the sad scone debacle of 2009: or how i learned to stop estimating and love the blob.

yet another jobby job i had a very long time ago was as a barista at an evil barnes and noble starbucks. i cried hysterically on my way home every day for the month that i lasted there. serving soccer moms their half-caf double skinny extra foam sugar free caramel mach-cha-chito (AT 157 DEGREES) and high school girls whose speech consists of 70% giggles made my life a living hell. the only bright spot, the only thing that made this torture bearable, was the blueberry scones. delicious little flaky rounds of soft and not-too-sweet fruity perfection. starbucks has since changed their blueberry scone to some sort of hard and oatmealy thing that is a sad reminder of the impermanence of beauty. no longer sweet and light, it is something that looks like it would come out of my own oven, which i should have realized before i tried to actually make them in my own oven. i'm not going to hypothesize on where exactly i went wrong here, only assume that when the recipe says that the dough should resemble biscuit dough that they are not playing some sort of april fool's joke on you. you cannot always eyeball your cups and teaspoons. or perhaps i should have cut my fruit into pieces rather than having golf ball sized strawberries in there. but none of this explains why the whole damn thing had the consistency of a bready pancake and tasted like a fruit cobbler. maybe the pancake thing, but damn. aren't recipes, like rules, meant to be broken? sigh, the search continues for a bakery that holds the perfect scone.

so distraught by my baking disaster, i could only boil up some store bought gnocchi and toss in in some vodka sauce with chicken for lunch. i am not sure that i have ever had homemade gnocchi and am terrified of making my own, having heard so many defeated tales of an afternoon's worth of effort dissolving in a pot of water. but i think i'm going to try it anyway. this recipe and this one look forward and fool-proof, though that doesn't necessarily mean anything. if i get truly ambitious and brave i could try the sweet potato gnocchi over here. if anyone had any gnocchi advice (or anecdotes), send 'em on this-a way. stay tuned.

scrap and button flora. no fauna.

eons and eons ago, i worked in a furniture store. not a stuffy, everything-comes-in-dark-cherry-and-chintz furniture store, but not anything too modern either. let's say it was a furniture store for young, hip families who wanted to push tradition's boundaries and still wanted something comfy for mom to sit in when she came to visit. but that's not the point. the point is, it closed and i ended up with shit tons of fabric swatches. not really enough of any one piece to do anything grand with, but they were big enough to make some fun little accessories or patches (we were supposed to ship them back to the company, but i did what any rebellious crafter worth her fiskars would do and stole all of them). by now most of them have big chunks cut out, but i still have tons of scraps left so i decided to make a "flower" pin for my little grandma cardigan that i picked up the other day. it's pretty self explanatory. cut out some gradually sized circles of coordinating (or clashing, if you prefer) fabrics, layer them, and sew a button in the middle. i hand stitched around the edges for a little embellishment and to stop any hardcore fraying. i don't have any felt at the moment, but i'm just going to sew a pin backing to a piece of felt the same shape as the back circle and fabri-tac it to the back. it's about the size of my palm, and i'm pretty damn pleased with the cool, elderly lady effect.

ah. and now i'm off to break into a pet store, liberate some canaries.