Sugary Discovery

How did I not know about this?!:

"The penny candy store elevated to an art form"
— Gourmet Magazine

Last year when my cousin was getting married and wanted to have a candy bar at her wedding, we went to this ghetto "candy warehouse" here in Jersey--clearly we should have hopped on a train and visited this place instead!

Watch the panoramic video...it looks like a little slice of old time candy store heaven...

Diaper Bags

This blog has admittedly been slowing getting off the ground, but I'm resolving to post more often about what we're up to here at dirtsa (which sometimes isn't much). To start, we've received a few Pretty Prints Diaper Bag commissions in the past few months, so madre's been busy sewing for some moms and their new babes. We try to remember to take a picture of every custom diaper bag we make, for our own records and to build up a library and give a feel for how different the bags can look depending on the fabric. Here are some of the most recent creations:

Baby Sabo

Featuring fabrics:

Covington

and

Robin

Baby McArtney

Featuring fabrics:

Spring

and

Daisy

and most recently:

Babies Arenger - Twins!

For this we used

Jellybean, which unfortunately is no longer available as a diaper bag, but can be had as a cute GPS case!

Someday we would love to offer the designer fabrics we so love (such as Amy Butler or Heather Bailey), like those we used for cousin Sarah's bag...
...but right now it's just too expensive to keep a selection of those fabrics in stock, plus they drive up the cost of the bag. But maybe when we hit the big time we can have different fabric pricepoints! For now we'll work with what we've got and hopefully the orders will keep coming in, slowly but surely...

Up next: another finished quilt (!) and a special edition fall bag that we'll be selling on etsy. Stay tuned! I promise it won't be so long between posts...

Finished!

I recently finished this quilt as a wedding gift for Becca & Randy, friends I met during my time in grad school. Becca's favorite colors are blue and brown, so it only made sense to make her quilt in those colors. It's composed of only one quilt block, repeated in all different fabric configurations.  I found the block in Susan Briscoe's Japanese Quilt Blocks to Mix and Match. It's one of the easier blocks in the book; someday I'll get around to trying the harder stuff.

One Step Ahead

For about the past 8-10 years, my mom and I have discovered that we have an uncanny knack for being one step ahead of new trends. For example, when I was in high school we decided it would be fun to embroider a bunch of my tank tops with my initials and monogram. My friends liked it so much they brought over their tank tops and we did it for them, too. A few months later, I walked into Old Navy and found the store filled with tops with embroidered letters. Other brands soon followed suit.

Little things like this happen to us more than you would think. Twice this month we were flipping through magazines and found things strikingly similar to ideas of our own.

Exhibit A: Hamper redo.
We got a cheap hamper at Ikea for 99 cents. I decided that I would utilize the frame but make my own laundry case in a pretty fabric. I altered the original a bit by adding a top flap, to hide my dirty clothes. Well waddya know, flipping through Domino magazine this month my mom discovers a little blurb about doing exactly the same thing -- and look at the picture--the same thing right down to the top flap!

My hamper redo


Domino's hamper redo

Exhibit B: Quilting Fabric Choice
A few days later, my mom showed me this pillow from one of her sewing magazines. The fabrics are extremely similar to those I'm using in my latest quilt (which I'll post pictures of when I finish in the next couple weeks):

The frustrating thing, of course, is that other people are making money off these ideas. So in the end, being one step ahead leaves us one step behind...

Peanut Butter

Did you know there's an entire blog devoted to peanut butter?

Peggy over at The Peanut Butter Blog found our lunch bags on etsy and was kind enough to feature us in her post today! It's always fun to be recognized and hear that someone likes your product.

I always thought peanut butter was a worldwide thing [actually if I'm being honest I never actively thought about who has access to peanut butter, but I definitely assumed it was pretty standard] so I was more than a little surprised last year when we had some relatives from Sweden come visit and say they had never even heard of peanut butter. What do the Swedish school children eat for lunch? Baltic herring and boiled potatoes? Uffda! as my Scandinavian relatives might say...

