I'm a man and you're a woman, at least last time I checked.

I, Drea, am a shop-a-holic.  I love shopping!  Well, kind of.  I hate the mall, and especially trying things on, so I'll take a quick stroll through, buy a bunch of stuff that looks cool, then return anything that doesn't fit.  I also have tremendous disposal guilt, which causes me to keep things until they ABSOLUTELY HAVE NO LIFE LEFT IN THEM WHATSOEVER.  Like seriously, I don't throw anything even remotely functional away.  I -might- give it away, but only after two years of sitting in a "charity" box without me thinking of it in addition to extreme amounts of guilt from Dan.

This has lead me to accumulate great amounts of tees, shoes and makeup over the past twenty years.  They still fit!  They still work!  Why get rid of them?  I am going out of my way to change this, though.  I donated a lot of old clothing to the play I'm in!  Mostly because one of the characters is a raging nerd that only wants to "sleep and read and bake".

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I've also put a moratorium on purchasing shirts and severely decreased my shoe purchases (except for when I find really gaudy heels for $10 (Hey!  They are $10!!!)).  Unfortunately, yarn and nail polish have kind of filled in the gaps.  They're small, cheap and functional, and multiply like rabbits.  And then my friends (see how I'm not naming names?) go out of their way to enable me, and all hell breaks loose.

So, A-Certain-Cephalogal-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named sent me a link to eye shadow tutorials yesterday that are pretty frekin fantastic!  I found this look and spent all night dreaming about it:

Beautiful, no?  So this morning I tried to replicate it:

Yeah...  I mean, it looks nice in person, but my skin has a horrible habit of completely annihilating any color I put on it.  I really loaded it on, and it was bright on my fingers!

I used this old eye shadow pallet from Clairs, Iridescent Red liquid eye liner from Makeup Forever, and Indigo Blue Mega Liner Liquid Eyeliner from Wet 'N' Wild.  Counting down from the left 1-5 and 6-10, I used 6, 7 and 4 in the center front of the eye lid, and 3 and 5 around in the crease.  I lined the top lid with red before and after the shadow, and dotted between the lower lashes with the blue.  Finished up with some black mascara and a bit of 1 illuminating the inner corner and 2 covering bags.

Like I said, it is nice, but I have no clue how to achieve the FUCKING BRIGHT tones of the sample on my skin :/

Sewn Purse

I've been sewing since before I learned to count.  We were so poor when I was little that I had one Barbie and my mother gave me an old blouse and a couple of fabric squares to make clothes for it.  I love sewing!  And yet, I never find time to do it.  It is less time consuming than knitting, but I'm forced to stay in one room for the entirety of the project.  Needless to say, I feel horribly guilty that I don't dedicate nearly enough time to My First Craft, other than the random drawstring bag for a swap here and there.  (In theory, Burn and I will be going to Pennsic this year, so I'll be needing to make a lot of garb in the next few months)

So, I finally did some blog-worthy sewing last night!  Tomorrow we're having an art auction for the musical I'll be in in two weeks (Evil Dead), and I'm making purses.  The first one is supposed to be a chainsaw, but it looks like a lunch sack and I'm not feeling it.  So I made this as a back up: 

I really liked the fabric ($10 remnant - 50%) and I lined it with some brown duck that I had from when I made the sofa cover.  It was exactly the width the pattern requested, and I didn't have to add any interfacing thanks to it being so stiff.

I'm happy with my workmanship, but not so much with the dimensions, since it is supposed to be a wristlet/clutch.  Keeping all the dimensions the same and just halfing the depth of the body should suffice.  I also didn't think to cut the zipper down to size (because I didn't want the pull to fall out) and it creates an odd bulge at the corners, but meh.  Overall, I'm happy at how I mathed the pleats ^_^

I really liked this pattern.  It was a bit confusing to follow (I had to highlight the step I was working on to keep my place), yet still well written.  I'm looking forward to making a rounded hobo bag with a face tonight if I have time after recording. 

[recipe] Cranberry Muffins

I am so mad at Dave right now.  He asked me to make him cranberry muffins for breakfast with this recipe I found.  The bater was orgasmically good and the muffins are just taunting me.  Do I break keto?  Do I give a flying rat's ass?  THEY SMELL SO GOOD INTERROBANG

Also, I'm fat, and I have to be half naked in a play in four weeks...

[recipe] SF Keto Flax Brownies

I've been playing around with this recipe for Miracle Brownies a few times to completely different results.  They are good, and pretty easy to make.

FIRST ITERATION

When reading the recipe, I realized it asked for three full cups of sweetener, one cup liquid, one stick butter, four eggs, and two cups flax meal.  I was horrified by this amount of sweetener, so I only used one cup of erythritol with some baking splenda mixed in.  Dan loved them, but I couldn't get past how sweet they still were, and the texture of the flax meal reminded me a lot of wheat bran or corn hulls.

SECOND ITERATION

Like most weekends, I woke up wanting to bake something at random, and Dan requested flax brownies again.  We were out or low in a few ingredients, so I substituted.  I only used 1/4 C erythritol total, used extra cocoa powder instead of baker's chocolate, and subbed the last half cup of flax meal with a mixture of hemp and coconut flour.  I frekin loved these!  They had the same texture as the carbomb cupcakes I'd made the week before for Isilza, though a bit dry.  I want to make them like this again but add more cream next time.  There was one tray of mini cupcakes (15 minutes) and one of big cupcakes (20 minutes).  Dan found them not sweet enough.

THIRD ITERATION

This morning followed the same procedure.  This time I had all the ingredients, but the stove was in the dishwasher, so I had to add the baker's chocolate shaved instead of melted.  I upped the sweetener to 1/4 C erythritol and 1/4 C baking splenda, which was a good level of sweet.  Again in one tray of minis and one tray of regular cupcakes, but something made them really fluff up!  Dan loved them and deemed them the best batch.  I didn't like them nearly as much as last month's because they had the hully texture again, but it got better after they cooled.  A lot more fluffy like cake than moist and chewy like a brownie.  There's a bit of tinny aftertaste from the sweetener.

MY IDEAL NEXT ITERATION

I want to keep the sweetener from batch 3, but the solids from batch 2.  Maybe do 1.5 parts cocoa powder and 0.5 parts baker's chocolate, and twice as much cream.

Cutting Time

So I tried to do paleo last month and it was a complete failure.  The lines were so blurry that I really can't justify not eating ice cream.  So I basically took the month off and ate anything I wanted.  But now that March has started, I have gone into a cutting phase.  

And let me tell you one thing, it sucks!  But desperate times call for desperate measures.

Dan found this Keto Calculator which helps you know how much you need of what macro nutrient depending on your weight, exercise level, and goals.  This is where I stood March 1st:

32/F/5'10" | CW 162.6 | 22.2% BF | moderate exercise

* 1363 kcal Goal (1362 min, 2374 max)

* 10g Carbohydrates

* 120g Protein (81g min, 158g max)

* 94-206g Fat

I've been trying to get 1400 kcals on days I don't do exercise, with the option to eat a few hundred more when I skate (there's a whole 1000 kcal window).  I weighed in at 158.8 this morning, almost four pounds less than four days ago, but I atribute them to debloating after getting off carbs.

My intention is to follow this through April and the end of the play, then alternating with bulking every six weeks after that.  If I don't finally lose that ponch after this, I will be very, very furious.