finger-weaving, and the younger one is crocheting!!! I love that!!! They were really polite and nice. I loved them! Here’s me and the gal who wanted me to sign her layer cake tissue cozy. So sweet! She was very nice and patient as Manda tried to figure out the video/photo settings on my camera! I think this was the first time someone asked me to sign a crochet piece! It was kind of hard to write on crochet…I was so afraid I was just messing it all up and drawing an ink blob! When these guys approached the booth, I felt like I was going to get the smack down from the Color Mafia!!! How cool do they all look together with their candy rainbow hair!? I’m always delighted to see Marissa and Josh, and I was uber-delighted to finally meet Irene and also another Stephanie who also has a bf named Matt! My last photo is of Dorklandia’s ice cream cart!!! This was such a GENIUS idea!!! She made ice-cream plushies and kits for making the plushies, and she pushed this ice cream cart around and ringed her bell all over the fair. MY GOD!!! SO BRILLIANT!!!! I couldn’t stop going on about how I thought she was the smartest person at the fair! I […]

There should be some fun photos from Day 1 of Renegade. I also have some funny video clips, but I am too tired to pull anything off my camera. I basically got no sleep last night!! This is from Hairy’s iPhone: More later: me spitting out a turkey sandwich, Manda waxing philosophically about crochet, Amy Shrinkle and I jumping in the air looking classy. Stay tuned!

I so feel the exact opposite of this picture right now!!! Deep breath! Off to do a zillion things!!!!!! (Adorable strawberry playsuit by SewOeno. It’s completely awesome, but my thighs are still a little fat for it to be seen in public. Tight elastic = not cute. Is it bad to use clothing as inspiration for exercise….??)

Preview of the Twinkie ChanBurger tee! I have to wait to affix the lettuce bows, and I’m not quite sure yet how I want to attach them, be it sewn on permanently, or pinned with safety pins for removal. Sometimes when I have t-shirts with pins, I just don’t put the pins back on. But if people didn’t put the bows back on, their burger would be lettuce-less and naked!!!! If I sew them in, I think it will all lay more neatly, but then people would DEFINITELY have to handwash their tee, and people probably think that is a pain in the rear, although, I have bought t-shirts that said dry clean only! Some people on Twitter suggested snaps. I like that idea, but (a) I don’t really have time to sew on 40 snaps before Saturday, and (b) I’m afraid you’d be able to see the snap behind the bow. I’ll keep thinking on it and decide tomorrow! Here is a salad cowl I made for the fair. There is a light green one and a dark green one. Wish I had time to make more, but now I have to focus on booth design and promotional materials! I got my hair cut and colored today at Dekko and while Jules was twirling my hair and making it big, she said, “I’m making you look like a crazy cow! Don’t Twitter this!!” HAhaha! Okay, I HAD TO MENTION IT!!! Uh, this is what I look like now. Sometimes when you are busy, you just need to get all the hair out of your face and put on your pajama pants.

I have been sewing labels and writing out tags for HOURS!!!! And I still have a big ol’ box of stuff left to label and tag!! Holy Bejesus! I wish I were ok with just GLUING the labels on instead of sewing. That would save time, but would be super ghetto. I have a LOT of stuff for the fair, which is great! But there are still so many more things I want to add!! Ha! There’s probably no time, tho. Right now I”m focusing on labeling and tagging what I have, printing out photos, planning out the space, fixing up the fridge. I guess if I can finish all that by tomorrow, I can make more stuff on Thursday and Friday. Highly doubtful, tho! I’m also getting my hair cut and colored on Thursday. I can’t really crochet there. There’s a lot of sitting involved in the color process, but I’m too afraid of getting bleach or dye on anything. Maybes I’ll try anyway. It’s too bad I don’t have confidence in myself or Hairy to bleach my roots at home! I so cannot afford to cut and color my hair, AND go to the periodontist next week, but oh well! These are what I deem NECESSITIES OF LIFE!!! Oh man, I just remembered I have to buy flea/heartworm stuff or the dogs, too. I have spent A LOT of money on this fair already… but Hairy says that as far as advertising goes, it’s all worth it. I hope so! He has been working hard every night screen-printing shirts for me for the fair. I can’t wait to see how everything turns out! This is the first time in my life where the balance on my credit card is scaring me, and I’m like embarrassed about it. We also had to buy plane tix and book hotel rooms for my friend’s wedding in Houston. Oy! Hopefully doing a major clothing sale in the next few weeks will help a wee bit. I have a LOT of cute stuff that I just don’t wear or have the space for! I’m gonna try to go to sleep so that I don’t wake up too late tomorrow. Sorry for the weird rambling and financial freak out. It’s late/early, and I’ve had two cups of Vietnamese Insta coffee tonight!!!

