Hi!! I’m back! Sorry for the abrupt break from blogging, I didn’t intend to take a month-long hiatus from this blog, it just happened! Thanks to everyone who inquired what was going on and wondering where I’ve been. I’m alive and well! Life is pretty crazy and full these days. I had no idea I was gone for so long! I really enjoy blogging, but keeping up this blog takes me 20 hrs a week and, frankly, with work and traveling and a pretty huge project that I’ve been working on, it was nice to take a little breather! What’s the new huge project, you ask? I can’t reveal it just yet, it’s a secret for now! But its keeping me plenty busy, keeps me up late into the nights and saps me of most my energy. It’s the biggest project I’ve ever worked on and I’m super excited about it! Can’t wait to share it with you all!

Even though I took a break from blogging, my love for bicycles hasn’t waned. I was shopping at Target last week and stumbled on this beautiful bicycle pillow!

Lord knows I do not need anymore pillows, I have way too many and most of them are in storage now because there just isn’t enough space on the couch or our bed.  Plus, I usually choose to save money and sew my own custom pillows (like these, these, these, and these), but I’m a sucker for anything with a bicycle on it so it had to come home with me! The gray matches our gray couch perfectly!!  I also walked out of Target with a bunch of other things I didn’t need like two picture frames, cute gift wrap and a box of gold fish crackers. Sigh, Target is my weakness!

This past Mother’s Day, I’ve had a new appreciation for all the love and sacrifice moms everywhere make for their children.  I don’t know how mothers do it, they are my heroes!   I’ve been really blessed with an awesome mother who has always made sure that my siblings and I had the best of everything.  She always put our needs above her own and our childhood was happy and carefree because of it.  I hope one day to be as good of a mom as she is!  Anyways, I was looking for a card to send her last Sunday and found this cute bicycle card!

It was perfect for her! Thanks, mom, for everything you do!

Anyways, I hope to be back blogging more regularly now!   Posts may not be as frequent but I’ll try not to drop off the face of the earth again! Thanks for bearing with me and for reading along!!

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My love for bicycles must be legendary because I got a couple bicycle things for my birthday this past week!  I think all my friends know how much I love anything with bicycles on it!  I love bicycles because they are  fun, whimsical, summery, happy and remind me of the care-free afternoons spent riding amongst the orange groves as a child.  Bicycling is also one of the few hobbies that Jeff and I enjoy doing together, thats why we had a bicycle-themed wedding and rode into our reception on a tandem bike!!

You know what’s sad though? Jeff’s locked bike was stolen out of the garage last month!  Darn San Francisco thugs!  I shake my fist at you!  Luckily, the thief didn’t steal my bike, which was locked to his. I guess the thief figured he would’ve looked pretty silly riding down the mean streets of San Fran on a pink beach cruiser with a whicker basket, bell and rearview mirror (yup, my bike is all decked out!). Jeff’s blue Trek was a better choice.  I know we can always get Jeff a new bike but the theft made me sad though because we bought our bikes together  in New Hampshire when were dating and have so many happy memories riding together around the Charles River.  I drew our bikes on our wedding invitations and they were the inspiration for our entire wedding.

Anyways, look at these cute bicycle glasses my old roommate S sent me in the mail!!! Aren’t they adorable?! I squealed when I opened up the package:

I love them!!  The package also came with a bag of my favorite cookies. Thank you, S!

I also got these super cute bicycle birthday cards from my friends J and M:

Also yesterday, my friend sent me this email from Paper Source:

(image from Paper Source)

They have a whole line of bicycle stuff at Paper Source now!! And its all so CUTE!!  Who knew bicycles were so trendy now? Click on the image above to see all the bicycle-inspired stuff that they are selling!  I want the apron!! And the streamers to add to my already over-accessorized beach cruiser!!!

Several people have also pointed out to me this adorable Bike Lane dress from Anthropologie:

(image from Anthropologie)

If it weren’t so pricey, I would totally get it!! Buy it here.

I love seeing bike stuff everywhere!!  Whenever I spot anything with a bicycle on it, I shriek, jump up and down and have to point it out to people around me, even if its random strangers!

Anyways, sorry I haven’t been posting a lot of crafty things or tutorials lately.  I started a new job last month which I am grateful for but I commute almost 3 hours a day, which is totally kicking my tush.  Everyday when I sit wasting time away on the train, I lament “I can be spending all this time sewing!!” Hopefully I can get some time this weekend to use my new sewing machine, I have a few projects up my sleeve that I want to finish and show you guys.  Have a Happy Easter, everyone!!! Thanks for reading!

