Etsy News

Just the headlines!

• I am delighted to announce that the giveaway I participated in at Fantabulously Frugal has been won by Terecille of New Jersey -- Congratulations Terecille! Her bobby pins went out in the mail earlier this week.

• new bobby pins are in my shop! 

• I sold three items this week -- what a rush!  One to a friend, and two to a lovely woman I have not met who runs a letterpress company and makes gorgeous things. In fact, she heard about me solely because I left several very enthusiastic comments on the giveaway she is running right now: $50 in letterpress products or in a gift certificate to Apple, MyFonts.com, or Amazon: go check out Dingbat Press's blog! So there has been lots of packaging and careful final finishing of my little fabric creations before I send them out into the wide world. And another friend, Megan, who modelled these bobby pins and this collage pin, is loving the bobby pin set I gave her as a thank you, and is going to buy more!

Recommendations-- funny, fierce, and friendly.

I want to share with you some of the things that have made me happy today, both of which came from friends I don't see a lot of, but who I stay in touch with on facebook -- people might be skeptical about facebook, but for me, it has allowed me to maintain relationships that I most likely would have lost otherwise.

My old friend Mia Antonelli, who I met in high school when we were in Drama together, has become a gorgeous, talented, professional actress. She has an amazingly funny youtube series called "The Glide." Each episode is just a few minutes long and features Mia as Rebecca and Kamen Edwards as Barrett, and they are two DJs in the Delilah tradition. It's super hilarious and they just put a new episode up!  Highly recommended viewing. A link to their first episode is below, and you really should watch several, as their relationship builds in hilarious ways:

This second recommendation comes via my friend Sean...

Skiing in Tahoe for Spring Break

Found on Flickr --  by Scott Thompson

I am so excited! My friend Kevin, a whip-smart fellow grad student in English, has invited me and some friends to stay with him for a five days at his boyfriend's gorgeous house in Tahoe. Yay Kevin and his retired-at-30-and-bought-a-house-in-Tahoe-because-he-invested-ridiculously-well-in-the-tech-boom boyfriend!

I haven't been skiing since I was like 16, when my mother sweetly took me, my high school boyfriend, and my best friend up to the mountains. My family used to go up to the snow every couple years before that, so I am hoping it's going to be more like riding a bicycle and less like html coding, which I am truly slow and stupid at when I haven't done it for several years. It will be interesting, to say the least, to see if I can stay upright while charging down mountains. I love the thrill of speed on the slopes, and I will just have to not eat much in order to be able to pay for the ski rental and lift tickets for as many days as possible.  Otherwise I'll have to go cross-country skiing, which is cheaper but  no fun at all, as in my opinion it's like walking, but harder, whereas downhill is more like

wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Best Friend-Book-Internet Coincidence Ever

I am so excited!  To begin at the beginning (and thereby build d  r  a m  a) ... My friend Genevieve, who works for Google Books and who was an English major with me back east in college, has a super cool blog that I like to read as often as possible. This girl is one of the funniest people I have ever met (we were in an improv group together in college, and I spent most of our performances trying not to break out laughing at her utter hilarity), and a great writer, and she does cool stuff to link publishers and libraries with Google Books, AND she finds really great things on the internet, which she posts at her blog, piglets and fishes.

This is where the amazing part comes in. Genevieve posted the best video today, which I am embedding below, too. I loved it. I watched the whole thing, all the way to the credits. And THEN I saw that the people who created the video are the super creative, totally talented, artistic-from-head-to-toe couple Lisa Blonder Ohlenkamp and Sean Ohlenkamp.

And then I may have made a little shriek of glee, because Lisa and I went to high school together, were in loads of classes together, mock trial together, etc etc, and I consider her one of my oldest, closest friends, and supremely gifted into the bargin. She and Sean moved to Toronto last year, where PDK and I visited them in September (insert long story here involving PDK's cousin's wedding and a Mustang convertible). Now Lisa and her husband, who is an artist and graphic designer himself, get to share a studio and be creative together. Lisa has a blog, Blonderland, where she shares her art and the secrets of yummy vegan cooking, and sells her drawings and crocheted creations on etsy under the name blonderland as well: http://www.etsy.com/shop/Blonderland/. I love the weird wiles of the internet that have allowed one of my favorite people find another of my favorite people, and then I get to bask in the sunshiny happiness of it all, and now so do you!

OK, now for their awesome, bibliophile-pleasing video

Last weekend -- mushrooms, pizza, celebration!

So Saturday we took a break and drove up to Los Alamos with our friends Justin and Cat. Los Alamos is a tiny, tiny town about 60 miles north of Santa Barbara, and all the storefronts on its main street look like they were originally built by the prospectors who came to California for gold in '49. Bedford Winery was having a wine tasting in which they served their wines alongside fresh picked, local wild mushrooms. All of it was so delicious, and the day was so, so beautiful -- pure blue skies, no wind, and balmy. My favorite wines were Bedford's Chardonnay, which wasn't oaked and so had a much lighter taste than most chardonnays, and their Reisling. Generally, I would say I preferred Bedford's whites to their reds. And the food was awesome! The winemaker and his friends were cooking out behind the winery and new food kept coming out through the whole three hours of the wine-tasting: brie baked with mushrooms in a pastry shell, flatbread topped with yellow foot mushrooms or with black trumpets, and chanterelles, chanterelles, chanterelles everywhere.

After ten different wines and heaps of mushrooms, we walked down the street to the legendary Full of Life Flatbreads restaurant. On the way we must have passed five antique stores, plus the only gas station I will ever describe as "cute."

All the flatbreads that Full of Life serves are handmade, totally local in all ingredients, and baked in a wood-fired oven right in the room you eat. We were still so full from the tasting, but we dug seep and managed to eat delicious pizza(s). I don't know how we did it.

This is what we had (we did half-and-half on each of 2 flatbreads, so we got to try 4 toppings):

• Oven Roasted Santa Barbara Squid and Chorizo
• Wild-Gathered Chanterelle Flatbread (can you really ever have enough chanterelles? No, I didn't think so.)
• Brett’s Chili Verde Flatbread
• Central Coast Sausage Flatbread
• Smoke-Dried Tomato and Mushroom Flatbread (ok, this mushroom obsession is admittedly getting a bit ridiculous)

The very nice man baking our pizza.

Aaaaaaand..... then on Sunday, PDK finished his dissertation! Much celebration ensued. I, on the other hand, almost finished a first run of editing an interview I conducted with a poet about two years ago. Small steps.