The Martha Stewart village kit back from the Martha-by-Mail days, finally all assembled, on the mantel.

One more house to paint, though.  You can also see our new Lego space needle addition this year, which was a present from Becket.

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I am in love with the working sketches on Llubav‘s tumblr (main site: Llubave).

The final products are pretty sweet too, but I’m really taken with the sketchbooks.  More people should post sketches!  Including me!

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Since I was too lazy to actually send out real moving announcements, I made little cards with our new address to pop in with our xmas cards.  The picture on one side is just the house photo sent through the Martha Stewart glitter painting tool (an effect you could also recreate in photoshop etc).  Our address is on the other side in a free font called Rabiohead.  I just tiled the image 10X in a powerpoint slide, ran it through the printer twice to get them double-sided, and cut them apart (that reminds me that my Fiskars thingy needs a new blade after all the card-making….)

They are quite cute if I do say so myself.

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Remember the sketched felt pinecone ornaments I made way back when?  You might even have one if you swapped with me.  I decided to see if I could reuse the screen for card-printing this year.  I think 2X is about the lifespan of a Gocco screen, though.  It started blebbing because the screen wasn’t pulled as taut where the cardboard frame got wet when I cleaned it after the first use.  They’re not bad, though.

I printed onto paper bags.  Even taking only the nicest parts of the bag (no seams, no bad folds), I got 21 prints to the bag!  The craft room is blanketed with them.  I am now envelope-limited, in fact.  About half of them I made like this:

from the pieces of the bag that are blank on both sides.  I’m just writing a note directly on the back of them and sending them as my xmas cards.  The rest were smaller pieces from the sides of the bag, or they have printing on the back, so I’m going to mount them on card stock or something to use as notecards later.

I wanted to use up the dregs of my tube of ink, so I printed a few on other paper I had laying around just for fun.  This Martha Stewart paper is my favorite.

If you’d like to trade cards, email me (maitreya@craftlog.org) and we can swap addresses.  I didn’t enter any of the ornament swaps this year, and I’m missing the mail from my imaginary internet friends.  :P

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As soon as I saw the awesome science cookies Not So Humble Pie has been making, I knew I had to try one.  Luckily, my postdoc invited me over for a party tonight, and, even better, he’s married to a worm geneticist.  So I made the streaked microbiology culture plates ala Not So Humble Pie and came up with my own worm plate variant. The yeast colonies and worms are “pearls” and “slippers” from a Princess mix sprinkles pack.  C. elegans isn’t really quite that big, but whatever, use your imagination.  I did try to capture the look of seeded plates (they eat bacteria, which is what the big yellow pool is supposed to be).

They are not exactly the prettiest cookies in the world, but they crack me up.  The icing is just powdered sugar and water and food coloring (the recipe also wanted meringue powder, but I didn’t have any).  I bought the cookies because the party is tonight and I wasn’t sure if they would cool in time to decorate.

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