Special thanks to my scanner, laptop and digital camera for making this post digital friendly.

For the wedding party I was able to cook for last month I had to figure out how to get 130ish cupcakes all on one table with a little bit of flair and seamlessly match the upscale natural decor. The bride suggested wooden stands, and intrigued by the idea I knew there had to be a way to make them. While these aren’t exactly “cheap” to make, they’re certainly one of a kind and perfect for outdoor parties, weddings, and your own coffee table. Here’s what you need:

All of these supplies can be found at your local craft store (Michael’s or Joann’s)
3 Wood stump slices – look for slices in 2 or 3 sizes so stand can get a little smaller on the top tiers. $10 each – $30
2 short wooden candlesticks. $3 each – $6
Small bottle of Gorilla Glue. $8
Small can of Minwax WoodFinish in your desired color. $8
Old dishwashing gloves
Needle nose  pliers
Foam brushes
Rags
Newspaper
Ruler
Pencil
Q-tips

Step 1: With your pliers, tear off or fold down metal piece on the inside of the candle stick. You want the top the the candle stick to be flat for the wooden piece sitting on top of it. It doesn’t have to be pretty, just as long as it’s out of the way. Take care not to cut or poke yourself with the sharp metal edges!

Step 2: Lay out your newspaper, strap on your gloves, pop open the wood finish  and grab a foam brush! Getting messy is always the best part, and this can get pretty messy. Give each candlestick a healthy coating of stain, making sure to get into all of the little nooks and crannies. Don’t forget the bottoms and tops!

Step 3: While the candle sticks are drying (about 15-20 minutes), use your ruler and pencil to find the approximate center of your bottom wooden piece. measure from top to bottom, and left and right, marking the rough center each way. After the candlesticks look like they’ve soaked up all of the stain, take your old rag and rub it down a little bit. I was going to an antique used look to match the natural finish of the wooden tiers. At this point the sticks aren’t “dry”, but you can handle them without getting too much stain on your hands.

Moving right along…isn’t this easy?

Step 4: This is perhaps the trickiest part, but a little bit of patience is all you really need. Open your Gorilla glue and apply a small amount of glue to the bottom of your candlestick. This stuff really does expand, so a little goes a long way. Place your stick as close to your center markings as you can get it, eyeing it as you go to see what looks best. Glue will inevitably come out around the bottom of the stick, so have your Q-tips handy to clean it up  before it dries. If there’s a pretty big glue spot, fear not, you can sand it off when it dries. Put a small amount of glue on the top of your candlestick and carefully center the next wooden circle on top of it.

Place a couple of heavy books evenly on top of your stand and let it dry for at least one hour. Balancing the books on top will help you see if your stand is centered, so don’t be alarmed if you need to inch your top round a little bit for perfect balance.

Step 5: After your first level has dried for an hour, remove the heavy books and find your second candlestick. By eye, center the second candlestick over the first, making sure to look at the stand from all angles. Lightly mark the spot for reference, the glue the stick as before and put it on. Glue the top of the candlestick and position the last wooden round the same way as the second. Balance the books on top again and let your stand dry overnight.

And just like that you’ve got a natural looking garden party cake & dessert stand! Just watch out for those miniature cupcake stealing garden gnomes And one more thing: If those little cupcakes are whetting your appetite, head on over to A Little Flaky for the recipe!

Today at 11:26 am the Atlantis space shuttle will, weather permitting make the 135th and final American trip into space. I’m not normally one to blog about current events, unless pastry related, but I’ll make a special exception for this. Space has always fascinated me – the National Air & Space museum has always been one of my favorites, growing up I went to every spacey movie to hit theaters (Apollo 13 & Contact were brilliant, why did I bother with Armageddon?), I even have a giant telescope that I’ll never part with. When I was 10 I was sure I wanted to be an astronaut or astronomer. I remember sitting around the tv on the 4th of July, 14 years ago watching the Mars rover land and the first glimpses from the surface of the Red Planet transmitted right to my eyeballs! I even remember when Pluto was a planet!!!