My mother insisted they try a peanut butter & jelly sandwich before leaving America. She thinks PB&J is so good that if peanut butter were really expensive to make it would take on the cultural cache of caviar and be reserved for special occasions and fancy parties. It was the most extravagant wedding I've ever attended--they had a 40 piece orchestra, vases and vases of imported fresh flowers, and they had servers walking around with trays of peanut butter & jelly sandwiches!

The sandwich did not go over well with the Swedish relatives, though I thought it was cute that one of them said she did like the "marmalade" (Welch's Grape Jelly, it wishes it was as refined as marmalade). In any event, visit Peggy's blog to see our bags and learn more about peanut butter than you ever thought possible...and remember, choosy moms really do choose JIF. Creamy JIF to be exact.

The Eyes Have It

When I was in grad school I adopted a policy of "deferred maintenance" when it came to taking care of myself. My living stipend was very small, and my health insurance was comical--I think I paid $400 a year. Thankfully I never got sick but if I had I can't imagine that would have covered any more than a pillow for me to rest my head on as I died.

Now that I'm out of school and (somewhat) gainfully employed, I've been able to do some things I couldn't do before--exciting things like going to the dentist and the doctor(!) The past few months I've been taking care of my eyes. First I decided to get contacts. I'm not going to wear them everyday since I have astigmatism and the ones I got don't correct for it, but they'll be good to have on certain occasions.

Of course, when I went to order the contacts I checked out the glasses frames and found a pair that I simply had to have. My prescription hadn't changed too much, but I sat on my old pair of glasses a few years ago and they haven't been the same since, so I decided to treat myself to a new pair. My new frames are geek chic...the geek is the thick black frame, the chic is the awesome pink enamel and rhinestone detailing on the side. They are so me.


After taking care of my eyes from a medical standpoint I decided they deserved a little beautifying as well. I went to the MAC store (the cosmetics, not the computers) and had a fabulously gay man show me how to do use some beautiful green eyeshadows to make my brown eyes pop. It definitely takes longer in the morning to achieve the new look, so to make sure it lasts all day I invested in an eyeshadow primer that I saw recommended on another blog. The picture below is of my eye after a very sweaty 4th of July picnic, 14 hours after I applied my makeup...

The green shadow is still in place! (Though i definitely could have touched up my undereye concealer--eesh). Impressive primer, eh? It wasn't cheap, but you only need a little bit and the tube is big so it'll last a while. It's by Urban Decay, you can buy it straight from their website (click on the pic), but I got mine at Sephora.

I've also been to the dentist quite a bit in the past few months, but I'm thinking pictures of my fillings would not be as entertaining...

Gumball Lamp

To those who know me, it's no secret I love candy. I believe one of the major perks of adulthood is being able to buy and eat candy whenever you want; it almost makes up for the stress, bills, and lame jobs that come with growing up. (I said almost). I do try to exercise some restraint when it comes to candy, but it's just so good and so pretty (witness: my candy button quilt).

I'm sure my love of candy started very early on in life, probably sometime in toddlerhood, but it was definitely spurred on in elementary school by the gift of a gumball machine one Christmas. The machine was awesome, it looked just like this one, except it was aqua instead of black. I loved it, even toted it off to college with me. The summer between freshman and sophomore year I stored a bunch of stuff on campus; upon returning in the fall I was told there had been a freak fire that had hit only one room in the whole dorm--the room where my stuff was stored. My easily replaceable box of desk supplies somehow survived. The gumball machine? Melted beyond use :(

Despite better intentions, I never got around to replacing it until last year, when my trusty aunt (a fellow candy lover) saw a gumball machine at a garage sale for $5. A *classic* red one with a stand. It sits at the top of my stairs, the first thing you see when you enter my apartment. As my mom says "It sets a good tone -- let's people know: 'This is a fun place!'" (Actually, no one ever visits...but if anyone ever did, it would set that tone!)

So when I recently found yet another classic red gumball machine at a garage sale (this time for just $2), I had to buy it, but I needed to come up with a different way of using it. Thus was born: the gumball machine lamp. My mom came up with the adorable idea of making it "healthy" by filling it with fake berries. We used a retro cherry-print fabric for the shade, and edged it with some vintage green rickrack. The result is adorable. And delectable. But I'm not sure what I'll do if I happen upon another bargain gumball machine at a garage sale...