My girls are getting gifts!

I revealed the first of my recent knitting in this post here. All my knitting has been under wraps lately since it's mostly being done as gifts for people! But I was able to give away another gift to Liz in Napa this past weekend! I'm really proud of this purse because it is 100% my own design. Okay I guess I have to give Ruth some credit because I used a lot of her instructions for her cabled clutch and adapted it to give this bag a "handle". Used some of my Amy Butler fabrics to make the super cute lining. Pinned a brooch on the front. Sewed on my designer label ;) and voilà!

The purses are a lot of work but it's so worth it to see people enjoy them so much. Liz told me she loved her purse and totally appreciates the amount of time and energy that went into it. She's such a sweetheart that it was totally worth it.

I obsessively did a little more macaron tests Friday afternoon too and packaged some up for our friends on behalf of Liz's birthday on Saturday. I don't know what happened this time though - the only thing I can find to blame it on was the heat (my kitchen was almost 80° because of the warm day outside) but I had a lot of failures. Roughly half the batch was sticking to the mat (using either a Silpat or parchment paper) and overly fragile, while the other half of the batch seemed fine. I have no idea what was going on, but that's the most angry I've ever been at cookies before - lemme tell you! There was even some cursing going on. How can one curse at cute little cookies? I think I've lost my mind. After retelling the story though, I now have a plethora of "failed cookie eating" volunteers...

The picture above should very quickly spell out my new flavor tests for you.

I apologize for the bad color - I took the photo pretty late at night and had to do some Photoshopping to brighten the colors a bit. You'll notice various versions of similar flavors there - cuz I ended up doing 2 batches of some after my previously mentioned curse session with partially failed batches. I even tried a raspberry that didn't make the cut at all whatsoever. We'll be back at the drawing board with that one. Let's just say - attempting to color macarons with pureed raspberry (trying to avoid food coloring) didn't work the way I planned it to. Perhaps using food coloring isn't quite cheating... I'll definitely be trying again.