I used to do these round-ups briefly, but I stopped for 2 reasons: 1) my shopaholic tendencies go in cycles 2) I started feeling pressure to do them regularly, and I hate pressure! Plus, I think that’s what Pinterest is for now, but it’s actually really hard for me to get into Pinterest. I’m pretty slow to adopt a new social-media-related thing, because I find them each so time-consuming! So, I’m bringing back Fun Stuff Round Up here on the blog! My shopaholism is full tilt right now! Here’s some fun stuff I’ve round up!

Real Gumball Candy Dangle Earrings by EatWithYourEyes on Etsy. I srsly need a pair of these but I can’t decide which color!

Pug Print Skater Dress from ASOS

Everything by The WhitePepper from ASOS

Mushroom House backpack from ModCloth. Are you dying yet? This is so adorables!

Neon Pink Clear Back Pack from American Apparel. This just speaks to the 90s girl in me!

Stickers Dress, Lazy Oaf x Nasty Gal. Lazy Oaf’s collab with Nasty Gal is so super cute! I don’t think I could actually wear a lot of it (no crop tops or bodycon for me!) but it’s just so fun to look at!

Cute things by Sara M Lyons! I bought some nail decals from her, but I lost them!! I need to do a deep clean of the craft room to find them!

I’ve been trying to think of a fun title for yarn-related posts. “Yarn Appreciation Post” came from @bunnycartoon on Twitter, and I liked it because of the acronym: YAP. YAP, yapping about yarn. YAP Time it is!

So, I’ve been working on some new secret Yummy You! collab projects, and I’m always really picky about my colors and their exact shades and saturations. This is going to sound lame, but I am very aware of the … connotation of color … what feelings a certain shade evokes and what I think it SAYS to me.

I wanted to share some of my thoughts on yarn color with you, even though it will be kinda messed up because (a) it can be hard to shoot/edit the colors exactly the way I see them, and (b) all our monitors will interpret them differently, stupid monitors! But at least you can get a taste for what goes on in my head and also check out some of the brands I use most. Links to where you can purchase yarn are at the bottom of the whole post.

Please remember, this is NOT comprehensive. I also use other colors/brands, but these are what I grabbed first from my stash. I also try to stick with using yarns that are fairly inexpensive and accessible to all of us (I can’t have the materials cost alone of a scarf be $50+), and I personally prefer acrylics because (a) a good acrylic is soft, and I am very sensitive to animal fibers being itchy, even some merinos, (b) many plant fibers don’t have the right feel for my projects, like cotton often feeling stiff, or bamboo often feeling too floppy. I also like a huge color range in a worsted weight on the heavy side, so you can see how I can get really picky about things! Okay, on with the color!

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Sooooo Christmas of 2011, I decided to buy a cookie press and make some spritz cookies. I was like, “OMG THIS IS SO FUN! I WILL USE MY COOKIE PRESS EVERYDAY! EVERY EVERY DAY!!!” I never used it ever again.

But tonight. Oh, tonight. I resurrected the cookie press and finally attempted to make some home made CHEESE CRACKERS!!!! AWWW YEAH CHEESE YEAH! I love Cheezits so much, that I literally make myself sick. My buddy Pickle once asked me, “What do you like most? The Cheez? Or the Its?” WHO CAN CHOOSE!?

Needless to say, this was like my most humongous kitchen debacle. My cheese crackers look like cat chow and they smell like Bibi’s feet.

Let’s go on this journey together.

I used the recipe from the Wilton website, Wilton being the maker of my cookie press. I know I should have done a little more research, but …. say it all together…. IDGAF! Actually, I do, but I’m also lazy.

Here are your ingredients:

• 1 pound sharp cheddar or aged swiss finely shredded
• 1/2 cup unsalted butter softened
• 2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
• Dash hot red pepper sauce
• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon paprika

I am a very serious chef, and I only use VERY SERIOUSLY SHARP CHEDDAR. As should you. I wanted to get yellow cheddar because cheddar is supposed to be yellow in my book. But Hairy is a food snob and insisted on white cheddar. Plus, he got all cheesenerdy with some dude at Andronico’s, and they were like, “Good sir, you must select a cheese from Vermont.” “Right-o, good sir, I shall!”

1. I attacked the aerobic portion of the recipe first: grating 1 lb of cheese. I gave up after .5 lb, which ended up being the best decision of the whole night. You may think this was due to laziness, but the real reason was my plate was overflowing with cheese, and I didn’t think I had enough large bowls for mixing everything together. SO MUCH CHEESE. So I cut the whole recipe in half.

2. Preheat oven to 375°F. In a medium bowl, cream the cheese, butter, Worcestershire sauce and hot red pepper sauce until smooth. So, what exactly does it mean to cream something, because I attempted to do this, but it was basically like trying to turn the cheese powder from your pizza delivery into a liquid. Like, it’s not gonna happen! It was like 80 million parts cheese to 1 part worcester sauce and butter. I already knew this was a terrible, terrible sign. “Cream” was not what I had. I had superstiff cheeze playdough.

3. In separate bowl, toss flour and seasonings with fork. Gradually add to cheese mixture. I added my cheese playdough by small chunks. What appeared in my mixing bowl was first like a pile of pebbles and then later like a bucket of sand. Great dough, right!?

