Oh cupcake.

A long weekend is great for catching up on all of those things that you just never seem to get around to - cleaning, laundry, homework, errands. I used my extra days for almost none of these things. However I did have some productive hours in there somewhere, getting some schoolwork done as well as progress on a few projects. (and lets be honest, I logged a good number of hours with Anthony Bourdaine, Andrew Zimmerman, and somehow got suckered in to this series on the American Presidents) I did some more sketching on the vignettes and eventually did the final overlay for each. In this room we were given the chair and the chest of drawers to put somewhere in a corner of a room in a 2-point perspective. In this, we were given the table and tulip chair to work into a corner of a room in a 1-point perspective.
Peanut-butter Reese cup, mess with me, I mess you up.
To continue my attempts at domesticity, I decided to make some homemade treats in the form of peanut butter cups. I used:
2 bags of Hershey's semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 jar of all natural organic peanut butter

In actuality only about half of these ingredients made it into the final treats, but there was a lot of excess along the way.

1. First I spread the peanut butter onto a piece of saran wrap on a tray until it was an even layer of about 1/3" thick. I put the tray in the freezer to harden up.

2. Then I melted some of the chips (just in a measuring cup in the microwave - I wouldn't recommend this method as the ones at the bottom kept burning and ruining the batch) and spooned a layer into paper-lined mini-muffin tins.

3. I put the tins into the freezer and knit a bit.

4. Then I pulled out the tray and tins and used a bottle cap to cut little discs out of the peanut butter and put them on top of the bottom layer of chocolate.
5. Then topped it off with a final spoonful of melted chocolate.
6. Back in the freezer to harden and then I popped them out of the papers. Makes 2 dozen.


Speedier than the gray.
What was I knitting in between, you ask? Well, currently I have about a dozen works in progress in varying states of doneness and urgency. This weekend I tried to make some casual headway with this gray number. I started it as a typical raglan sweater, but have decided that it might turn into a sweater dress. So around the waist area, I've begun to do these increases on either side, originally every 3 rows, now every 4 rows.
Medium of Choice: edible.
For anyone who knew me in undergrad, you can attest to my fascination with art projects using food. Like the time that I frosted the President's garden, or the installation with cupcakes (that hung in the gallery for a month, much to Dan Gunderson's dismay.)
The summer that I tried to resin everything from frozen vegetables to a whole fish, and then meat that I eventually resined as part of an installation for my senior thesis (with the giant flour box, again to Dan Gunderson's dismay.)

Mention Felix Gonzalez-Torres and I swoon.

So of course my interest was piqued when I heard about some lady running around making giant portraits of Obama out of cupcakes. Zilly started with a window-front display on Election Day, and most recently was invited to the American Art Museum to do a piece including both Obama and Lincoln. I'm most disappointed that I discovered this AFTER it had already been consumed.