So of course, my heart is breaking with the last space shuttle making its final flight. There’s so much more SPACE left! Sure, we can explore the crazy stuff that we probably can’t even imagine at the bottom of our own oceans; but how are we going to learn to live on Saturn or have Intergalactic Empires? How are we going to teach our children the wonder of space and exploration if they never get to see a lift-off live? I can’t even bring myself to think about the privatization of space travel and the possible implications that might have for everyone’s futures.

I hope that the Russians continue their space explorations and the international space station stays vital and productive. In the mean time I’ll continue to be enthralled with the images & discoveries the Hubble Space Telescope continues to provide us with (did you know it just made its 1 millionth observation?). I’ll also look forward to discoveries made by non-human operated spacecrafts, and look forward to the time when we’re able to travel in newly developed shuttles to Mars and other places in our own Solar System!

It’s all just too big to sit around and wait for it to come to us.

One more thing: you can get tweets from astronauts in space! Follow them HERE.

I’ll admit that from time to time I have a little bit of iPhone envy, even though my Droid 2 is awesome (after all, I’m blogging this on my phone on the train commute home). Most of this envy stems from the list of apps iPhone users enjoy that Droid users are left to hope will be released for us eventually, although I’ll also admit that I haven’t spent all that much time exploring the market. But come on – Cartolina? Instagram? Pinterest? I’d gladly fork over the greenbacks for your programming genius!

Luckily, the camera junkies over at photojojo are looking out for the androids of the world and gathered a list of the coolest photography apps available on our platform. On the list is the app Vignette, which has changed my life. No more will I admire digital uploads from my friends that look like classic Polaroids or long for vintage tinted images on blogs from people on the go. No, I’ve got Vignette.

When you think about it, the cell phone camera really is the new instant camera anyway. You can immediately view and share your images with anyone. The me of 1989 is still enamoured. The list of frames, lens options, and color filters is more indepth than I ever imagined a cell phone camera could ever have, and I’m still figuring it all out.

So here, at last – straight from my camera snaps of my daily life =D

Over the weekend (which for me lands on Tuesdays and Wednesdays), I unexpectedly spent about 3/4 of my free time sitting on the couch watching endless episodes of 30 Rock and giving iartaday.com a facelift! A couple of months ago I set the style to plain white, not really knowing what to do with it. So much work needs to be done organizing the hundreds of posts and updating all of the pages. I considered switching over to wordpress.org and hosting it all myself, designing it or having some very talented designer whip up a shiny new page – but I really don’t have that kind of time or cash to dump into a blog that after 4 years is still very much in progress. So for the first 3 hours of the facelift I tested out 3 or 4 templates and stared at the 140+ template options wondering just what I could do with them. A lot of them seemed so business-like or too complicated for what I had in mind. Simple, clean, feminine, creative, coordinated, well-designed. That’s all I really want, okay?

There comes a time in every designer’s life that they realize, if they’re going to get what they want they’re probably just going to have to do it themselves. Yes, I spend most of my time cooking these days, but I still have the latest version of the Adobe collection, a powerful MacBook Pro, and an unshakable third eye that sees the world through a special design focused lens. Ultimately, the Vigilance theme seemed the most flexible, with a nice and clean structure to color on. With that out of the way, the next 12 hours of making a header, icons, and reorganizing pages just flew by! (No seriously, it’s so cathartic sometimes.) I was inspired by the turquoise of my new bike, as well as the pinks and reds of 50s designs that accent turquoise so well.

I’m thrilled to now have a dedicated page for my archives, neatly organized with posts close to my heart easily accessible. My friends & family blogroll page is one of my favorite new features, with a tiny (but descriptive) taste of each of their beautiful blogs. In the coming weeks I’m looking forward to adding a newly redesigned and updated About Me page as well as a simpler blogroll and internet sources page (maybe even a recipes page?). It’s great to finally feel excited about my little patch of the internet again!

