Featured Etsy Shop of the Week: hippofabulous

On of my new favorite Etsy shops if Hippofabulous...purveyor of nifty vinyl wallets and bags with fun images.

Check out some of my favorites:

Sparkle Vinyl Cupcake Wallet




Happy Cloud Vinyl Wallet






Sparkle Vinyl Pirate Wallet




Find her on etsy, or check out her blog: http://hippofabulous.wordpress.com/

Geared up for life in the Promise Land

Living in the Promise Land has it's perks....rain-free summers, beautiful scenery year-round, friendly people, the list goes on. One down side, however, is that the rainy season is, well, rainy. And Jack being a poodley sort of dog gets kind of matted when he gets wet too often.

Enter Jack's new Promise Land Puppy Protection:

Jack now has a cute little rain coat that protects is top side and his tummy from getting too wet when he goes out for walks. Plus, now he's not the same color as wet pavement and I can worry less about him getting run over by a car speeding through our parking lot.

PS I could still use some help with cranberry recipes.

Cranberries anyone?

Make your own cranberry sauce 101, originally uploaded by Janice LeBlanc.

I love cranberries. They definitely make the "top three" list of my favorite things to bake with in the fall....apples, pumpkin and cranberries.

I was so excited that cranberries were now available that I went out and bought 2 large bags. I made a cranberry apple crisp to go with the amazing apples we got from The Sauvie Island Pumpkin Patch. It was yummy but didn't use enough cranberries. So now I have about a bag and a half of cranberries and I could use some inspiration.

Do you have a favorite cranberry recipe? Please share!

Rediscovering a Good Thing

I've been in a bit of a culinary slump lately.  But this week I've been doing some experiments.  Last week I made some seriously awesome tomato soup in my crock pot.  I figured I should probably go record what I did before I lost the piece of paper I scribbled in the ingredients on.  So off to BakeSpace....the Ravelry of the cooking world.

I haven't logged on to BakeSpace in a long time.  And as I was looking around I was amazed.  The site has been totally re-done.  The pages load faster (WAY faster), the way you do things is more user friendly, I was impressed.

As I was poking around, I saw that some of my recipes lost their formatting (anyone else noticing a theme in my life lately?) so I'm working on fixing those.  And as I was fixing formatting, I rediscovered some recipes I used to make a lot but haven't for a while (like super easy pumpkin spice cake or coconut thai shrimp and pineapple curry) and some I had totally forgotten about (like Crockpot Tortilla Soup).

It was fun.  I think I may need to start spending some more time over there.  If you're not on BakeSpace yet, check out any of my links....the site is free.  And like I said, it's like the Ravelry of the cooking world.  Go check out my recipes or sign up and add me as your friend.

Almost Fixed!

For the last week, my blog has been broken.

One day at work I thought to myself "My blog is boring. And my pictures don't fit very well in the little column Blogger gives me. I need a new template!"

So bright eyed and hopeful, off I went in search of a new template. And I found lots of really cool ones. But no matter how meticulously I followed the directions for installing them, they never worked. Ever. I kept getting error messages from Blogger or a screen of garbely gook. I just couldn't figure it out. In the meantime, while I was trying to figure it out all my little gizmo gadgets in my side bar disappeared.

So everyday for about a week I would spend time trying to fix it.

Was it the blogger server? Wait for a day. Nope. Not it.
Was it the computer I was on? Change computers. Nope.
Browser? Maybe it doesn't like IE? Firefox? Chrome? Oh come on!
Maybe it's the template? (try maybe 15 different templates from different sources). No
XML? No
HTML only? Sorry.
Google the error codes showing up. Nothing. Except 2 hits in French. I don't speak French.
Crap

BLOG! WHY ARE YOU BROKEN!?! STOP TORTURING ME!

**sigh**

Seriosuly. I was thisclose to just deleting my blog and starting over again.

So today while putting in some blog fixing time and researching transfering posts to a new blog, I decided I'd try changing the template on a different blog I own. It worked! It was cake! Hmmmm.

So after puttering around for a bit I figured out at least one of my gizmos (which had never given me any problems before) was broken. So I deleted it (and a bunch of other gizmos that weren't broken in an effort to find the broken one). And you know what happened?

It worked! No error message. No computer code vomit. A blog! With cupcakes! Yay!

I even got ambitious and tweaked the code a bit to fix the size of my main posting column. Changed some colors, etc.

I do still have quite a bit of re-configuring left....especially with the right column gizmos and links but I'm pleased to say that my blog works, you can read it, AND the pictures fit in the main column (which was the thing that started this mess to begin with).

