liu-party time!

saturday was a fun productive day, mostly spent mostly within the confines of our kitchen and living room. after a short run along the west side highway and a quick lunch in chinatown, i decided to give my new heat embossing tool a whirl and make a personalized card for my friend, sharon's, baby shower!

the card reads, "good things come in threes!" and there is a cartoon picture of a hatching chic above it. the quickie glue pen was easy to use, similar in flow like the gelly roll pen, and created a textured glue surface for the gold embossing glitter powder to adhere to. unfortunately the stamp was not as successful due to the lack of texture in the stamp ink, and my poor choice in using brown kraft stationary with the gold glitter. it's there, but it's not as clear as the quickie glue pen. nevertheless, fun! and this means i'll need to get some more embossing glitter powders :)

i spent the rest of the afternoon prepping in the kitchen for a small liu-party! my parents arrived around 5pm, and my aunt and cousins a little later around 6:30pm. for dinner, we prepared the following:

dinner menu

pork larb with butter lettuce wraps

pea shoots with garlic

wild-caught shrimp with garlic

braised beef with carrots, daikon, and tofu skin

sweet & spicy sichuan style cucumbers

homemade kimchee (aged 2.5 weeks)

the pork larb and kevin's cucumbers were the stars of the show! two pounds of ground pork with cups full of fresh herbs and three taiwanese cucumbers marinated in sweet and spicy chili oil, ground peppercorns, sugar, and soy sauce were demolished.

conversation was plentiful and everyone was in great spirits. i can't remember the last time we all got together like this in an intimate setting, probably long before jess and my weddings. we even dialed in my 96 year old grandmother in taiwan on skype and she chatted us up for a solid 30 minutes, mostly heckling kevin and me for a great grandchild *slap on forehead*. that woman is not so subtle even when she's trying her best.

after dinner, we walked over to fifth avenue to enjoy the illumination of the empire state building, "racing extinction". the collaborators of this incredible event, travis threlkel and louie psihoyos, projected digital light images of endangered species onto the building to draw attention to the a "noah's ark" of endangered animals. it was my first time to see the empire state building lit up with images - it was quite extravagant and moving, and people were stopped in their steps, cars pulled to the side of the streets, and tour buses pulled over, all to catch a glimpse of the giant ape climbing up the empire state building, the blue whale, snow leopard, and more.

there wasn't any music that could be heard from the streets, in the racing extinction video below, it's pretty awesome.
 

 

happy 33rd birthday to my brother, jon gunjak! :)

calligraphy 101

practice makes perfect!

this is probably the greatest lesson i learned tonight at the 14th street paper source intro to calligraphy class taught by christina grace. with eight of us huddled around a high-top in the back of the store, christina taught us some of the basics of traditional vs informal calligraphy, and we spent the next two hours practicing our strokes. 

we also learned how to use heat embossing powder and envelope liners, which i fell in love with! the liners really make the envelope pop when you open them, and there is something magical when you see the powder transform into the raised sparkly impression.

at the end of the night, with the rest of the girls, i bought my own set :D

happy wedding day!

today is my friend, yvonne's, wedding day! :) since she is here in nyc without most of her family and friends, i wanted to do my best to make her wedding day special, even if it's not her official wedding with all the fancy food and decor.

yvonne requested a bouquet of light pink peonies, and i was at to the task. i took the day off and when kevin headed to the office, i set off for the floral district, just a few blocks north.

it's always an exhilarating experience to go to the floral district, but especially invigorating in the early morning when the flowers are being delivered to the wholesale shops. i made my way to "the shop with the cat", which is one door down from my usual shop. they opened at 5am and my head was spinning as my creative juices started flowing at the sight of all the beautiful flowers! after much perusal, i left the shop happily with my three bouquets: light pink peonies, peachy pink juliet roses, and ivory patient roses!

it was actually quite easy to make the bridal bouquet! and the supplies required are few: 

2 bouquets of larger flowers
1 bouquet of  smaller flowers
floral sheers
floral tape
vases with water
ribbon
pin

after unbundling all of my flowers, i immediately snipped the ends on an angle and put them into water so they could hydrate. then i removed all of the leaves and placed them in a pile to use later. next i picked the three flowers with the most open petals and taped them together with floral tape. i continued to add on flowers, from most open to least open buds, and periodically alternating the flowers and arranging them in a round shape. for this bouquet, i used about 25 flowers, but this will depend on the size of the flowers used. when the bouquet felt just about right, i added some of the leaves as accent, and wrapped the stems with an ivory ribbon secured by a pin. i think you can get very creative when it comes to bouquets and dress them up or down, but i tried to go with the look i envisioned when thinking of my friend.

and to keep the bouquet fresh, i place it in a vase with water in the fridge until her ceremony. from what i've read, flowers can stay fresh for 6-7 days without drooping if you keep them refrigerated at nights!

here's the final product :) 

congratulations, yvonne & gerry!!!! gorgeous bride and handsome groom!

three's

the best things come in three's!

we got up on the earlier side and headed cross town towards the east river for our longest run in a long time (for me at least). weather was perfect - cool and crisp, and the running paths were relatively obstruction less. though the sun was already up, we were able to finish the run with a decent amount of shade from the FDR overpass downtown skyscrapers along the west side highway. i think kevin could have gone further, another 3/4 mile to our apt, but i was satisfied with 9 :p

jess picked up a delicious trio from the doughnut plant: green tea, blueberry, and coffee, in clockwise order.

i picked these aboriginal taiwanese keychains up for jess and jen when we visited yeh liu (野柳) in march.

jess and i spent part of the afternoon making these paper peonies in white, blossom, pink, and rose! final product photos coming soon :)