Lavender's Blue Designs

One of my friends had a birthday last week and I wanted to gift her a little treat, so I thought this flourless chocolate Nutella cake was just the thing to make. To present it to her, I put it into this little mini pie box and finished it off with a doily and twine. Perfect!  Here’s what you’ll need to make your own:

Supplies: Pie Wedge Box template (available for download at end of post), doily, twine, scissors, double-sided tape

Step 1: Print and cut out template.

Step 2: Fold along dotted lines.

Step 3: Put double-sided tape on tabs and attach to sides.

Step 4: Repeat with another copy of the template to make your top and bottom.

Step 5: Fill with cake or pie!

Amazingly, one of the things that I haven’t missed eating in Grenada is cheese. In fact, the IGA grocery store here stocks some fantastic selections of international cheeses from Europe and other parts of the world. And sometimes, right before they’re about to expire, they go on mad sale (like $1 for a wheel of brie). My neighbors also happen to be cheese lovers, so we formed a little cheese club. Basically, when the cheeses go on sale, we buy enough for all three of us and distribute it to the other club members.

I’ve stored up a nice collection of these cheese boxes and have been trying to find a good use for them. I think they make perfect jewelry/trinket boxes, don’t you?

1. tiger balm (for mosquito bites) // 2. pool party // 3. mac ‘n cheese kinda day // 4. repurposed yard clippings // 5. vietnamese sugarcane shrimp // 6. work day // 7-9. koi pond

We’re headed back to the US on Saturday! We’ll be visiting my sis in DC first. She went grocery shopping this weekend and stocked up on cheese, junk food, and steak for me and Dean. Best sister ever.

For Dean’s birthday party a while back, I wanted some mini paper sacks to hold the popcorn. I wasn’t able to find any on the island, so I decided to make my own using regular-sized paper sacks that I had on hand. Keep reading for the full tutorial!

Here’s everything you’ll need:

Materials: ruler, regular-sized paper sack (any size will do, just as long as you can cut out an 8.25″ x 6″ rectangle from it), scissors, pinking scissors, tape

Step 1. Fold down the bottom flap of the paper bag and then cut off the tops and bottoms, leaving a length of paper bag that is 8.25″ long.

Step 2. Carefully peel open the bag and lay it out flat.

Step 3. Cut the bag into 6″ increments. With a sack this size, you should have 2 complete sections and some extra paper left over. Set one of the pieces aside for now.

Step 4. With the paper oriented landscape, fold the two sides into the middle until they meet. Crease firmly.

Step 5. Get a piece of tape the length of the bag and tape down the middle. You may want to overlap the two flaps a little so that the tape doesn’t touch the back of the bag.

Step 6. Make a fold 1.5″ from the bottom.

Step 7. Open up the fold and press down on either side to create two triangles.

Step 8. Fold down the tops and bottoms of the triangles.

Step 9. Affix with tape.

Step 10. Fold the two sides in and crease firmly.

Step 11. Open up the bag and crease the edges again to make it really sharp.

 Step 12. Trim the top edge with pinking scissors. You can also use scalloped scissors or whatever decorative scissors you prefer.

Fill with your favorite treat and enjoy!

1. waiting for the bus // 2. homemade jajangmyun with sides // 3. souvenirs // 4. crab // 5. our apartment // 6. homemade pad thai // 7. playing telestrations // 8. island by night // 9. friday afternoon

Do you know about Google’s new image search option? I recently stumbled upon it quite by accident, and I think it’s just about the coolest thing on the web since Pinterest. It allows you to drag and drop images into the Google search bar and search for items from an actual image. You can also input a URL of an image or upload your own image. Isn’t that incredible? My mind was blown.

It’s built into your browser if you use Google Chrome, but there are also plug-ins you can download for Firefox or Chrome to make the searching process even easier. Read about it here.*

Anyway, how is this relevant or helpful at all? I can think of a few applications:

I don’t know about you, but I am constantly frustrated when I discover an image of a great product/idea/recipe via Pinterest or other website, but when I click through, find that the link no longer works or doesn’t go directly to the image source. Instead of having to scroll through decades of old blog posts or having to search through a store’s catalog for the product, I can now drag and drop the image into Google and it will bring up all the places where that image was posted, usually listing the original source first.

Have you ever seen a piece of art that you like in a photo, but can’t identify the artist? Or maybe you’ve come across a piece of architecture, but you can’t quite place your finger on who the architect was? Or better yet, you’re looking through your summer vacation photos from last year and can’t remember the name of that cathedral you visited in Germany? Well, now you can. And like I mentioned earlier, you can even upload images from your own computer to Google’s image search and it will find identify that artist/architect/cathedral for you. Cool, huh?

This is pretty self-explanatory, but if you ever need to find a different-sized version of a particular image, this is the way to do it.

When Google provides search results for your image, it will also provide you with similar images at the bottom of your search results. This means if you’re looking for mint-colored pictures to fill up your minty inspiration board, Google can find those images for you. It can even do more complicated images with several colors or combinations of colors and shapes.

Isn’t that neat? Or am I just the last one to jump on the bandwagon (as I was for Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram…)? How have you been using Google’s Image Search?

*Please note that this is not a sponsored post in any way. I’ve simply used and loved Google Image Search and wanted to share it with you, my dear readers!