So I managed to get all the pieces done!!! Now that I’ve done six, I totally want to make one with even more boxes…like a tiered wedding cake!!! Haha. But that would have to be for a time when I have a lot of spare hours on hand! The sprinkles are still loose and not glued on. I tried also using seed beads instead of pom poms, but somehow they ended up looking like dirty random sprinkles. For now, the pompoms are on top. They will probably stay there, but we’ll see. I’ve been decorating pear scarves today. Later, I need to sew labels on aaaaaall my items and start tallying stuff up and making lists!! If I finish all my labeling, tagging,making my lookbook, and printing my signs, I will try to make more cute-tility packs before the show. I hope I can. We’ll see… Oh wait, I also need to clean up the fridge and plan my booth organization. Doh.

Sprinkles or no sprinkles? See below!! Also please excuse extra weird video. I was blindly recording with the digi cam (I usually use Photobooth) so I had no idea if I was actually in the frame or not. Hahah! Cake Box from Twinkie Chan on Vimeo. This is a “sketch” I did in photoshop before I started work in order to figure out the colors. As you can see, I initially did put sprinkles on it, but I am sort of leaning toward no sprinkles now…. hmmm!!! Also here are some doggie vids from yesterday. Here is Bibi eating her foot and Bunny saying hi with her butt. Untitled from Twinkie Chan on Vimeo. And moments after, here is Bibi checking out what’s on TV. Untitled from Twinkie Chan on Vimeo.

I’ve been wanting to do another ice cream scarf for some time (I did one years ago), but just never got around to it. I wanted to refine the cone, and I wanted to make sure that my ice cream scarf didn’t look too much like my cupcake scarf!! Also a little birdie once wrote me a letter covered in cute little sketches of things. One sketch was of soft serve scarf. It looked like vanilla with rainbow sprinkles. I’d been thinking for a while about how to do it, and I finally settled on a plan. I got a great yarn from ImagiKnit. I believe the brand is Twinkle. It’s super duper chunky, fluffy, soft and luscious. It’s truly delicious! I bought it in chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla. This stuff is $20 a hank! I probably won’t keep using this yarn, but it was nice to work with on this initial scarf. The cone is good ol’ Vanna yarn. I like working with Vanna a lot, and there are a ton of colors (not great pink or yellow, tho!). I ran into the problem of the cone curling a bit. I seem to have this problem when I work in sc. I haven’t discovered or read about any ways of curing the curl, so I think for my next version, I will work in a wool for the cone so I can try to block it and stop the curling. As you can see, this scarf is HUGE!! It’s too big for my taste. Not only is it big, but it’s also rather dense, eventho the chunky yarn is worked in dc, so it’s super heavy, and when you wrap it around your neck, it feels like a neck brace!!! So next time: smaller pattern, looser work on the ice cream so it’s not so dense, and wool yarn for cone. I also want to do all vanilla ice cream, with rainbow colored party cones! I like how there is space across the top of the cone to stitch out words if I want, like people’s names! I really want to make another version right away, but I have other pressing craft-fair projects to complete!!

I went over to my parents’ yesterday to get help from my mom for this crafty project! Usually I go bug Manda about my sewing needs, but I feel like she has a lot of her own sewing projects on her plate now, so I hit up Mama Chan. She claims to not sew very well, espesh clothing, but she sure whips up a mean couch-cover from her own pattern! Here’s a peek of what we made. Next time I order my fabric from Spoonflower, I will make the images bigger. We felt that the pillows were a bit on the small side. At least I have my colors locked down now, so I can go crazy with my fabric orders!! Due to certain boo-boos on my part…there won’t be very many pillows at Renegade. There will be 4 kinds: tater tots, pickle jars, ketchup bottles, and hot dog packs. If people seem to like them, I will print out more varieties of foods. If they are a big flop, then I’ll just make a set for myself!!! 😛

Hey guys, I just sent out a mailing list message, but in case you are not on the mailing list, I am going to ask for your help here, too! I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to decorate my vintage fridge for the craft fair with magnets and pictures of other people wearing my goodies. I only have a small handful of customer pics, so if you could take a quick snap shot, or if you have some laying around, I would SO appreciate you emailing them to me (twinkiedink at gmail dot com) so your beautiful faces can be at my booth! I plan to print out the pics as little fake polaroids, so if you also want a little message or name or nickname or something written underneath the pic, just include that in your email as well. THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! I know it can be a big pain in the rear end to take pics and send, so if I happen to receive any new pics in my inbox, I super appreciate it!!!!! I also never mentioned here in my blog that I will have some marked down prices on the more expensive scarves, so it’s definitely a rare opportunity and you should definitely come and visit! Nothing will be over $100. Also I’ve been working on some cute new designs, and I will try to preview them here in the blog when I get a chance to take pics and post them!