It was my third year of college when the need to know New York better overwhelmed me. I had visited a handful of times on class trips and ridden the Chinatown bus back and forth, and couldn’t shake the feeling that it was so much bigger and brighter. As an aspiring architect the first place I wanted to look for a job was New York City, but finding it hard enough to locate a job in Philadelphia I resolved to build my base career where I was and then head to New York in 3 to 5 years. Of course, none of it worked out that way. Six months ago New York City couldn’t have been farther away.

While I’ve sought out a new career over the past year, the boyfriend stood firm in his resolve to find another architecture position, and ended up with a great job in the handle of Connecticut last September. With a new career goal and the new prospect of moving to the NY metro area, the glimmer of hope of building a New York life was seriously reignited.

The day after I graduated from Baking & Pastry school in December all of our things were packed into a moving truck and taken North. After Christmas I followed, not intending to really look for a job until I made it up and had unpacked my shoes at least – although it was nearly impossible not to scan Craigslist at least once a day. The first week of January was spent applying to every restaurant listed in the New York area online and a couple in person. Several people wondered why I wasn’t really looking for a job right here in Connecticut, and I’m sure there were places to look at – but how can you explain? When you’re this close, and it’s something you’ve dreamed about – when a morning commute is worth the price and the early hours and sub-zero mornings, when Barbra Streisand and Frank Sinatra sing to you on your walk to work. How do you tell someone that Connecticut is your fall-back plan if you aren’t good enough to cut it in New York City just yet without sounding like an idiotic starry-eyed dreamer with her head in the clouds? Frankly, I’m surprised I even posses such high hopes after growing so cynical in Philadelphia, but I do and sometimes you can’t just walk away from that without giving it all you’ve got.

After going to an open call for one of the newest and highly anticipated restaurants uptown, I had a trail nailed down. The day of, I spent my morning following the pastry chef around a restaurant in Chelsea where I felt inadequate but resolved to pull it together for the big trail uptown, brushing off and looking at it as a “warm up exercise”. I spent the next 10 hours working with the next pastry staff and preparing desserts durning dinner service, wondering about each VIP ticket that came through the printer and wondering if I could hack it here. It felt good. It felt right. A few days later I called the executive chef and told her that I really enjoyed the trail experience and was offered a job. And just like that I’m in.

Over the past month and a half I’ve been working long hours, meeting lots of new people, adjusting to the heat and pressure of a big deal restaurant and trying extremely hard to be as valuable as I can. Every restaurant in New York is a big deal to me, but this one seems to be a big deal to everyone else as well, and the opportunities we’ve had just in the last month have been exciting and at times overwhelming. I can’t help but get a little giddy when whispers that Tyra Banks has arrived float through the kitchen and world famous photographers are in shooting desserts for their next cookbooks. I keep trying to remind myself to wear make-up to work because I never know when there’s going to be a camera crew rolling through. If I can stand my ground here and really learn my stuff, I feel like I can do it anywhere.

It’s hard, every minute of every day. It’s frustrating and emotional feeling like I have to prove myself with every pie I put together, every ice cream I make and turn, every doughnut I mix and cut, every cream I cook or whip. I’m imperfect and the least experienced person in the pastry department. But I want to be there so badly. Most of the time I leave exhausted. Some of the time I leave satisfied. Every day I leave empowered to make tomorrow an even better day, and sometimes I even manage to pull that off. All of that aside, I walk out of the restaurant and gaze down Lenox Avenue, past Central Park, and there on the skyline on the other side of the island is the Empire State Building. It’s just the beginning but at least I’m in the city I’ve always wanted to be in doing something that I know I really want to do.

“Traditional Greeting” Hoodie – Threadless.com $45

Click this photo!

