Package from Arika!

Presents from Arika!

I got an awesome package from Arika a couple weeks ago. This included some great tea samples, including the tea flowers that open in hot water, which I love!

Arika also included scented candle wax thing in Sweet Orange and Chili Pepper, which Ansell is a huge fan of.

I LOVED the jewelry Arika sent me too. The sparrow necklace is gorgeous and fits in perfect with my upcoming fall wardrobe. It’s a little long so I’m going to add a loop further down the chain to shorten it. I also received stunning chandelier earrings that I wore to the 1920s party I went to. It worked great with my outfit and I really like how it looks with my short hair.

I miss my girls!

And, of course, I received some make-up. The lip color is nice but I have to be careful what I wear it with since it pales my lips out a lot. The eye shadows are great! A lot are from the Egyptian Treasure collection from Meow Cosmetics, which is a fav collection of mine. Again, these samples are perfect for the upcoming fall. Arika has great timing!

I am super happy and pleased with my package! Who doesn’t like a fun package, especially when it’s from someone who is so in tune with your likes and dislikes?

Thanks Arika!

x o x o

Edible Worlds by Christopher Boffoli

Christopher Boffoli – Edible Worlds

Once again owning an exotic pet was proving to be
nothing but trouble.

In New York Ansell and I visited several galleries. My favorite by far was the Winston Wachter Gallery, which had a solo show for Christopher Boffoli’s Edible Worlds.

It didn't matter how much overtime was needed. The pancake
producers were determined to catch up with their
orders before brunch.

“For this show, Boffoli features a series of crisp and vividly colored images. The viewer becomes voyeur in each captured moment and is privy to scenes of work, play, and conversation. Snapshots of saturated color and massive food items allow the miniatures who stand in Boffoli’s surreal scenes to come to life.

With his history, no one would have believed it was an accident.

This juxtaposition of scale has been inspired in party by the heavy use of this visual device in films and television from the 70’s and 80’s and the 18^th century fable, Gulliver’s’ Travels. A wide range of human interaction is captured throughout this series within a dizzying array of produce and prepared staged foods.”

Blackberry CSI

I loved this show and its art. I thought the images were fun and the little one-sentence stories added a whole story to the images. I also liked how colorful and fanciful the images were.

This was my favorite one, for obvious reasons! It was also Ansell's favorite because it involved scuba diving.

Eric always had a healthy amount of anxiety before a deep tea dive.

NYC - Day 4 Friday 8/17

Last Day!

On our last day, we said goodbye to our nice Harlem apartment, dropped our stuff off at the luggage-holding store near Penn Station, and set out to Soho.

 The Soho area is pretty cool. It had some really interesting stores that I have never seen anywhere else. One of which was called Evolution and had everything to do with animals, insects, and humans. So, it had fossils, every kind of beetle, moth, and butterfly imaginable, bones, globes, rocks, etc. It was such a cool place and won Ansell and I’s best store in New York award.

Soho also had a little shop called Mini Cupcakes. It is exactly how it sounds. I chose the Cookie Dough one although I think the Smores would have been fun as well. It’s $1 for one, $3 for 3 and I think $5 for 6. The next time I might just get all the flavors to try it out.

These cupcakes are so small that even 6 of them probably wouldn’t add up to a full cupcake. :)

We also visited this fantastic boutique hotel/restaurant called Isola. The restaurant part is like an indoor/outdoor space. The walls and ceiling are all glass and they incorporate a lot of greenery and open space so it feels like the outdoors but temperature controlled. Ansell and I really loved it and we spent some time enjoying a drink (beer for Ansell and tea for me) while doing some quiet reading. 


I really appreciate when places allow us just to hang out and sip drink quietly while reading. The wait staff didn’t bug us much and didn’t pressure us to buy more stuff.

This is what we get in Portland.
Yeah...it's hard to top.

For lunch, we passed a cabaret place doing a $10 lunch deal and took advantage. We actually got a lot of food and it was pretty good quality for $10. It was obviously a “get-them-in-the-door” tactic though so you could meet the girls inside. I wasn’t that impressed though. If I wanted to see bored attractive girls dancing to music I’d go to a club, at least there the girls would be having fun. Besides when you used to live in Portland, OR and got to see fire dancers and gymnastics just taking off your clothes isn’t very impressive, just boring. So we ate cheaply and left.

These are all paintbrushes stuck in clear gesso.

We rounded out the day by meeting up with another of Ansell’s friends, Mitch, who is in art school and visited the Museum of Modern Art, or MoMA. We timed it to coincide with their free entry period and it was packed. Despite that we had a nice time looking around. I’m not a big fan of modern art and I really appreciated Mitch filling in some of the back-story and interesting details about certain paintings, styles of art, and artists. I also appreciated how low-key he was. He never came across as those artists who are so into themselves and what they’re doing that they’re a chore to be around. Instead he was refreshingly honest and down-to-earth. You can check out his artwork at www.mitchpaster.com.

