I won't take credit for this recipe. I found this on Sally's Baking Addiction while searching for cinnamon bun recipes without yeast. I'm not a big fan of using yeast in recipes, so I was happy to find this simple one.

Ingredients
1-8oz tube of crescent roll dough (I used Pillsbury)
1/4 cup butter, melted
1/4 cup cake mix (I also used Pillsbury yellow cake mix)
1/4 cup sprinkles
2 tablespoon brown sugar
2 tablespoon cinnamon

Directions
01. Preheat the oven to what crescent rolls package instructs. Pillsbury was 375F. Grease the pan/cookie sheet.
02. Take the dough out of the package. Roll out the dough, make sure it's completely seamless.
03. Sprinkle the dough with the sprinkle and roll out the dough to really set in those sprinkles.
04. Afterwards, brush the melted butter onto the rolled dough. Sprinkle on the cake mix, brown sugar, and cinnamon.
05. Roll the dough into a log and cut into as many buns as possible. I was able to cut 8.
06. Bake for 12 minutes.
07. When finished, spread frosting onto them. I used store bought frosting.

Extra notes
When first taking out the dough, I worked with half the dough at a time.
I also didn't stick to exact measurements; I used more or less according to what looked right.

Anywho, I for real leave for Portland tomorrow. I'll be gone for a week, arriving back home on the 21st. I am so excited!

I love coming across random items or objects that turn on a creative lightbulb.
There were so many times I passed this little bunny container in my basement, and this one day it hit me. I thought about painting it over and redoing it to remake it to something fun and different.

The box was originally a light blue in which I painted black with chalkboard paint. That was easy. The interesting part was finding a known bunny character as the subject. I thought it'd be interesting to do Frank from Donnie Darko.
I sketched him out and finished up the details with pen and ink. I shaded with gray marker and fully colored him in with colored pencil.

I finished him up and glue him on top of the old bunny.
After, I contemplated for a while what to do with the rest of it. I didn't want to make it cheesy or overdo it.
I looked up the known quote "28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, 12 seconds, that is when the world will end." I cut out the letters from magazines to make it look ransom-like and laid them down to see how they look.

I just went for it and glued on the letters. I felt the front was empty too so I cut out geometric shapes to fill the space.

To be honest, this has been sitting in my room for months and I finally got around to finishing it.
I posted Frank in my Storenvy shop.

While we're still on the Donnie Darko topic, here's my favorite song from the movie.

My flight was canceled yesterday due to "freezing temperatures" which was named the "Polar Vortex". I spent my entire afternoon/night on the phone with the airline and company that I bought the tickets from to try and reschedule. The next flight out is Friday, which I almost booked before my call got disconnected after being on hold for over 2.5 hours.
I ended up canceling the flight completely and rebooked for Tuesday the 14th. My trip is pushed another week, which is frustrating, but everyone is trying to reassure me that maybe it's a blessing in disguise. Only time will tell with that one.

But for now, I'm trying to figure out what to do with my time. I picked up work shifts later in the week, so I took it easy today. I played with paper mache!

I've been experimenting with different forms of working surfaces for personal art projects. I've been using these paper mache circles as canvases.
Any chance you happen to remember how I once had my crafty store on Storenvy before Etsy? I never deleted the account, so I figured I'd use that store for art related things and keep the products different from my Etsy.

Back to the canvas talk, I officially finished a piece on a canvas I've had for a while. Finally got around to using them, and the spontaneity was fun. Keeps my imagination flowing. I plan on treating more this way. The one finished is up in my Storenvy shop. It's a reference to The Smiths song.

I have quite a number of empty canvases to use, and I'm excited to use them. And that's what's currently up. Aside from that, I did some Googling to find some more things to do in Portland when I actually end up going. One thing I want to do for sure is go to a show. I want to see some bands and check out the music scene. I found some shows coming up that seem worthy and came across this video about a small part of the Portland music scene. Love the vibe of the video, it's making me really excited for the bands I plan on checking out.

I'm leaving for Portland today!
I booked my flight with a friend over a month ago and I can believe how fast the time flew.
We're leaving today, and coming back on the 14th. A good week of experiencing a great city on the other coast.