Fuji Instax 210 Wide Format Instant Camera – Photojojo.com $80

“Calf & Half” Creamer Pitcher – Neatoshop.com $17.95

Hello Kitty Phone Skin – Skinit.com $14.99

Star Wars Heros & Villains Cookie Cutters – Williams-Sonoma.com $19.95

Big thanks to my family for such sweet gifts <3 Hope your holidays were fantastic! Are you ready for 2011?

In June I started brainstorming what I’d be for Halloween this year and immediately set about finding a pattern for the costume. By July the date for the party was set and the preliminary planning began (theme, food, costumes). At this point I’ve gone off the deep end and have started picking up and making all of the party favors, decorations & invitations. I can hardly contain myself.

Halloween has always been an awesome holiday to me. From the time when I was very young and walking through the haunted house at church and trick-or-treating through 4 neighborhoods in Charleston – on to the not so creative hussy college costume parties. Whether it’s been spent just handing out candy on the front porch to neighborhood kids or throwing a Halloween bash with all of my friends, I look forward to Halloween with a great deal of anticipation.

This year is no different. With stacks of party supplies forming around the house, here’s a taste of what’s ahead…

1. Candy Eyeballs – by Festival $2.79

2. Skeleton Hand Cello Bags – by Martha Stewart $6.99 (for 12)

3. Handmade & Calligraphed Invitations – by me.

4. Freaky Fabric – $3.99

5. Sprinkle Test Tube Set – by Wilton $4.19

With my cousin’s wedding speedily approaching, I set out on a search for a summer dress fitting for an outdoors southern wedding. I had my doubts that at this point, with the temperatures quickly dropping in Philadelphia and no hint of summer frolicking left on the racks downtown I’d probably be out of luck and resigned to wearing the same dress I wore to the Bride’s sister’s wedding 2 years ago.

Not to be deterred I started at H&M and found a cute silky pink & grey ballon-cut dress, sleeveless and cropped above the knee. With the right grey jacket over it, the dress was a definite closet staple. I liked it, but the outfit just didn’t have that heart stopping giddy in the pit of my stomach once in a lifetime save this dress forever kinda feel to it. Sure, it wasn’t my wedding – but that didn’t mean I wasn’t looking for the PERFECT dress.

After leaving H&M with a wholly appropriate dress on my hands I decided to stop into Anthropologie, just to see what gorgeous things they have in store this time of year and maybe browse the sale racks. Down the staircase, past the kitchenwares and hanging delicately on the front of a stand-alone sale rack was a strapless navy blue dress, adorned with nautical knots and colorful accents that whispered sweet nothings to my eyeballs. The size 4 was the only one in the room, and at $69 I only hesitated about 45 seconds before deciding to try it on – just to see if it fit of course.

Now, the last time I wore anything nautically inspired was probably when I was this old:

It’s never really been my thing. But, when it’s right it’s right – you know? And the dress was right. It fit in all of the right places. It would be cool on an undoubtedly warm and perhaps balmy day on the waterfront in Charleston, SC and the style was so inspired that I immediately got that HSGitPomSOiaLSTDF feeling.

Resolved to take the last dress back, I carried this 100% cotton frock to the register an pulled out my credit card. But what was that you rung up? This dress only costs $29!?!?!?!!!! My week was instantly made. A quick browse over to Anthroholic later I found this dress originally retailed for $138 in the spring! After spending the whole day in the dress I was still smitten and comfortable. And the wedding? It was an absolutely lovely day with the family…

{P.s. – Lauren (& Reed of course!), Here’s wishing you lasting happiness, true love, and everything you’ve ever dreamed of! You are so loved, and congrats again!}

“Someone should write an erudite essay on thr moral, physical, and esthetic effect of the Model T Ford on the American nation. Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary systems of gears than the solar system of stars. With the Model T, part of the concept of private property disappeared. Pliers ceased to be privately owned and a tire pump belonged to the last man who had picked it up. Most of the babies of the period were conceived in the Model T Fords and not a few were born in them. The theory of the Anglo Saxon home became so warped that it never quite recovered.”

John Steinbeck, Cannery Row, 1945

photo via corbisIMAGES