Yay Cookbook!

Learn to make your own tiny food! We wrote a cookbook with 20 miniature food jewelry recipes (and a few real food recipes too!), and it is officially being released October 20, 2009! It's fun, it's colorful, and it answers the perennial question: "How on earth do you make these?"

Not only that, but the photos inside are absolutely delectable (the photographer shot the cinnamon rolls on real cinnamon sticks, with a real cinnamon roll in the background- mmmmm), and the book is totally colorful and fun.

If you'd like to pre-order the book, you can find it at your favorite booksellers!

amazon.com

barnes and noble.com

borders.com

Peach oatmeal

I've been inspired by a breakfast suggestion from the incomparable Diet Girl. I've always known oatmeal is healthy, but it's so often just insipid and bland. Her idea of adding pears and almond butter to oatmeal was a huge revelation for me. I adore fresh pears, but the canned ones just aren't quite the same. So I subbed in peaches and tweaked a few details to come up with my own version of fruity oatmeal. Seriously, this stuff is much better than you remember, and has a heck of a lot fewer calories than you'd think. One key to great flavor: use the liquid from the canned peaches (instead of water) to make the oatmeal. It imparts a great extra-peachy flavor.

Peach Oatmeal

yield: 1 serving

1/2 cup rolled oats
1/2 can of sliced peaches in lite syrup (ie: in pear juice)
1/4 cup milk
1 tbsp crunchy almond butter

* Add the oats, milk, sliced peaches, and (this is crucial!) the pear juice from the canned peaches to a microwave-proof bowl.

* Microwave on high for 2 minutes (enough time to scratch your cat and get the coffee started!)

* Cut the almond butter into the oatmeal. It's easiest to mix in the almond butter if you have it on a spoon, then use that spoon to chop up the sliced peaches.

You can also sub pears in, if you prefer those. And ground flax seeds make a nice nutty addition if you're out of almond butter. I'd love to hear some other variations if you have ideas!

Better than pina coladas, or walks in the rain

At the market this weekend, two twentysomething women walked into our booth. Clearly friends, they were having fun joking around with us over our work. And then they came to the cuff links.

"Donuts!" One of them laughed as she picked up our pink donut cuff links.

"Can you imagine the guy who would wear these?"

"I know!"

"You should take a photo of them and post it as your match.com profile photo. Any guy who'd wear these cuff links is a guy you'd want to date."

Spring Bada Bing!

One of our favorite shows of the year is coming up this weekend! Spring Bada Bing is put together by the Richmond Craft Mafia, and has a collection of about 60 nifty vendors this year! We're especially excited about Needle Noodles (hilarious crocheted creepy cute things), weehah (awesomely sweet cards), and beesknees studio (lovely paintings.) And most intrigued by a shop called Everything Tiny- these teeny dinosaurs promise to be great!

So, if you're in Central Virginia, fancy a road-trip to Richmond on a what promises to be a lovely April day (yay!), and would like to see some incredibly cool crafts, stop by! The event space is great, parking is easy, and there will be more eye candy than you can handle.

Hope to see you there Sunday!

A nice surprise

We spend a goodly amount of time at the post office. The Charlottesville post office is a generally nice place- really helpful, efficient, and generally nice postal people. We have a smile-hi relationship that I always more deeply appreciate whenever I have to go to a different post office (say, the everything is behind bulletproof glass one near the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia).

I was dreading going to the post office this afternoon to drop off orders, given the usual tax day chaos. So imagine my pleasant surprise when the open area in the front of the building had some happy tents set up (complete with one of those weird waving wind people), and Papa John's was handing out slices of free cheese pizza. The parking lot wasn't crazy, the line inside was short, and I walked away with a tasty hot slice of pizza.

I'm pretty sure I've never been so happily surprised on April 15.

Post script: In looking for an image to link to for the weird waving wind people, I discovered an entire world of people referring to them as "Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube" men. Bar none, THE best photo of one is a bento box version on flickr. LOVE it.

Show schedule 2009

Come and see our whole collection in person, design your custom goodies, or just drop by to say "hi." We love to meet you.

The photo of the two of us in our booth was taken by the lovely Lis Kidder, a glass artist who makes gorgeous dichronic glass jewelry.

Here are our upcoming shows for the 2009 season.



Charlottesville City Market
(Charlottesville, Virginia)
most Saturdays
April 4- December 19, 2009
7am - noon
information & directions

Spring Bada-Bing
(Richmond, Virginia)
April 19, 2009
11am - 4pm

Renegade Brooklyn
(Brooklyn, NY)
June 6 & 7, 2009
11am - 7pm

Ballston Arts & Crafts Market
(Arlington, VA)
July 11 & October 10, 2009
10am -5pm

Taking over Brooklyn one piece of tiny food at a time

We are ecstatic: we just found out we were accepted to Renegade Craft Show in Brooklyn! We consider Renegade to essentially be the Ivy League of indie (ie: self-representing artists with a DIY bent) craft fairs. The great (and difficult, for us) aspect of juried shows is that the organizers try very hard to ensure a good diversity of kinds of products. Jewelry-making is a very easy craft to pick up, and there are a lot of amazing jewelry designers out there. The net result is that jewelry generally ends up being the most insanely competitive category in any juried show.

I spent all day Monday (the day the notifications went out) reliving my college application process: hitting refresh every 5 minutes on the email, just in case that might speed things up. Right around 9pm, the email finally arrived. I held my breath as I opened it, then did a fair amount of jumping and yelling when I realized (two sentences in) that we had been accepted!

SQUEEEE!!

So, if you're in Brooklyn this coming June 6 & 7, stop by McCarren Park and check out the show! We can't wait to see which other artists made it in, and to meet a whole new crowd of people up in NYC!