music i love: the girl.

I might have teared up when I listened to this today. But I also cry when I watch Extreme Home Makeover and The Biggest Loser, so it really isn't all that surprising.

music i love: matt and kim.

So I got the illustration job. It kinda rocks my world. Partly because it's awesome and partly because it is a huge transition. I'm excited to share projects that I work on, but it'll be awhile since I can't share any of it until it is publicly released due to the gag/confidentiality agreement that I had to sign before they hired me. Any who, I work at a computer all day so I'm always listening to something. Here's one of the 5 songs I've been playing over and over the past few days.

front page.

One of my headbands finally made it to the front page of etsy. If you haven't spotted it, it's beside that adorable coordinating striped pillow. Now I can close the shop with a peaceful conscience. Kidding. Still don't know what I'm going to do about that. For now I suppose I will keep on trucking.

lettuce wraps!

I haven't really cooked in months, so I decided to find a bunch of interesting recipes online and start making a few a week and see how long they stretch. I'm just one person, so they should last for awhile. I made these lettuce wraps tonight... except I didn't want to buy seseme seed oil or rice vinegar, so I just used a bottled orange ginger sauce. It was pretty tasty and healthy. And it made quite a bit. And I felt super fancy. Win/win/win.  The original recipe (and picture) is from here and you can look at the other recipes I have been collecting here.

Chicken Cashew Lettuce Wraps (makes 6-8 lettuce wraps)
Ingredients for Chicken Cashew “Filling”

2 chicken breasts (about 3/4 lb. total), diced

8 leaves of greenleaf or iceburg lettuce

3 tablespoons canola oil (or oil of choice)

1 cup onion, diced

2 garlic cloves, minced

1 teaspoon soy sauce

1/4 cup cashews, chopped

Salt and pepper to taste

Ingredients for stir fry sauce

2 tablespoons soy sauce

1 tablespoon rice vinegar

1 tablespoon brown sugar

1/4 teaspoon ground red pepper

1/4 teaspoon ground ginger

1 teaspoon sesame oil

Directions

For stir fry sauce mix all ingredients making sure to dissolve brown sugar. Set aside.

Heat canola oil in pan over medium to medium high heat. Add diced chicken and brown (about 4-5 minutes). Remove chicken from oil. Add onions, garlic and 1 teaspoon soy sauce to pan; brown. When onions and garlic are brown and tender add stir fry sauce, browned chicken and cashews. Saute mixture for a few minutes and remove from heat.

Spoon chicken mixture into individual lettuce leaves. Add your favorite hot sauce, more cashews or basil.

Enjoy!

french music.

Possibly the creepiest music video ever. But I LOVE LOVE LOVE this song!

eat your veggies.

So I just turned in my application for an illustration/graphic design position at Provo Craft. At the last minute (of course) I started freaking out about not having a good enough portfolio, so I spent all of this afternoon working on this little poster:

I'd like to go get it printed and start selling it. Or trying to at least :)

Cross your fingers for me. A full time arty job sounds SO good to me right now.

san fran blog banner.

Yesterday Naomi asked me to make a banner for the Family Home Evening blog that she is in charge of for her ward in San Francisco. I looked at these images for inspiration:

 And came up with this:

But then her San Franciscan co-chair told her that we had to change it to "City Kids FHE", because apparently only tourists call it San Fran. Whateves. 

music i love: dance, dance, dance.

Lykke Li AND Bon Iver? Wonderful. Also, I want her jeans. They'd be so much better for fat days than skinny jeans are. Plus they'd make me feel like a hippie.

braided bracelet love.

Told you there would be more. Okay, so the inspiration bracelet is sparklier and daintier, but I still like my version too. And hopefully so will the friend that I'm giving it to as a birthday gift. 

texas orange bow.

Three things you need to know:

1. I've been obsessed with the styling from MAAN kids (see adorable outfit above).

2. I fell in love with this burnt (Texas) orange scarf when I was doing my digital window shopping while I was making my Christmas wish list. 

3. Whilst I was in the DI last week I came accross THE most heinous puffy, silky, pirate shirt in that same beautiful Texas orange.  So I bought said shirt thinking that I could make something out of it. 

So because of these three things I took that nasty shirt and made myself a silky bow pin and I LOVE IT. And there will probably be many more burnt orange accessories in my future, because there was a lot of yardage in those puffy sleeves.

music i love: send me on my way.

This video gives me a slight case of the creeps, but the song always reminds me of Matilda, and that makes me happy. I used to be able to recite every word to that movie. I still might be able to do two thirds of it if I start watching it. You'll never know. 

late night ramblings on blogging.

So it is late right now and I can't sleep. I guess that's what happens when you take naps at five in the evening. Well since I can't sleep I've been doing a lot of blog-browsing for the last two hours. And it got me thinking (well, I've been thinking about it for a long time, but it got me re-thinking) about my blog. Why do I even have it? There are SO many blogs out there- style blogs, life style blogs, design blogs, cooking blogs, kid's blogs, family blogs, interior design blogs... and those are just the kind that I read. 

And my blog is just kind of a catch-all. I guess it really started just as a way for my parents to see pictures of what I was up to or things I wanted that I was trying to describe to them. And then because I was looking at so many design blogs I started re-posting things that I liked as a way to (kind of) keep track of them. And then Rob encouraged me to open the etsy shop and we tried to think of any way possible to market our headbands, and blogging is a great marketing tool for people who know how to do it right. I, however, did not really do it right. My blog really wasn't worth putting on my business card. Oh, and somewhere along the way I started posting youtube videos of songs I liked... most of them are on there because I'm too cheap to just pay the $1 for the song on itunes, so if I ever want to listen to it I just go to my blog and play the video. 

