Two weekends ago I was graced with a lovely impromptu visit from Tatiana - she called on the 4th of July to see if the upcoming weekend would be a good time for her to come to NYC. I said, of course! We'd been talking about a visit before she moves back to Maryland to start grad school (she's getting a Masters in Museum Studies at GWU). I hadn't expected it to be so soon but I was certainly not complaining!

I've recently started to actually read Time Out New York (yeah, yeah, I know. I've been a bad New Yorker what can I say) so I trolled through it looking for fun, free things for us to do that weekend. I came up with some fun places to eat (which of course included Blue Sky Bakery... I'll have to take pictures of those muffins sometime so you can see and drool), and also found a cupcake craft event! How timely!

Cupcakes Takes the Cake is a blog - one of my new favorites no less - about cupcakes. The girls who run it post pictures of cupcakes and write about different cupcake shops around the country, and generally just love those delicious treats. (And how could you not?) Anyway more about that later.

Tatiana arrived on Friday night so I took her to Quickly Shabu Shabu - we've been to Happy Shabu Shabu and Cafe various times but I'd read in TONY that Quickly was surprisingly good - and you get a free bubble tea with your meal. How can you beat that?? Well, the place is so adorable. Again, I didn't take pictures - oops! Well, go check it out yourself - I recommend the sour plum bubble tea.

Saturday we slept in (well, for me. For Tati it seemed like a normal 11:00am wakeup time hehe), then got some sushi in my 'hood and headed off to Cupcakes Takes the Cake craft day! It was at Etsy Labs in Downtown Brooklyn - which was pretty funny because the previous night Tatiana had asked me if I'd ever heard of etsy.com and I said no... then we found out that the cupcake event was at Etsy Labs. Crazy! Anyway check out etsy.com, it's full of adorable, pretty things that you can buy. And if you make adorable, pretty things you can sell them too.

We were the first ones at the lab, which was totally awesome because we got a private tour and complete control over the button-making station. We made loads and loads of buttons:

And everyone who came in later wanted to copy us. Some even stole the squares of fabric that I had cut out for my own use! Psh.

Oh did I mention that they had free cupcakes from Crumbs?! Yum.

So, in talking to one of the girls who runs Etsy Labs, I found out that for $20/mo I can go to the labs as often as I want (it's open 7 days a week!) and use their machines and supplies, and get a discount on their classes. That place is like a minefield of crafts, let me tell you... so I'm planning to sign up as soon as I take care of some other expenses.

After we left Etsy, we went extensively shopping at Macy's, got some groceries for our picnic on Sunday, then headed off to Zaytoons for dinner before seeing Knocked Up. Okay people - I don't know... seeing this movie perhaps proved to me that I am not a normal woman. In fact, I may be more of a guy. (But we may have already known this.) I really liked the movie but I couldn't help but leave feeling kind of discouraged that my gender is being represented by moody, manipulative psychos rather than level-headed human beings such as myself. Alas, perhaps my views will change when I'm pregnant.

Anyway Sunday morning we woke up at 9:00 (which apparently is early for Tati... meanwhile it's later than I like to wake up on weekends) and got muffins at Blue Sky, then headed back to pack up and make a delicious picnic for lunch. I made my cucumber salad, as well as some vietnamese summer rolls and we ate at Washington Square Park before I sent Tati off to the bus!

I have to say - that was two weekends ago, and since then a bunch has happened to really make me want to push myself toward more and more creative projects. I'm finding that I've become much more self-involved than before... hopefully not in a bad way, but just... knowing when to take time for me to condition my mind and soul. Does that make sense?

I hate catch-up blogging so I'll end here :) And perhaps I will write again later tonight, or tomorrow. For now, I have to find some food, and maybe start reading Harry Potter...!!!