I’ll be heading to the Fred Flare California Dreamin’ sale in San Francisco this weekend. Yay for sales!

A new desire – L’Occitane Verbena Harvest. But, the verbena fragrance does not come in the solid perfume any longer, darn. I would have been more likely to buy that. As it is the $36 price tag only prompts me to spray myself when I pass the shop instead of buying it.

One of my favorite things, these itty bitty cuticle nippers save me from lots of frustration. Skip the too-large ones you can find at places like drugstores and Sephora and look for them in those We Have A Hairdresser On Staff Just So We Can Sell Beauty Products types of places.

Would it be super weird to start a fan club for a fabric? Because I have a serious fan boy crush on the pink version of Bagatelle (as seen here in the red version at the most stupendous Reprodepot Fabrics). I even have a stalking list:

• loobylu
• dorm pillow of the daughter on sopranos, her roommate as well
• Maybelline commerical, in a skirt
• bag held by Dharma on Dharma and Greg rerun
• button at Sew Wrong
• episode (credited) of Martha Stewart Living, which I taped over a year ago and only got around to watching last night (Martha called it “Marimekko”) – it was probably in the Kids magazine as well

Anyone wanna join?

I did something I rarely do, I ranted, at length, it’s over here at Sew Wrong. It is long, and full of details interesting only to myself. You have been warned.

Food notes – the Frozen Mocha Toffee-Crunch Terrine turned out delicious, although not necessarily pretty. It was fun to make as well, I felt like I was getting to defile foreign cheese. Thanks to everyone who gave me tips on finding the Nabisco Famous Chocolate Wafers. Tofu fries from the frozen then unfrozen tofu were yummy, definitely a different texture. I liked them better, Scott didn’t like them as well. Then again, this time I burned them.

p.s. We discovered that a jar of spaghetti sauce works as a cheap tool to pound chicken flat.

I improvised a tofu strainer using this Ikea ice cube tray

I have another one to add to the Woolworks list of knitting references in books. From The Once and Future King by T.H. White:

Wart dragged himself off to the tower room, where Merlyn was busy knitting himself a woollen night-cap for the winter.

“I cast off two together at every other line,” said the magician, “but for some reason it seems to end too sharply. Like an onion. It is the turning of the heel that does one, every time.”

. . .

“Oh, Merlyn,” exclaimed the Wart, “please give me something to do, because I feel so miserable. Nobody wants me for anything today, and I just don’t know how to be sensible. It rains so.”

“You should learn to knit.”

. . .

“That’s good, because I wanated to mention that you have been knitting your beard into the night-cap for three rows now.”

. . .

“What didn’t you tell me before?”

“I wanted to see what would happen.”

“You run a grave risk, my boy,” said the magician, “of being turned into a piece of bread, and toasted.”

With this he slowly began to unpick his beard, muttering to himself meanwhile and taking the greatest precautions not to drop a stitch.

Just a small note to say thank you to everyone who got stuff at the garage sale this weekend, if you sent payment via PayPal your package was in the mail as of 11 a.m. today, yippee!

This weekend I went shopping to gather ingredients for the Frozen Mocha Toffee-Crunch Dessert, the desert which is on the cover of Everyday Food Issue #2. I went to two stores and was unable to find either chocolate wafer cookies* or toffee. Seeing as I’m unwilling to make my own wafer cookies and toffee right now I gave up. It was pretty sad. I started to thaw some tofu to check out that miracle frozen tofu texturing thing, but then we went out to eat. I’ll try it out tonight.

* I’m assuming they should be kind of like Nilla Wafers? The closest I could come would be to buy Oreos and scrape off the icing. This didn’t seem right somehow.

Not Martha turned two recently!

The winner of the first ReusaChallenge is Vanessa with a tropical lamp! Congratulations! It actually reminds me of that lamp in the beginning of Joe Vs. The Volcano. Jennie’s challenge was to find a use for those empty plastic cd spools. Check out the fake awards Rachel made too! If you havn’t seen it yet the Reusablog has some great stuff going on. My favorite is still the bread bag closure tab thingy used to mark your place in clear tape.

I found a really great quilt at the Salvation Army yesterday. There were two rows full of what appeared to be brand new quilts, a charity drive perhaps? But this one was made from scraps of those old polyester clothes. I really don’t need it, but it was hard to keep myself from buying it:

Remember that Williams-Sonoma foaming hand soap container I was so excited about a while ago? It stopped working, the pump would get stuck in the down position. When when I opened it up to investigate a tiny ball bearing popped out and hurled itself down the sink drain. So I bought some Dial Complete foaming hand soap. The good news is that the top of the Dial container screws right off. This is good news because the Dial soap smells so horrid. It smells like an airplane bathroom. You know, that smell that makes you feel bad for all the people sitting in the back ten rows of the plane. Dare I assume it’s the active ingredient Triclosan? So, I poured it out, rinsed it really thoroughly, added two or three tablespoons of the good grapefruit hand soap, filled it with water, shook it*, and now we we’re back to where we started. Also, the inside of the Dial foaming mechanism appears to be pretty much the same as the one from Williams-Sonoma, so I can scavenge the ball bearing and put it in the original pump, assuming I ever get it to not stick.

* These are the directions from the WS hand pump.

We went to Ikea last night to get me a small desk to use for sewing, and we grabbed some other stuff while we were there of course. They have a bunch of bowls which come in the West Elm lime green and deep plum, we got a Groggy ice crusher and even some of the 7-11 slurpee straws. After a brief rendevous with the ice crusher I have my doubts, but I’ll report back on how it does.

This really freaky thing happened to us last night on our way to Ikea. I know I complain about the traffic around here, but this wins as the Worst Ever.

There is rumor that I will be holding a small online garage sale this Saturday at 12 noon Pacific time. There is another rumor that I will be selling some of my over-zealously stashed Ginger Altoids at said garage sale.

Alex is also having a garage sale which is going on right now, and to be honest her stuff is much better than mine. And if you get the Kings Quest Mask of Eternity game I’ll let you know how you can make the main character walk around wearing nothing but a fig leaf. No really.