After that we went to a cool divey diner and I got way too many pancakes. I downed those pancakes like I hadn’t eaten pancakes in months, which is kinda true.

Full on pancakes & happy from our time in New York we caught the bus home to DC.

We had such a wonderful time, Ansell got to visit some old friends and I met new ones, we saw amazing things, ate lots of food, drank lots of tea and overall had a great vacation. I can’t wait to go back!

See you soon New York!

Tea Party Invitations

Tea Party Invitations

The Making of…

My theme for this party was a (somewhat) British Afternoon Tea and the colors were spring based with purple, green, and yellow. I wanted the invitations to reflect all of that!

1.  I went to PaperSource and bought a pack of green envelopes, purple premade folded cards, and a giant piece of yellow flowery paper. I think it all cost a total of $15. So, I could have bought premade cards for the same price but then I wouldn’t have a fun project!

I’ve really been into making silhouettes lately so my idea was to put teapot silhouettes on the cards.

2.  I used a picture of a teapot to make my template, which would fit appropriately on the purple card. Then cut the yellow paper into pieces the right size for making the teapots.

3.  Next was tracing the teapots on the back of the yellow paper pieces and cutting them out. Basic scissors work well for this part but ascertain how many invitations you want to make before you start all the tracing and cutting!

4.  Then, using an exacto-knife, cut out the middle part of the teapot handle.

5.  Paste all the teapots onto the purple cards. I jazzed up the purple cards a bit by cutting a wave into the bottom of the card. This would be easier with those shaped scissors but it wasn’t time consuming with regular scissors either.

6.  On the inside of the card I choose to print out the actual invitation with day, date, time, etc on my computer then print and paste it into the card. This should have been faster than handwriting it all but I had a hard time not being OCD about the look of the printed invitation and it ended up being the most time consuming part.

7.  To make the invitations look really fancy, use a calligraphy pen (you know the kind that you can get in craft stores that make it LOOK like you know calligraphy) to write the recipients name.

8.  The final touch is the addition of a tea sachet. I read this idea somewhere online and thought it was brilliant and super cute!

Despite all the steps, and dependant on the number of invitations being made, these invitations only would have taken an hour or so…but I did this between doing a bunch of other stuff so it took me longer.

The final result is a totally customizable and unique card. You could make any silhouette from flowers to faces and the color scheme is easily changeable. Include a sweet touch like a seed packet for a garden party or a rice sachet for a wedding invitation and take the invitation up one more notch!

I had a lot of fun making these invitations and look forward to another invitation project!

PS. All those little inside teapot handle pieces? I made into adorable flowers!








Check out my Instructable! 

Earl Grey Tea and Pear Loaf…Attempt

Earl Grey Tea and Pear Loaf…Attempt

I’d been wanting to tackle some of the recipes I found on a favorite food blog After Apple Picking. I really like the author’s recipes and they strike my warm fuzzy British baking feelings. Of course I wanted to do the recipe that involved tea first.

Spoiler: Our final product will not look like this.

I knew I couldn’t tackle baking alone and would need help. So I enlisted the help of the tea-loving and sweetly southern Charla who is also a cooking guru (thank goodness). This wouldn’t be possible without her as she brought along half the ingredients and the knowledge.

Here we are all set up and ready to go. I taped the recipe on the cabinet so it was in easy sight and would stay clean.

We used two mixing bowls one for the date and tea mix and one for the flour and sugar mix.

 

Cooking intensity!

Then the two would be mixed together.

Unfortunately we made our first mistake here. We didn’t blend the dates, baking soda, and tea together before putting it in with the flour and pear mix. This caused the final mixture to be really soupy.  (At least this is what Charla told me. I really had no clue what was going on pretty much the entire time. I mean...the poor women had to teach me how to stir properly!)

Charla tried to save it with more flour to make it thicker but it never achieved the consistency that was needed.

We then put it into the oven to bake for 50 minutes and had ourselves a little tea and snacks.

I adore this butterfly embroidered tablecloth I found in Annette's stash.
It comes with matching napkins. 

However, unbeknownst to us the next mistake was occurring (which was totally my fault). I read 170 degrees on the recipe but didn’t read the Celsius part. So, instead we baked it for 50 minutes at 170F…yeah that did basically nothing. So we tried again at the correct temperature. After another hour it still wasn’t done but we were tired of waiting so we got it out.

The crust looked good but the consistency was all wrong. Ansell called it Busted Pudding Bread. It wasn’t loaf like at all, more similar to bread-pudding, but it was still somewhat tasty and you could see the potential. I would definitely try this recipe again.

The Aftermath! I got to watch two episodes of South Park while cleaning dishes.
Oohh the guilty pleasures!

The next Charla and Teal project is Alfajores. Yum!