Hey kids! I am doing my very first giveaway over at LovelyLittleDeer’sblog, and there is also a fun interview with moi! The giveaway item is a custom sugar cookie pin :). The contest ends on July 13! Please visit Becky’s blog to see how to enter! Also, I was alerted to the fact that my first cake tissue cozy was featured in a blog about the 12 most Creative Tissue Boxes! Also, we took my laptop into the Apple store today and discovered I have a janky video card, and since there are a bunch of class action law suits involving my video card, I’m getting it replaced for free!!! It’s going to take a while, so I still won’t be online as much as usual. I feel like not having my laptop allows me to do more work, while also keeping me from doing work. Haha. Double-edged sword! Also, using someone else’s computer is weird….the keys are all different, I keep making typos, I feel like it’s a little bit slower. It frustrates me a little bit, so I probably won’t use it very much. I’ll still do my best to keep on top of everything I have to keep on top of. Don’t worry! But I mention it just so you know I may not comment on stuff as much! I gotta go and work on t-shirt and postcard designs now! Can’t wait to post pics of the soft-serve icecream cone scarf I have in the works. It’s dericious!

Hey guys. Last night, the screen on my laptop decided to take a break….  Hairy says they’ll probably have to send it away to be fixed. It’s kind of the worst time ever to not have access to my computer while I’m still designing stuff and preparing for Renegade, so we might just buy a cable and see if I can hook it up to our flatscreen tv, and then send the computer in after the show! AHHHH! We’ll see. In the meantime, I can gank Hairy’s laptop when he’s not using it, but I just wanted to let y’all know if I don’t respond to your comments right away or post here as much! Happy Fourth!!! Hairy is roasting a chicken and we bought lots of foods to nosh. I gotta go baste that bird!

We are the proud owners of a vintage fridge! We drove to Pleasanton last week to pick this up and use it for a display unit for the craft fair. Hairy thought of paying for a storage unit for a month to put the fridge in, and then selling the fridge after the fair. But I suggested we just put it in the downstairs bathroom for now instead of paying for storage. Now we have the weirdest bathroom ever. It was already ugly (pea green walls and purple tile!) but now there’s an old fridge AND a Dora the Explorer pinata in it!!! (The pinata is a gift from my manager dude. He swung by last weekend with his supercute daughter Hayley McMuffin and he said he got the Dora pinata for me to customize into a Twinkie pinata!) Hairy says the Dora pinata has front-butt. It’s in pretty good condition. Apparently it was repainted at some point, but there is till kind of a dent in the door and some rusting. It needs some stickers removed and some TLC, but it will be a cute way to hold the foodie scarves for events. I kind of want to keep it and use it to store clothes upstairs, but I’m afraid it will start to smell in there. Plus, it’s really heavy and nobody is going to want to haul it upstairs into the bedroom! There was kind of a huge rigmarole involving this fridge for the first 48 hrs. Let’s just say, 10,000 spiders & beetles, egg sacs, a blackwidow, a whole can of RAID, asbestos, hissing tubes, and compressed frothy white oil all over the garage floor. It was really scary for a hot minute! Even though it is shorter than I am and has had some heavy stuff removed from its guts, it’s still really heavy, and it will be interesting to move this thing around in the next 2 weeks!!!

Yesterday, I had lunch with my ex-office ladies. Our salads were not too delightful, but the company was. I was also next to my favorite cupcake shop: Kara’s Cupcakes, so I picked up a little box of yummyness. I just ate the last one (yes, before dinner!), and for some reason, I felt like I was supposed to record it and speed it up! Here’s what happened!! (I keep looking up and over because I was watching “Undeclared” on DVD!) Oh, P.S. it’s the “Lemony Lemon” cupcake, and it’s SO good cuz the frosting is neither too sugary nor too shortening-y, plus the lemon FILLING is delish!!! The special cupcake of the month this month is SMORES: chocolate cupcake, graham cracker crumble, toasted marshmallow topping. I might buy some tomorrow if I’m feeling like a fatty, which I probably will….hahaha. I will be in the neighborhood again to have lunch with the BFF and her friend.

I can’t remember if I ever posted info for the fair! It’s July 18-19, in Fort Mason here in San Francisco. Here is a link to the Renegade site. I went to this fair last year as a shopper/visitor, and I was AMAZED at how many vendors there were! So Much stuff!!! Bring lots of cash!!! We ran out! Manda and I will be at booth 92, which will be nearish to the frontish. I’m starting to feel like there are 12 stages of planning for a craft fair. At first I felt anxious, then I felt relaxed (about having plenty of time to make stuff for my table), then I was in denial (about having no time to make stuff for my table), then I was FREAKED THE EFF OUT, and now I’m excited. I wonder what tomorrow will bring! Probably more freak-the-eff-out before this event is done. Please come say hi. If all plans turn out well, I will have a really cool booth display, and LOTS of new, fun items!