Well, now I don't need to re-post design things that I like because I finally discovered Pinterest (thank goodness), and I'm not really trying to promote Wendy and Peter because I'd like to phase out of the whole headband thing soon (that's a whole other too-long entry). And blogging takes time, so if I'm going to have one, I want it to have a purpose/direction. 

I know I don't want a design blog. There are already SO MANY great ones out there, and I don't want to compete with that. I'm kind of a "I want to be one of the best at what I do" person, so if I were to have that kind of a blog I would want it to be a really good one with lots of followers and stuff. And while doing that would be really fun and a great creative outlet (cause really, running a design blog is like editing your own little magazine), it would also require A LOT of time and blog browsing, which I am trying to steer away from. So that's just not what I want right now. 

I know I don't want a style blog. Mostly because taking pictures of myself all posey-posey with a tri-pod in the snow in my parking lot in the middle of a college town does not sound fun to me. We live right across from the grocery store. There would be a lot of staring. 

I know I don't want a really personal "these are all of my thoughts and personal experiences and struggles" blog because A) I've already been doing a pretty good job of keeping a private, personal journal here and B) I just don't want to share those things when people may or may not be reading them and I may or may not know these people. 

Like I said, originally I started my blog as a "hey mom look at this cute thing I'm thinking about buying/bought/made/pictures of that fun thing I just did". That's kind of what I'd like. Like a photo journal with words. Part what I'm wearing, part what I'm listening to, part what I made, part what I did. I either want a good, visually pleasing, meaningful blog (even if it's just me and mom and dad and Naomi reading it, cause then I have an awesome day to day visual journal), or no blog at all. 

And quite honestly, there's not a lot going on in my life right now, so there might not be a lot of blogging. But we'll see. Also, one day maybe I will want to make it more of a design or style based thing (like if I do end up quitting Wendy and Peter for good and need some kind of creative outlet), but right now I think I'll just stick with the photo journal thing.

And although this is already probably the longest post I've ever posted, there's more. The other aspect of blogging I've been thinking a lot about for quite a while is the sheer amount of time that I waste reading blogs. Seriously, there are a million interesting/pretty/inspiring ones out there that I could (and have) just get lost for hours bouncing from blog to blog to blog. And while being inspired and up-lifted by sweet people and pretty things is good, too much of anything is bad. And when it comes down to it, I'd rather be living life than watching other people live it. So I'm working to have more control over how much time I spend reading and or writing blogs. It's pretty darn hard for me to do right now just cause of where my life is at (i.e. nowhere... I'm trying to decide the next step to take) and I'm still waiting to hear from some jobs, so I'm at home alone for most of the day. And there are good, productive things that I could and should be doing, but with no set schedule it's SO easy to just waste time on-line. I am trying, I am doing other things, it's just a battle with my self discipline. My best idea so far is to pick the amount of time I'm aloud to browse and then set a timer. I'm serious. I bought one for this purpose. I'm just still not in the habit of using it. Yet.

And now it's almost an hour later and maybe I should try to fall asleep again. I'm going to be a zombie at church tomorrow... actually today I guess. And I'll break my "every post needs a picture" rule since this is already so long.

music i love: when u love somebody.

This song just came up on my Pandora. I love it, even though I hate when people use "U" instead of "you". I will forgive them since the song is so sweet. 

Isn't "When you love somebody and you bite your tongue all you get is a mouthful of blood" such a great line?!

food i love: quicky red velvet whoopie pies.

Our apartment decided to host our own FHE tonight (in which we hand-picked the members of our family :). Our friend Joey gave an AMAZING lesson and we played a rousing game of Pit (yours truly was the Pit Master). And you can't have a Mormon gathering without treats, so Marti and Collin and I made red velvet whoopie pies. Because Marti loves red velvet cake. SO MUCH. We used this super easy recipe, though the consistency was more cookie-ish and less cake-ish than I think it should have been. Not sure if it was because of the recipe or because we didn't have an electric mixer. Either way, they were still quick and delectable.  

1 box red velvet cake mix

1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened to room temperature

2 eggs

1 8 oz. package cream cheese, softened to room temperature

1 lb. powdered sugar

1 tsp. vanilla

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Mix cake mix, 1/2 cup (1 stick) of butter and two eggs in electric mixer until combined.

3. Roll dough into balls and place onto baking sheet about two inches apart.

4. Bake for 10-12 minutes.

5. Meanwhile, cream 1/2 cup of butter, cream cheese and vanilla in electric mixer. Gradually add powdered sugar and mix until smooth.

6. When cookies have cooled, spread filling over one, then top with a similar-sized cookie.

lost shirt love.

If you know my little brother, you know that he's obsessed with LOST. He knows every detail of every single episode and pretty much falls asleep watching it nightly. So for Christmas I made him this shirt...

Well, I made him a similar shirt, I never actually got around to taking a picture of it, so this is just a mock-up done in photoshop. I don't have silk screening equipment anymore, so I made a freezer paper stencil (tutorial here), though it would have been A LOT quicker and easier to silk screen it. Anyways he LOVED it, which made me feel good. It can be really hard to think of meaningful/affordable gifts that people genuinely like. 

Oh, and if you aren't a LOST junkie, those numbers are from the show. You can read about them here.