Etsy Score of the Month!

I would love to feature my favourite etsy find each week, but I try very hard not to be a shopping blog.

Etsy Score of the Month is my compromise :-)

I fell in love with the work of UnlessSomeoneLikeYou last year while searching Etsy for gifts. This month, I ordered a portrait for my husband as an anniversary present. If you've ever wanted to feel like you're starring in your own graphic novel or are a comic book heroine, this is a great way to do it!

I have to give a huge amount of credit to the artist, Leslie, who cheerfully incorporated my feedback into the work.

Here is the original photo:


And here is our anniversary portrait:


UnlessSomeoneLikeYou also sells a range of amazing creative wedding invitations, and just started selling perhaps the coolest Save The Date card of ALL TIME:


I am already married, but you can bet that I will find a reason to use a variation of these cards. I'm thinking either 1) party announcement or 2) birth announcement. I'm several years away from needing a birth announcement, but c'mon - how much fun would it be to scratch off the conclusion to "It's a..."

Kids Crafts - Valentines

I am lucky enough to once again be contributing to HGTV.ca

Check out these ideas on Valentine's Crafts for Kids

New Year, New Ideas

I've been hatching all kinds of creative projects in my spare time. It has been absolutely invigorating to get back to the creative arts in a variety of ways.

1) Party Planning! The indomitable Kaili is having a baby, and I have the privilege of co-hosting her baby shower in just three weeks! I can't give away any more information, because it's a suprise for the baby mama...

2) Baking bread! That's right, baking bread. That's my plan for tonight - to hit the bulk section of the health food store with my friend Ashley, and spend the evening baking whole grain bread.

3) Making stationery! It was my paper (1st) anniversary on Monday, and I tried to make my lovely husband a customized set of stationery. Then our printer broke, so I made him an I.O.U.

4) Making more stationery! I might start up a small press/paper business with an old friend who is also a genius culture commentator and journalist.

5) Promoting myself! You bet that qualifies as a creative art! I sent an earlier blog post to Design Mom, and she's forwarding it on to kirtsy. This is what you get for being self-promotional. It's great!

What are you doing to get the creative juices flowing?

Creative inspiration

Spoonflower is a company that lets you design your own fabric (quilt-weight cotton) for $18 per yard. The idea of the company is fantastic, but what I find even more inspiring is what people have done with their custom orders.

Purlsoho is a fabric and yarn store in New York that I will probably never visit, to save myself the temptation of buying supplies for a hundred projects that I'll never make. However, I am deeply inspired by some of the projects undertaken by the owner of Purlsoho.

This custom Spoonflower fabric (so darn cute!) was used at her wedding:



And then turned into a quilt:



The same exceptionally talented woman also made this fabulous quilt from the same pattern:



Purlsoho actually sells kits with 52 different rainbow fabric swatches to make this quilt. Quilts are the sort of thing that I know I will never, ever have the patience for, but I deeply admire in others.

All photos from purlbee.com - the purlsoho blog.

Vegan Chocolate Cupcakes!

Ages and ages ago, I wrote that I would post about vegan chocolate cake. Well, last night I needed to put together a quick dessert (because I was having huge chocolate cravings) so I busted out my new favourite chocolate cake recipe. It's cheap. It's easy. It can be made with things you already have in the cupboard. And it's vegan. Did I mention it takes about 10 minutes to make?

VEGAN CHOCOLATE (CUP)CAKE(S) WITH PEANUT BUTTER (TOFU) CREAM CHEESE FROSTING

The cake recipe comes from the Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca, New York and is available online here. It is reprinted from Moosewood Restaurant Book of Desserts , Copyright 1997 by Moosewood, Inc.

