Crocheted food - yum

The only thing better than felt food is crocheted food. I found an excellent pattern for crocheted cupcakes at BitterSweet (what an amazing blog - she is a crochet genius). From there, I just made the patterns up myself.

Chocolate cupcake with pink icing and sprinkles

apple

carrot

The cheeseburger is my favorite.

more on felt food

The felt food is being put to good use. Mmmm ... tasty.

Felt Food toys

I have a new craft obsession - felt food. It is so fast, so fun, so easy to make. I just sent a bag of "groceries" to my niece for her second birthday (a perfect compliment to her first kitchen from grandma). Most of these ideas are shamefully copied from the toys at Mahar Dry Goods (sorry). Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right?

Pancakes, bacon, a fried egg and a strawberry

The insides of a bologna and cheese sandwich with lettuce and tomato

lunch - bologna and cheese with potato chips


Oreo cookies (these are crocheted)

pizza with pepperoni, mushrooms, green peppers and black olives

cheese ravioli with marinara sauce

Chicken dinner - a drumstick, mashed potatoes, pea pods and a slice of pumpkin pie

another shot of the pumpkin pie - I added a dollop of whipped cream

The grocery sack - I sewed it out of those sheets of fun foam you can find at the craft store. Peeking out of the bag is the ravioli (I made a label out of full-sheet label paper and stuck it to a glad ware container) and a loaf of bread (which I forgot to photograph).

They should start a 12-step program for people like me. Hello, my name is Jill and I am addicted to making felt food.

Dishtowel Aprons

I made these two aprons using the dishtowel apron tutorial over at I Have to Say. Such a great idea! For this first apron, I actually used half a dishtowel (it was for my 2-year old niece).

I also have been itching to try out embroidery, and luckily came across a 5 week lesson series at Crafty Daisies. For this project, I just used the backstitch (which turned out to be quite simple) and I am excited to learn others.



I was having a difficult time at the store deciding between prints, so I bought two (the polka dots above and the apples/pears below). The apple/pear towel turned out to be so large that I thought it would be a quick and easy project for myself - a new apron in about 15 minutes! You can't beat that.

Missouri sugar cookies

Sometimes I miss my home state of Missouri, and so does my best St. Louis pal, Megan, who recently moved to NY. Its times like these when I am forced to make Missouri sugar cookies.


I love this cookie cutter. I found it at Off the Beaten Path (which just so happens to be located in the fine state of MO). Megan thinks I should get one of each state and make a cookie map of the U.S. While that certainly would be cute, I just don't think I have a strong enough attachment to each other state to store their cookie cutters in my small kitchen. At some point I'll order a California and New York, and maybe just for old time's sake, a Utah.

Quick: Read this if you ever store password data

Thomas Ptacek has a good post explaining why your password storage scheme is probably bad.

His post has a lot of words, so I'll summarize:

• Storing passwords in plaintext is obviously bad (most developers already know this)
  
• Using a salted-hash such as MD5 or SHA-1 isn't much better. (too easy to brute force)
  
• Your other clever password storage ideas are probably bad too.
  
• Use bcrypt instead. It was created by real cryptographers for just this kind of thing.
  

Here's bcrypt for Java. It has a nice simple API:

// Hash a password for the first time
String hashed = BCrypt.hashpw(password, BCrypt.gensalt());

// Check that an unencrypted password matches one that has
// previously been hashed
if (BCrypt.checkpw(candidate, hashed))
    System.out.println("It matches");
else
    System.out.println("It does not match");

I'm sure other popular languages have similar libraries.

Teapot Sugar Cookies

One last post about this last baby shower and then I swear I'm done. I just wanted to post a few pictures of the teapot cookies because they were so cute. It was difficult to come up with designs for these because I am not good enough with the frosting tips to make them too intricate, but I didn't want them to be boring either. I settled on these four designs:

Swirly lid teapot

Polka dot teapot (this one felt very Alice in Wonderland to me)

Flowered teapot

Argyle teapot

The polka dots and flowers were my favorites. I picked up a couple new cookie cutters while buying supplies for these as well as a giant frosting tip for cupcakes - can't wait to use them!