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Look what I got for my birthday! A new sewing machine!  My awesome sister and my friend N pitched in to get this for me!  I’ve been sewing with a simple Singer Prelude which had all the basic sewing functions and met all my sewing needs for the past 6 years.   Every where I moved (I lived in 5 apartments over the past 6 years!) I brought my trusty little sewing machine with me and I made many many big projects with it.  It wasn’t until I used my sister’s brand new fancy sewing machine that I realized what I was missing out on!   Her machine didn’t shake and rattle the table and groan like mine did!!  I found out how much more enjoyable and quick it was to sew when I wasn’t constantly untangling the bobbin and re-threading the needle.  I didn’t realize how much time I wasted de-tangling threads, cursing and ripping out uneven seams!!   So, I decided it was time for an upgrade.

I decided to get the Singer Quantum Stylist 9960, isn’t she a beauty?

I settled on this particular  model because I didn’t need a fancy professional industrial machine, I wanted something more middle of the road. I like Singers and this one got great reviews on Amazon and had all the functions that I was looking for.  It had 13 automatic button hole makers, an automatic needle threader, a thread cutter and over 600 built in stitch patterns- none of which my old machine had.  The best part was when I was looking over all the embroidery options, I spotted #20- a bicycle!! It’s like this machine was meant for me!!

My friend N came over this past weekend to help me figure out how to use it. If it was just me by myself, I probably wouldn’t have taken it out of its box for weeks. With her reading the manuals and me fiddling with all the options, we had the machine threaded and running in no time.  We had a lot of fun discovering all the functions and playing around with all the electronic programmable features. I was amazed by all the options for embroidering letters and numbers. I tried embroidering my name a few times, it was surprisingly easy!

With my new sewing machine, I churned out 6 pairs of pajama pants for my friends on Saturday!  I would never have been able to do that so quickly with my old machine!  It was so smooth and quiet, too, I was amazed!!!!

Here is a side by side picture of both my sewing machines:

You can see how much more advanced my new sewing machine is!  I promised Jeff that I would sell my old sewing machine, so if anyone wants it, let me know!!!

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(Photo taken by DT)

Happy Birthday to my identical twin, wombmate and favorite person in the whole wide world!!!!! (and yes, this means its my birthday, too!)  Every year on this day, I get to reflect on how blessed I am to have a lifelong, built-in best friend from birth.   The chances of being an identical twin is only 1 in 250 so we really cherish this special relationship that we have.  I’m so lucky to have a sister who knows everything about me and who shares so many of the same interests as I do!

Every year, no matter where we are living, we always make sure we spend our actual birthday together.  The day is a celebration of our sisterhood!!  Last year, we met up on the slopes of Breckenridge and this year, my sister, her husband, their dog and another good friend N drove up from LA to spend the weekend with us in San Francisco.  Jeff wins hubby of the year for planning a great weekend filled with all our favorite things- good girl friends, fabric shopping, sewing, ramen, boba, antiquing, indian food, crafting and pastries.  On Saturday, we went fabric shopping with a group of my closest girl friends and came back to my sweatshop my apartment to sew pj pants for everyone, including my friend’s 3 year old son!  (He was so happy to pic out his dinosaur printed flannel fabric!) We ended the night with a sushi-making pajama party.

(photo from my friend M)

I also got a cool birthday present that I’ve been pining away for!! It may or may not be another crafting machine to add to my collection! hehehe.  I’ll share about it tomorrow!

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Remember one of my New Year’s Resolutions was to learn how to use my new serger? I wrote more about my serger aspirations here.  I excitedly and somewhat naively thought that once I got my serger, I would be churning out all sorts of apparel. I imagined myself making all these fancy shirts and cute dresses, I really thought that I would be an emerging fashion designer and all these people would be complimenting me on my fashion forward clothes as I walked the streets of San Francisco.  HA! Psh!  It took me awhile to even muster up enough courage to open the box and learn to thread all four spools of thread.  I watched the instructional DVD a few times but even with all the diagrams on the machine, there was one confusing thread that I just couldn’t get right.  My friend had to came over and threaded it for me and I was finally all set up.