Cake ingredients:
1 ½ cups unbleached white flour
⅓ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup sugar
½ cup vegetable oil
1 cup cold water or coffee
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
2 tablespoons cider vinegar (plain white vinegar works too)

As with all cakes, get your pans ready first. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit and oil and flour your pans (if you're using a cake pan, put parchment in the bottom and oil and flour the sides. If you're using muffin liners for cupcakes, oil the muffin tin before putting the liners in). This recipe makes 24 small cupcakes (not quite mini, but not regular size), or one 10" cake, and I don't know how many other combinations.

Sift the flour, cocoa, baking soda, salt and sugar into a mixing bowl. In a separate bowl, mix together the oil, cold water or coffee (it's a GREAT use of leftover coffee!) and vanilla. Mix the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients, just like making cake from cake mix. Once the batter is mixed, add the vinegar and mix again. The batter will develop white swirls from the baking soda reacting with the vinegar. Stir just until the vinegar is mixed in, and then pour into the muffin tins or cake pan. A cake takes 25-30 minutes. My small cupcakes took about 20 minutes. Use a toothpick to test for doneness (it should come out clean) or do the "bounce back" test - if you press lightly, the cake should spring back.

For the icing (not from the Moosewood):
Mix equal parts of:
-Tofutti "Better Than Cream Cheese" (or regular soft cream cheese)
-Smooth peanut butter (the best is the runny kind that comes from a tub in bulk)
-Icing sugar or brown sugar

If you use brown sugar, the icing will have a granular texture at first. It does fade a bit over time as the sugar dissolves. You can cheat like I did and top the cupcakes with a bit of crunchy topping to hide the granular texture (I used organic cocoa bean bits, because I'm a lucky duck and had some in the cupboard from my mom's travels) but anything will do - chopped peanuts, mini chocolate chips, etc.

Once the cake or cupcakes cool, frost them with the peanut-butter-cream-cheese-awesome frosting.

This would be a great recipe to use to make your own cake mix, since the dry ingredients can be mixed together and stored. A medium zip lock bag would easily hold one batch of cake.

Resolutions

Last New Year's Eve, I made resolutions in four areas: Personal, Professional, Health, and Relationship. As I mentioned in my very first post on this site, I achieved 3 of my 4 goals over the course of 2008.

For 2009, I am only making one resolution, which is to focus on my health. In light of my long and complicated relationship with food, I know that my mental health and physical health need to be tackled (or perhaps nurtured) in tandem. After several years of ups and downs on the scale and elsewhere, I'm excited about the year ahead. In the last month I've re-joined GoodLife (the best darn gym in the world), I've been working out regularly since renewing my membership, and I've found a Weight Watchers meeting that I like. I'm excited at the prospect of getting outdoors on snow shoes and cross-country skis, and I'm thinking about playing in a touch football league in the spring. Because I feel like kicking some ass...in a good way.

GoodLife gyms share my personal motto, "Good enough is good enough." Their point is that there is a level of general fitness that is both attainable and maintainable, and that's what most people should be striving for. It's certainly a change for me to think about going to the gym 3 times per week rather than having an all-or-nothing attitude towards exercising. So far, so good.

Right now I am getting ready to wake up prepared for a great day (menu planned, gym bag packed, smile on my face) on the last day of 2008.

DIY Christmas Gifts - Part II

Each year I give my other half a Christmas gift that is personalized in some way. These gifts have included an engraved flask, a branding iron for woodworking (I made the branding iron, which I think gets me a lot of cool points), a compass engraved with a favourite e.e. cummings poem, and this year, a painting of our family as we celebrate our first Christmas as married folk.



Silhouette paintings take very few supplies (without the lettering, you really only need black paint, canvas, and a paint brush), and some attention to detail. I made this painting by taking silhouette photographs, printing and enlarging them on a photocopier, outlining and then cutting out the silhouette, tracing the image onto canvas, and finally filling it in with black liquid acrylic paint (I highly recommend liquid, rather than heavier acrylics for this type of project). I'm disappointed with how the lettering turned out - I thought I could do the lettering freehand but in retrospect a stencil would have been a great idea. Next year!

I should note that this project was inspired by Nie.