Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Sophisticats


So stinkin' cute. I picked these up at the thrift store but now I realize that I'm way past the age where I can use them for school!

Saturday, August 17, 2013

Big Sur

Ryan and I took a trip to Big Sur a while back. We forgot to pack the camera so we had to buy an overpriced disposable. We finally developed pictures a couple of weeks ago. This place was so beautiful, even the Walgreens-photolab-developed photos turned out gorgeous!


A few miles down the highway from this spot was a hiking trail that led to these scarylooking rocks that overlooked the ocean. Guess who HAD to climb them?



 The sun was setting fairly quickly that day and we didn't get enough shots to finish the roll. We took these other ones at different beaches in Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay.
Tidepools!




Sunday, August 11, 2013

Fruit Fun!

I'm such a lazy blogger! I've got photos lined up from months ago that I've planning on sharing with the world but wasn't able to work up the energy to upload them until now.

I love our backyard. When we first moved to this house in 1998, the grass was dead and the only living things were an orange tree cut to look like a poodle and three apricot trees. Unfortunately the apricot trees all died of root rot. Over the last 15 years, my grandparents turned the backyard into a beautiful garden full of edible fruit, veggies, and leafy greens. We currently have lemon, cherry, apple, persimmon, white peach, and pomegranate trees. Up until last year, the pomegranate tree didn't yield any fruit. My grandpa grumbled something about "male flowers" which I didn't understand until I noticed how very little fruit the tree had. (Ohhhh yeah...We learned about this in 8th grade science!)




The flowers are beautiful regardless and I can't wait to eat the pomegranates that did grow!


Sunday, May 12, 2013

Vintage Crewel Kit: Baby Lion Picture Frame

I picked this kit up at my local thrift store a few weeks ago. It was only $0.99 but the tag was on sale for an additional 50% off! I really lucked out.

My aunt is having her first baby in a few weeks and I thought this would make a wonderful gift. I haven't done any needlework in a long time so it helped kick things into gear for when finals are over.



Sunday, May 5, 2013

Shrinky Dinks

Guess who just discovered them? haha

My local Michael's only carried the white and smooth transparent kind so I had to rough up the surface myself. I was surprised at how well it worked and how beautifully the color came out after baking.

I decided to test the shrinkage out by tracing a mandarin duck I drew a while ago. They give you measurements and an estimated percentage but I like to see for myself.



Here's a side-by-side before and after shot. I placed it on a Moleskine "Classic Large Sketchbook" (5.25 x 8.25). The colors are so much more vibrant after shrinking!


 I plan on turning it into a brooch of some sort but I didn't plan it out well enough. I should have punched holes around it as a border so I could sew it onto some felt. Oh well, maybe next time!

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Fancy Pants Candy

Since starting the Fall semester, I've been too busy to even pick up any of my crafting stuff. I spent some of my break making a prototype for an iPhone 4 case and drawing up designs. It sounds silly because they've already come out with the 5 but I'm slow on trends and was given my cousin's hand-me-down. I was excited for my first smartphone ever! It only took 5 years, haha. I got lost the other day and it saved me lots of time finding my way back home. So cliche but I'm not sure how I managed to survive before! :P

I don't have anything to show today except for this candy I bought a week ago on Fab. I can be very irresponsible with my money and this definitely shows it...My excuse was that I wouldn't have been able to find it anywhere else for that price (everything was around $2-3 off, plus I had a $10 gift certificate). I'm a sucker for pretty (useless) things as well as strange flavors (meaning not your usual lemon/lime, grape, orange, etc. Speaking of that, why do we need three citrus flavors and a pineapple one in almost all American candy?!) My boyfriend Ryan made a joke about how I'm becoming an old lady. I told it was my ~retirement candy~ haha I can already see them sticking together into one giant clump already!


I like collages! 

They are made by Maison Boissier. You can read about its history on the website. I'm going to get into the details about the candy!

The two I bought were the candy balls in the blue gift tin and the "Heavenly Pearls". I knew the latter were going to be tiny but I was still pretty surprised when I pulled them out of the box. I took a photo of the two types side-by-side for comparison. The balls were like 20% smaller than your average gumball. What convinced me to get them were all the flavors of the Pearls: "apricot, orange, cherry, strawberry, lemon, tangerine, almond, apple, blueberry, pear, peach, plum, and grapes".  The texture of each pearl is like rock candy but not super hard. They are delicate and easily crushed between your fingers/ inside the box if you close it wrong. The flavor doesn't hit you for a least a few seconds until the sugar coating dissolves. Then you have about 10 seconds where you start to figure out what flavor you just got and it just bursts open, depositing its juice inside your mouth. Wow, that sounds like really bad erotica. But you get the point! It's like a Fruit Gusher but the filling for these pearls is watery and (delightfully) pungent.

The candy balls are solid like any hard candy. The flavors were poppy, rose, violet, cherry, and blueberry. I love floral flavors. My first experience with them was with Les Anis de Flavigny's rose and violet pastilles. They were sickeningly perfumey but I think that's typical. You can tell you're eating violet candy (so far that's the only one I've tried aside from poppy) with the Boissier balls but it's not overpowering and is tart like a Jolly Rancher. It's slow to dissolve so you can enjoy it for several minutes before, if you're like me, get impatient and bite it. As for poppy, I ate it by accident thinking it was cherry. I kind of deduced it when I realized it was an unfamiliar flavor. It's not very flower-y at all! I really like it and I think that once this tin is finished, I'm going to try to track down more poppy-flavored edibles.

To be completely honest, these were expensive and I had no business buying them when I should've gotten my textbooks instead. But like I said, they were on sale and difficult to find anywhere else online/in the US and I enjoyed the novelty! I'm excited to share them with my friends and family. :)

tl;dr This candy has many flavors that are not typically produced by US confectionaries and it's delicious albeit on the pricier side.

Friday, December 7, 2012

Treating myself


I've wanted I'm Your Present's sweetheart earrings in this colorway ever since I saw them half a year ago. I finally bought them for myself after "working hard" for the past semester. I'm so happy with them! I love that she was so kind to include all those little extras. :) My only regret is that I didn't see the Christmas versions until much later...Maybe next time!