I've had it in my head for a couple of years that I will move to the west coast after graduating. Crazy thing is, now I have one more semester to go before graduating and I got to get my act together. I'm really hoping a lot of good things will come from this trip. Networking, meeting, connecting, SHOPPING. So excited.

Last time I was there was about a year and a half while visiting Seattle. This time we plan on staying in Portland, but visit Seattle for a day. No concrete itinerary, but lots of ideas of what we would like to do.
I plan on being out and about, which means I won't be bringing my laptop. My online stores are temporarily closed, and so, I bid adieu for now. Hope y'all have a great week and I'll be back with fun stories and great photos!

Don't worry, I'm not going to make this a serious 'religion vs. science' post.

An assignment I had last semester was to create a painting of some kind of serious topic featuring human subjects. The conflict between religion and science is something I've been interested in and wanted to play around with that. I won't go into discussion of my feelings about the subject, but instead just briefly touch upon my materials and methods and keep it at that.

I really wanted to have fun with this one, and I really played around with mixed media. I did the piece on wood, the majority was painted with acrylic, gold paint was also used, magazine scraps and sewing thread for little accents and finishing touches.

Mexican folk art was the style I wanted to mimic while keeping it light and somewhat comical. My main subject was Galileo holding the sacred heart surrounded by that folk art feeling with lots of decorative elements. I just really wanted to push the decorative bits more than anything else. It's also been a while since I've worked with acrylic like that.

I plan on playing around with Mexican folk art inspired decorative pieces. It's fun and a bit challenging to be able to pull of patterns and colors and make it all work. But I love that.

To end the post, here's a fun video I wanted to share from Tim Minchin. I came across it when I started this project and thought it somewhat related. Rants about science. I love it. Tim Minchin is amazing. Watch this, you won't regret it.

One project I was assigned last semester was to take a preexisting movie and give it a makeover, as if it was to be redone today. We were allowed to change anything we wanted to. My head immediately went to Pretty In Pink. I wanted to go wild with the pink, add cherry blossoms, and make the setting in Japan.

After doing some research, I chose Kyoto. My version of Andie would be Japanese, of course. I designed her with pink hair, a pink blazer, a black bowl hat, and somewhat of traditional Japanese school gear.
I put together a character turnaround for both outfits.

It was a two part assignment, so aside from character redesign, I chose to create a mini set design. Since Andie's style is so important in the movie, I thought remaking my Andie's room was the way to go.
I built it with cardboard, painted the walls pink, and chose one wall to paint cherry blossoms.

I made a "transparent" window with window seats. I sewed pink cushions. I was all about my hot glue gun for this assignment.

It was a little nervewracking to start creating the furniture along with everything else. I was afraid to ruin proportions. After more research, I jumped right into it. I sewed together a bed with pillows, and made the bed frame out of cardboard. I put together a nightstand and desk and chair with more cardboard. To finish, I made a sliding door.

I went to town with this project, and tried to make it as believable as possible. It was exciting bringing my crafty skills to an illustration assignment. I like it!

It's officially 2014! New years - the one time a year to start fresh.
I talked about my goals yesterday, but I started thinking about my resolution.
I think I want to keep up with saying yes more; many good things can come out of saying yes. I also want to make things happen. That's what's great about life, nothing's impossible.

Ever since I was younger, I always had the mentality of nothing's impossible. Whether I acted on that is a different story, but it was something I always had in the back of my mind. Since we are getting older each day that passes, life is only getting more interesting, it feels important to act on it and treat each day as an adventure.

Ever since I found this fortune years ago (I have a little collection of worthy fortunes, and I also just love eating fortune cookies) my belief seemed legit. It made me believe nothing is impossible, but there is such thing as acts being improbable. They're two different things, it makes sense.

So with that said, I am taking this to heart starting now and I want you all to think about this too. If you believe in doing something, keep trying. Don't give up, even if things don't seem likely to happen, don't shoot down the idea because you never know what will come out of it. It may be something amazing. Life can surprise you like that.
It really never hurts to give anything a try.

To end this post, here's a beautiful Depeche Mode song; one of my favorites. Although it's a love song, it gets the same point across.
Happy new year :)