4. Mix until dough holds together and shape into small logs. Sand is just not going to hold together on its own. It needs LIQUID. Any sand-castle-buildin’ 2 year old will tell you that. But whatever. I figured there was cheese oil in there, so I stuck my hand in the cheese sand and started to mash and massage into little logs to insert into my cookie press.

My logs did not look well. There was no way the dough was going to shoot through the cookie gun and stick to the cookie sheet. But I never give up!

5. Place in barrel of Cookie Pro™ Cookie Press using any disk, press onto ungreased cookie sheet. Ok, so this is the part where I gave up. For a cookie press to work, the dough needs to be sticky, so that your cookie stays put when you pull the gun away. What I ended up doing was shooting the dough through the gun, which was still stuck to the gun, and then I picked the clumps off with my fingers and reshaped them onto the cookie sheet. WHY DID I NOT JUST TAKE THE DOUGH LOG OUT OF THE GUN AND THEN HAND-SHAPE EVERYTHING?! I don’t know. I had so much faith in the cookie press. This process took approx 9 million years, so I did one cookie sheet and called it quits.

I used the Y-disk which technically should create heart-shaped cookies, but given the crumblyness and dryness of my dough, they didn’t spread very much, so I just had Y-shaped crackers. Y as in WHYYYYYY GOD WHYYYYYYY.

6. Bake 10-12 minutes or until lightly browned. Remove and cool on rack. At 10 minutes, my crackers were pretty toasty looking, and I probably should have been watching them more closely instead of washing dishes.

7. Sprinkle with paprika. Sorry, my crackers did not deserve any paprika sprinkles.

In an effort to cook/bake more of my snacks rather than eating packaged foods filled with weird chemicals and stuff, this was an interesting experiment. Although I’m pretty certain that I’ll never try this again, they are after all like 92% cheese, and you can’t go that wrong with cheese. It would probably be more efficient for me to eat the cheese right off the block and leave stuff like baking to the pros. But you know I’ll be back in the kitchen soon …

Last Saturday, Manda and had a girl date at Maker Faire.  We tried to plan wisely and both ride the train from our respective towns to meet in the middle in San Mateo. Parking and traffic can be a big, hour-long hurdle when Maker Faire is in town, but our efforts to ride the train went out the window when we both realized we would miss our trains!

We ended up parking at a nearby shopping mall and walking 20 minutes to the faire, which I think worked out just fine! Espesh cuz we grabbed Chocolate Creme Frapps at the mall for our walk!

Here’s a fun mosaic UFO that I think we should all have in our back yards.

I didn’t really end up taking many photos that day, but there’s neat stuff all over the place, like a man riding a mechanical horse bicycle thing, a man driving a fur-covered articulated blinky luck dragon, stuff shooting out fire, kids building all sorts of stuff, a guy  dancing in a super happy robot costume, some dude banging on bucket drums, kids playing around in cardboard Minecraft outfits, and lots and lots of carnival food!

Garlic fries were our #1 priority. GBFF! GARLIC BREATH FRIENDS FOREVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ALSO, cheesy popcorn!!! CHEEEEZ FINGERZ!!!!!

Then we hit up the Bazaar Bizarre to check out all the crafty peeps. I ended up really loving the brooches by Bottle of Clouds. They are laser cut wood and then hand-painted. I wanted so many of them! I may re-visit her Etsy shop when it re-opens. She was also super duper sweet!

I really just love being a relaxed shopper at craft fairs, instead of being a vendor. I always feel too guilty to break away from my booth for too long in order to have a look around, so I truly appreciate just having a stroll and appreciating everyone’s creativity!

If there is a wooden or cardboard cut-out of something, I really super have to take a photo with it.

OH yeah, it was really super sunny that day, if you couldn’t tell, and Manda was really worried that her nose would fry. We are going to invent some kind of nose guard for sun glasses. Here’s the prototype.

My Accessory-of-Note for the day were my super cute bunnycookie pins by TinyTangerines!

Later that evening, we met up with our dudes and watched Star Trek: Into Darkness! Despite anything I might read on the internet about it, I enjoyed it! Two thumbs up! Two thumbs way up for the whole day!

I have a new pattern in available in my Etsy shop. It’s for a “Pancake Lovey!” I had no idea what a lovey was, until someone asked me to make one a year or two ago (I didn’t end up doing it). I guess it’s like a doll/security-blanket hybrid, usually characterized by some kind of head stuck to some kind of blanky. This Pancake Lovey has a happy, sleepy butter pat buddy sewn to a security pancake!

I don’t really want to make/sell baby items, and I probably won’t write very many baby-related patterns, but I designed this particular morsel because my brother and sister-in-law’s first baby, Ender, was born on May 16! He came out really cute, and not at all wrinkly or alien-looking. Manda and I got to see him after he was just about a day old. Pretty crazy!

You might be wondering why I made a PANCAKE for them.  Recall the baby shower and how I mentioned my brother loving pancakes. Also, my sister-in-law decorates a lot using beige/neutrals. So, I figured, even if the baby never ends up using the Pancake Lovey, it could still sort of maybe fit into the neutral color scheme of their home.

Incidentally, I didn’t get a chance to bring them the lovey on the day we visited them in the hospital, because I washed it but didn’t have time to dry it because Hairy’s air-dry-only laundry was taking a million cycles! But the baby won’t be able to actually use it for a while anyway, so I guess it’s all good!

Here’s a picture of Ender for you baby-lovin’ folk out there!