• Baking and Cooking

    Chocolate Chip Scones

    I honestly haven’t been doing much baking since I landed in this new apartment last year. The oven has baffled me. Because I’m a pretty good baker. Since I learned to drive, I’ve spent every christmas helping my grandmother – who is the best baker I know who doesn’t own a bakery, her older sister being the only person to come in at a tie with her – make our family kolachi and cookies and generally learning the “tricks of the trade.” After ten years of this – and I don’t mean to sound cocky or full of myself even though I’m about to – I know what I’m doing.…

  • Jewelry,  Life,  Purchases,  Travel

    Arts on the Square

    Saturday me and the boys drove down to Scranton (NEPA’s largest major city center) to attend the 2nd annual Arts on the Square, which is essentially a gigantic craft fair that wraps all the way around Scranton’s Courthouse Square. The event is organized by ScrantonMade, a group that does an amazing job promoting the arts in the area and which has made some amazing strides in the last couple years. I hadn’t known about the event before a few weeks ago when my favorite etsy store, Tiny Galaxies (who’s owner I just happen to know and love to pieces – I promise the fact that it’s my favorite is unrelated…

  • Life,  School School School

    Motivation

    Just a (very) quick update to let everyone know what I’ve been up to. This week I’ve been… …planning: for the semester! I’ve let myself get very caught up in course planning this past week. My schedule is a little different this semester – one of my courses is a longer class period than I’m used to, so I’ve got quite a lot of lecture shuffling and schedule adjusting to do on top of the usual revising I do every year. …working on: a few more text-heavy posts for here. They always take me a little bit longer to write because of the obsessive compulsive drive to revise anything eight…

  • Pysanky

    Sheeptastic Egg

    Today I have an egg I did a while back with the intention of gifting it to my LYS owner, but alas, it was not meant to be. It just turned out with too many mistakes. I ended up with some dye leakage underneath the wax for some reason – you can see it in the middle of the photo above. That pattern was supposed to mimic the look of a knitted fabric, but something happened somewhere along the way. Maybe my wax application hadn’t been thick enough (although my grandmother is able to use the thinnest lines I’ve ever seen and they stick through several dye baths), or… well,…

  • Home Dec Love,  Links,  Making Do

    Filling Empty Wall Space

    I’ve been on a home-dec kick lately. Or rather, I’ve been on a home-dec kick on PINTEREST lately. Because actually decorating the apartment requires money – at least a little – and money is exactly what I should not – no, CAN’T – spend right now. But anyway, I’ve been specifically concerned lately about our surplus of empty wall space. There’s just a lot of white, blank walls in our apartment, and it’s starting to get to me a little bit. So I’ve been looking for ideas about how to decorate using as little money as humanly possible, and Pinterest (of course) came through in spades. I figured I’d share…

  • Life,  Nail Polish Love,  Pet Related Posts

    Mani Monday: Deborah Lippmann Across the Universe

    So last week I helped my mom take our big galoot of a labrador, Rusalka, to the vet for her annual check-up. She’s a lab, and she’s highly excitable and STRONG. It always helps to have an extra body on hand for these things, particularly if the vet ends up with an emergency and we end up having to wait a little bit longer than our usual five minutes. Well, guess what happened? The vet ended up with not one but TWO emergencies around our appointment time and we ended up waiting for almost an hour with our big, strong, and by that point completely cracked out blonde lab. She…

  • Book Love,  Life

    Torn…

    So yesterday I went grocery shopping, and as I was passing by the book section in our Wegman’s (love Wegman’s) I ended up spending literally 10 minutes fighting with myself about whether to buy and read The Fault in Our Stars. I kept picking it up, and putting it down again. Picking it up, reading the back cover, and putting it down again. Picking it back up, putting it in my cart, walking three steps before shaking my head and putting it back. In the end I ended up leaving without it because I remembered my no-book pledge and forced myself to just walk away. But I’m still torn about…

  • Knitting and Crochet

    Quick WIP Check In: Liesel

    Just a quick check in on my current WIP: My Liesel Scarf in Manos del Uruguay Wool Clasica 110 – Stellar. I’m almost done with the first of my two skeins, and the scarf is only about a foot and a half long (it’s shown with my 6 inch sewing gage for scale). I’m still worried that both skeins are not going to make a scarf long enough for my preferences – even once blocked, and despite being more than the yardage called for in the pattern. But I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see what happens. Progress has admittedly been slow now that the weather has warmed,…

  • Nail Polish Love

    Mani Monday – 4th(ish) of July Edition

    Just a quick look at the mani I did for the holiday weekend. It’s pretty much the accent nails from my Winter Olympics Mani, only on allllll the nails. Overall it was not a great idea – I’m clearly not as adept at keeping lines straight and making sure the tape is properly sealed when I have to do every single nail instead of just the accent nails. The colors I used also required much thicker coats to be opaque as well. Overall doing this mani was a MAJOR pain in the ass, honestly. And with the humidity and heat the way it’s been, took for-freaking-ever to dry. But in…

  • Life,  Lists,  Making Do

    Mid-year New Years’ Resolution Check-in

    Well, we’re officially in July. Six months have passed; I’m not really sure where the time went. It feels like it was only yesterday when I was making my New Years’ Resolutions, and already we’re halfway to new ones. So I guess it’s about time to check in and see how I’ve been doing. Let’s start with #1: (I’m going to do this from least successful to most, so ignore the numbers in the images.) So far, not so good. I did a great job in January, but as soon as the semester hit, that was the end of that. That said, I’ve decided to be realistic and just accept…