For my first project, I decided to try to make a simple tank top.  I thought it’d be easy enough. I had some  yellow and white striped knit fabric leftover from my circle scarf and decided to trace one of my tank tops to make a pattern:

My plan was to just serge the bottom hem, then the sides and top shoulders together.  In theory, it shouldn’t have been too hard.  But what started as a loose flowy long tank slowly started turning into a short midriff as I kept messing up the bottom hem and cutting it shorter and shorter.  Then one of the needles hit a pin and the needle tip broke off. Oops!!!

I couldn’t find any info in the instruction manual on how to change out a needle or even what kind of needle I should get to replace it so I stuffed the whole machine back into its box and shoved the whole wretched thing behind a bunch of boxes.

And that was my first serging experience. Fail.

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I’ve been saving this 4 feet x 18 inch scrap piece of wood for almost a year.  It’s leftover wood from the back of this wood mirror frame that I made last year.  It’s nothing fancy, just a piece of cheap plywood, but I knew I could use it for something one day.  Jeff almost threw it away when we moved across the country last summer, but I insisted on bringing it with us to San Francisco.  He thought I was nutso (again) and because we had nowhere to store it in our small city apartment, it was stuffed behind our washer/dryer for the past half year and forgotten.   Because we are renting our apartment, I haven’t really put much effort in to decorate it all that much.  Our walls are pretty bare so I unearthed the scrap piece of wood and decided to try painting the scrap wood and hang it up in our living room.  It’d be a cheap way to decorate!   I decided on the words “All You Need is Love” because I thought it was a sweet sentiment.

First, I spray painted an even coat of white primer on the wood:

Since I’m terrible at freehand painting, I used my silhouette machine to cut out the giant letters for “LOVE” (with a giant heart for the “o”) out of black vinyl and stuck it onto the surface:

I wanted a distressed, uneven look so instead of using paintbrushes, I used a kitchen sponge to add more texture to the paint. I mixed up different shades of gray paint and just dabbed all over the surface, with darker gray around the edges:

Then I peeled off the black vinyl letters which left a white relief of the letters behind.  My handwriting is actually pretty similar to the font used for the “All you need is” letters, but I didn’t trust myself to paint it freehand, so I found a font that was similar to my writing and printed out the words on my printer. I taped the print outs all together, placed it where I wanted them to be and traced the letters onto the wood canvas using graphite paper:

The graphite paper leaves a pencil-like outline behind:

And then all I had to do was paint in between the lines:

I let the paint dry overnight and used wood glue to hang 2 picture hooks to the back of the wood and hung it up!

Ta-da!!  It’s not perfect but it makes me smile whenever I see it!  The whole project cost me $0 since I used materials that I already had. That makes me smile even more!!

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Happy Spring, everyone!! It seems like people all over the country have been enjoying warm weather the past few days!  (Everyone, except for those of us that live in San Fran!)   I’m so happy its finally spring time!!  One of the things that I look forward to the most this time of year is buying Cadbury mini eggs!!  These little bite-sized pieces of chocolate are my favorite!  They only hit the stores once a year around Easter time and I get giddy with excitement whenever I get my hands on my first bag of the year.  Growing up, I loved the big caramel Cadbury eggs, but nowadays the mini little ones with the crunchy shell have me hooked. I can’t stop eating them!  There are all these knock-off brands, but Cadbury is the best.  In theory, they are kind of like giant egg-shaped M&Ms but I don’t know what it is, they taste so much better.

They also have them in dark chocolate, too!

I’ve been eating these by the handful!! How can you resist?

With the boxes of girl scout cookies that we got and now these bags of candy and some Easter jellybeans, we are all set in the sweets department for awhile!  Anyone else addicted to these?!

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One of the places I miss most about living in Cambridge, MA is my favorite bakery there.  Those of you who know me know which bakery I am talking about because I can and will go on and on to anyone who would listen about how good their treats were.  They also happen to serve the BEST homemade iced chai and I’m a sucker for good home brewed chai.   We were sad when we moved away last summer for many reasons, but one of things that I mourn most is their famous crinkle fudge cookies.   I can’t say the exact name of the cookies, but let me just say, they will ROCK YOUR WORLD!!!