Any suggestions for things you'd like to see on my blog? Let me know in the comments! With the exception of actual entries, I'm kind of starting from scratch again so I'd love ideas for fun things to do with my new space. It's kind of like moving into a new apartment...same stuff but new digs and a new chance to re-decorate and re-organize in a (potentially) more useful way.

Maybe it's a good sign for things to come.

Fall is here

Part of why I have been such a blog slacker lately is because I get guilt for neglecting it.  I feel like I neglected my blog for so long that my next post better be awesome.  But I don't have anything awesome to post about so I don't post anything.  But then I feel guilty for not posting.  So then I feel like my next post needs to be awesome..... and it goes on and on.

So I'm giving up on trying to come up with witty, well-written, clever entries about the happenings of a knitting cupcaker and her family.  Instead, I think we're going to try the "short and sweet" approach.

So this is what I've got for today as a recap for October:

I made this yarn:

It's half fleece artist BFL and half purple corriedale.  In the end, it give me 98 g (about 64 yards) of bulky weight yarn.  I want to do mittens but I don't know if I have enough.

I made most of a sweater:

It's a modified version of Star-Cross'd Love.  Pattern was originally a size small, I'm making it a L/XL.  Looks good so far.  Need some sleeves and to add a bit of length to the collar.  If you're a Raveler, my pattern page lives here.

I dyed some new roving for my shop:

It's a new Cupcake Factory line called "Confection" and it lives here

I made these:

The little ones are chocolate cakes baked in Pampered Chef prep bowls.  The big ones is yellow cake w/ halloween sprinkles (funfetti-syle) and baked in a PC small batter bowl.  Little stems are mint candies.  Large stem is molded lime tootsie rolls.

I went here:

And did this:

Oh!  And because Melody asked so nice, here is a gratuitous dog picture:

In which Carissa and Joe get a scooter

Nothing says "manly scooter" like a puppy, does it?

The tale of a confused tomato

As I showed in my last post, my upside-down tomato is a little confused about this growing in a hanging pot business and was doing this:

The very friendly people in the container gardeners group on Ravelry told me that as the fruit get bigger that the stalk will straighten out. Since the plant in the above picture already had 13 fruits on it, I thought it would gradually get pulled down as the fruit get bigger and heavier.

So went to work on Thursday with the plant looking exactly as it does in the above picture but when I came home it was doing this:

It almost completely straightened out over a 6 hour period!

But now that the stalks are growing down, the stems and the fruit (which had been growing parallel to the ground) are now growing sideways:



I hope the stems re-correct as well because I'm worried as the fruit gets bigger that gravity might start pulling it off the stem pre-maturely.

Garden pics

In non-knitting, non-cupcaking news, this is what I've been up to:

(apprehensive dog for scale)

I've been growing a mini-garden on my back porch.

I've got 2 tomato plants (one regular, one upside down), a basil plant, a very sad looking hydrangea, an avocado tree sproutling, and some morning glory/beans.

Tomato #1 is in the picture above. While it's very large and bushy, it has no tomatoes. It had quite a few flowers but they seem to be infertile. I'm curious to see if maybe it will get some later.


Tomato #2, I'm growing upside down.
I drilled a 1.5" hole in the bottom of a 5 gallon pot, put coffee filters around the hole so the dirt wouldn't fall out and threaded a (much smaller) tomato start through. It did okay like this for a while but then decided to rebel (red lines show how the stalks are growing):

It grew down for a bit but then did a u-turn up to the right. The fork to the left is actually just a really big branch coming off the main stalk. Both are growing in a decidedly upward fashion.

And while it's definitely an "interesting" looking plant, it was the first one to make one of these!
There are currently 13 tomatoes growing on the upside-down plant with many more pregnant-looking flowers that I'm sure will turn into tomatoes soon. :-)

The Vines are not cooperating. I had this vision...the bars on the side of the porch covered in beautiful vines sharing their bounty of morning glory flowers and green beans with me. I planted both morning glories and beans in smaller pots and spaced them out along the fence.


This pot didn't get the memo:
Since I took this picture last week, the beans have since flowered and are growing mini-beans....but they forgot to climb. They're just hanging out near the pot. The morning glories in this pot were trying to climb the beans so I tried to re-direct them to the rail and now thery are being grumpy at me.

This is the only pot of the 4 which is doing what it's supposed to:
The bean in this pot is still short, but at least the morning glory figured it out. I've got quite a ways to go to get to my "wall of vines" look I was going for. *sigh* oh well.

We're looking to buy a house so hopefully this time next year, I'll own dirt that isn't contained in pots and my garden will be behaving a bit nicer.