sewing fun!

So I'm super backlogged again, and although it's not entirely the case, I'm willing to blame it on my boyfriend.  This isn't such a bad thing - I still bake on time, but it's been difficult to find the extra time in an already-overflowing schedule to post the picture I've taken.  Any free time that I imagine I might have tends to go to Phil, and this is an extra case of that happening: both of us are all disdainful about Valentine's Day and the associated commercialism, and so we decided to do inexpensive things for each other, and mostly to use the day to enjoy each other's company.  I, being stubborn, decided he absolutely had to have a stupid stuffed animal holding a heart.  Not wanting to pay Hallmark for a gorilla or something, I took a sewing pattern I bought a while ago, and the loudest fleece I could find, and sewed together the little guy pictured here.  I'm very proud of my work, especially considering that it only took me a few hours, and am considering making another with the left-over fabric.

In other craft news, I stumbled on this knitting pattern the other day, and am kind of excited about making it.

exam panic time!

As predicted, now I am super stressed out about exams, seeing as take-home tests are kind of like death. Especially in the way that they're both things I don't really want to try right now.

So in the spirit of procrastination, I not only made cookies, but finished my wall decorating project I mentioned last week. I've been kind of bothered by some of my empty walls and how expensive it is to find things that aren't frameless posters to fill the space.

Then one day as I was surfing around the internet I stumbled on the suggestion to glue scrapbook paper to styrofoam sheets and put that on the wall. I decided that this was a good idea, and raided Michael's. The result is shown on the right. I like the way this looks because the paper is about 1" away from the wall (meaning, there's some dimension to it). Also, I was able to put these up using sticky tack and a level program I downloaded for my ipod. Accelerometers FTW.


As for my baking adventures, yesterday I made lemon-pistachio cookies (45). These are nice fluffy cookies, made fluffier by the egg white I had to beat until it formed peaks (thanks to my friends for the blender <3). Aside from the egg white, there's chopped pistachios, a little bit of lemon juice, a LOT of brown sugar, and about a tablespoon of flour involved. Since there's so little flour (and no butter), these are kind of crunchy and really airy, as you can probably tell from the picture.

I made these cookies because I wanted to use up my pistachios (they're not exactly my favorite nut, I think they're too salty), and I wasn't sure if they would turn out well, but I think these are really tasty. The brown sugar balances out the salty taste of the nuts, and the lemon juice adds in a slight bit of sourness just where it's needed. What's more, once you get past chopping 1C of pistachios, the recipe is very easy.

Alright, that has to be it for now. I have an Electricity and Magnetism final to plod through, followed by Quantum Mechanics. This is going to be a very long week.