My sister, who being my identical twin, not surprisingly pretty much loves everything that I do, also quickly became a fan of these cookies and any time she came to visit me in Boston or I came back home to LA, we would stock up on these cookies for her.  One time I caught her saving a package of these cookies for over 5 months!  I don’t know how they lasted that long, but she would just break off and eat little bits of it and let the chocolate melt in her mouth.  Luckily, she doesn’t have to do that anymore because we got the top secret recipe!!!  A good friend, who knew how much my sister adored the cookies, asked the chef for the recipe and the chef was kind enough to print it out for her!  I don’t think bakeries would typically do this for you, my friend is quite pretty and charming, so we feel really special to be entrusted with the secret recipe.  We were absolutely GIDDY with excitement when the sweet and thoughtful friend gifted it to us!! This friend wins the Friend of the Year award!!!  One afternoon my sis and I decided to try out the secret recipe.  We were a little skeptical that they would turn out as good as the real ones, we weren’t sure if we’d be able to replicate it.

Surprisingly, the results were just like the real thing!!!!  Soft, chewy, dark chocolate crinkle cookies:

Sorry, this is almost cruel of me to post pictures but no recipe. I don’t feel like I can in good conscious give it out. Hope you forgive me for this tease!

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The most anticipated event of the spring, March Madness, came to a quick and heartbreakingend for my family this weekend when our beloved Blue Devils were bounced from the first round of the tourney on Friday in a stunning upset.  What the heck happened?!  It was over before we knew it!!  I’m still getting over the shock of it.  My brother, my sister and I all went to Duke so everyone in our family, including my parents, are huge college basketball fans.  In fact, you will find no bigger Duke fan than my mom, she knows more about basketball than I do!!  It’s so cute!!

We’ve had a season full of highs and lows but us Dukies will always be diehard believers.  Alumns will always bleed Duke blue forever.   Some of my Duke friends from college, who ended up marrying each other, just had their second daughter.  Their oldest two year old daughter has already been groomed to be a Duke fan, so I decided to make both of them Duke Blue Devil capes.  (The Duke Blue Devil mascot wears a cape as part of his costume.)  I’ve made similar superhero capes before (see these superman capes and my “reversible cape” tutorial here) so I was able to whip these out pretty quickly:

I used leftover blue material from my previous capes, bought some blue bias tape that happened to match the fabric perfectly and used my silhouette machine to cut out the Duke logo and iron it on.  They are a fun little thing for the girls to wear when they watch the basketball games or they could also be used as bibs or aprons!

And lest you think these capes are just for kids, here is proof that adults can wear them, too!

How amazing are my parents?!  This is actually a picture from last year’s tournament.  They were getting ready to cheer on Duke at the sweet sixteen game when they played near my hometown. My mom and dad got all into the spirit and “duked” themselves out with face paint, shirts, hats and signs.  My sister made them adult-sized capes!!!  I wish I had a picture of the backside because their capes were amazing, they had the logo sewn on the back.  My sister actually sewed 4 capes, one for herself and her hubby, too!  They got so much attention at the stadium, people were cheering and high-fiving my dad.  He even got on the radio because of all the attention he got from his get up!  Haha, my family is so funny and quirky and I love it!

I’m looking forward to a Duke comeback next year!! go duke!!

Here are some other baby outfits I made for future Duke students (click on picture to view):

And here is the tutorial I made last year on how to make reversible superhero capes (click on picture to view):

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Happy Pi Day, everyone!!  Do you remember all these cute washi tape rolls that I got when I was in Japan in January?  They are so pretty and precious, I almost don’t want to use them up!

A reader asked me to share some projects that involve these Japanese masking tapes so here is one way that I’ve been using my washi tape.   I like to wrap my gifts with recycled brown paper bags (so eco-friendly and San Franciscan!) and the washi tape is a quick and easy way to spruce up the otherwise plain gift wrapping.  It’s fun to come up with cute designs that pertain to the recipient.  Below is an example of a gift I gave a 3 year old who loves the ocean and sea creatures:

Another fun way is to decorate the wrapping by spelling out the recipient’s name instead of using a gift tag:

You can spruce up gift bags, too!!

Isn’t these colorful polka dotted washi tape so cute?

I was recently browsing through one of my favorite stores, The Paper Source, and found that they sold these exact same polka dotted tape there!!  If you don’t want to go all the way to Japan, you can buy both rolls here online for $11.50 at The Paper Source. I also found the tape much cheaper here for $4.  Cutetape.com is a very affordable online store for washi tape and they have a great selection! It’s cheaper buying it from them than to buy it in Japan!

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