There are so many free printable Valentines out there on the series of tubes – here are some of the best. You still have 2 days to print them out. I am going to preemptively give full snaps to Neatorama which is the original source of the first three.

• Bitter Superhero Valentines – get them at Shirt.Woot

• Pun-laden Science Geek Valentines – get them at Neatorama

• Pun-laden Science Geek Valentines, the cartoon version – get them at Ironic Sans

• Edible Dog Biscuit Cards for your Dog – yikes – get them at Crunchkins

• Anti-Valentines by Dylan Edwards- get them on his site

• Disturbing Pimp Valentine’s Card – see it at StrangeCosmos

I love to play with this SUPER FUN app that generates a lovely harmonious color palette from your photos. You upload a photo and the app processes it and spits out the palette. This would be a great way to think about room decor, website design, or even what color picture frame to get. Here are a some I did from some of my photos:

This is the (amazing, delicious, if you love cheese don’t miss it!) cheese shop in Neal’s Yard, London, that makes a lovely subtle palette.

This photo of Confucius’ Temple in Beijing yields a spicy palette- I think it would make a cool kids room.

This is a horse farm in Kentucky – which gives me a gorgeous palette that makes me want to redo a room right this second! I think my bedroom would do well with this.

You can play with it at Big Huge Labs. Hopefully you will have more restraint than me and not become addicted to it. If you’re clever, you can use this color conversion chart and get something to bring to the paint shop! OK gotta go, I have thousands more photos to try.

And now for something completely different: the GINGERBREAD CASBAH.

The gingerbread casbah came into being because every year, we throw a themed Christmas party for around 100 of our closest friends. Since we just took a honeymoon to the Middle East, we thought we could try out some new tricks at a Middle East-themed Christmas party. After all, that is where the whole Christmas thing started, right? An evite full of bad puns later (”we are Beiruting for you to come”, and so forth) we had our “Christmas at the Casbah” party ready to go, and all we needed was an impressive centerpiece.

This is not really a casbah, but a typical courtyard house. (Casbah sounds cooler though, so that’s more of a marketing-focused name for it.) On our honeymoon, we stayed in a beautiful hotel in Old City of Damascus called Beit Al Mamlouka, and I very loosely modeled the casbah on my recollections of how it looked. I say “very loosely” because their floors weren’t made of sour belts and jujubes, and their walls weren’t edible.

For the gingerbread, I used a recipe that C&H tweeted me- and it was great. Alas, I haven’t actually tasted it, but from a construction point of view it was tops – simple to make, very easy to roll out, not too sticky, sturdy, and kept its shape during baking. Also, it smells delicious, which adds a nice extra sensory dimension to the house. The royal icing that glues the whole thing together is just a stiff mixture of egg whites and powdered sugar with a pinch of cream of tartar, mixed with the paddle attachment of a Kitchen-Aid.

I did most of the shape-cutting freehand, but used a star cutters for the front windows. To make the windows, we rolled out the dough and put it on a silpat. Then we cut shapes out and arranged crushed jolly ranchers inside. When they baked, they became clear and solid. You have to let them cool while carefully loosening them from the silpat, as the candy stays soft and molten for about 30 minutes after coming out of the oven. Once they harden fully, they are structurally quite sound.

I thought that doing this alone would be both boring and incredibly frustrating and also not come out as well, so I assembled a crack team to help out. Rodney the pastry chef is always an excellent addition to this type of team, and did lots of the rolling, fine icing work, and construction assistance. Heather took care of cobblestones and windows, while MJ formed small furnishings including the excellent hookah.

I am a firm believer that everything on a true gingerbread house should be edible, and should be candy. Also, I can make like anything out of marzipan or fondant- ergo, marzipan and fondant are cheating. Sculpting something out of a tootsie roll is so much more impressive. So I refused to allow any non-edible, non-candy/gingerbread/icing objects adorn the house.

I bought electric flicker tea lights to illuminate it during the party, to make the windows shine. Merry Christmas everyone!

Here’s the breakdown of what’s what:

• Windows: crushed jolly ranchers baked into the gingerbread
• Tile floor: rainbow sour belts, jujubes, licorice wheels, and silver dragees
• Balcony floors: red hots, tic tacs, and silver dragees
• Balcony railings: sesame candies, licorice wheels (unrolled), jujubes
• Cobblestones: formed tootsie roll slices with yellow sprinkles
• Hanging lamps: licorice wheels and Haribo raspberry gummies
• Hookah: deconstructed tootsie rolls, sour belts, and licorice wheels
• Table: gingerbread star with dragees and jujubes
• Chair: sesame candies and tootsie rolls
• Tree: iced cookie with Haribo raspberry gummy and tootsie roll
• Camels: iced cookies with sprinkles

I wasn’t able to find any other instances of Middle Eastern gingerbread architecture on the web, but I did come across some gingerbread structures of note. Here are a few of my favorites from around teh interwebz.

• Max’s cave from Where The Wild Things Are, from A Table for Two <<<btw, AMAZING!!!>>>
• Gingerbread Houseboat from Houseboat Eats
• Gingerbread Woodcutters Cabin from Sweetopia
• Not gingerbread, bacon and licorice house from Almost Bourdain
• Cool 2 story house by Brown Sugar Bee

Gift wrapping can get so boring, and I get super jealous of people who wrap gifts all tastefully and creatively. So here are 2 ideas from the internetz about some easy and fun ways to step it up from a gift tag perspective.

1. You can print out these free gift tags from Angry Chicken, there are a bunch of designs.

2. You can get creative with a stamp pad and your thumb for these cute owl tags I saw on Design*Sponge.

Cute, and FREE if you already own cardstock or pilfer a few sheets from the office! (I said a few sheets. I’m not advocating widespread office supply fraud. Put down that ream of paper and all of those staplers. You don’t even need that many staplers anyway.)

Have you tried Yearbook Yourself yet? You can upload a photo and see how you’d look through the eras.

I think these are my best three, if by “best” I mean most amusing. Heh. I’m tempted to use one of these for my next Christmas card.

My friends got married on a mountaintop in Israel, and had a little local shindig to celebrate the nuptials stateside. I offered to make a wedding cake for the party, and they gave me absolutely NO guidance. These folks are avid kayakers, backpackers, skiers, and mountaineers- but of all those, kayaking is definitely their #1 love. Furthermore, they met on a kayaking trip. So this was a no-brainer: I had to surprise them with a kayak wedding cake!

Of course, I had to make the cake delicious as well as beautiful, because it’s totally stupid to make a cool-looking cake that tastes only so-so. I made a double recipe of hazelnut brown butter cake from Smitten Kitchen and a brown sugar buttercream from Epicurious. I divided the batter between a 5 inch pan and a 10 inch pan. The hazelnut brown butter cake was great to use for this project, because not only was it delicious, it was also dense and heavy, so it really helped everything stay in place. I chose the brown sugar buttercream because I wanted dirt-colored frosting but didn’t fancy chocolate.

As to the decorations, my goal was to make the cake as naturally tasty as possible- meaning no gum paste or real flowers or other such nonsensse. Hence, I used marzipan for the kayaks, leaves, and flowers. (You might be wondering why I opted to make the kayaks in such ugly colors, but I felt it important to faithfully represent the neon hues of each of their real-life kayaks.) I used whole hazelnuts for the boulders, and ground pistachios for the gravel. The blue icing was just the brown sugar buttercream dyed and marbled with 2 shades of blue.

TIP: if you’re marzipan-challenged or even just really lazy, the calla lily is by far the easiest flower to pull off. Roll out a thin snake. Flatten a colored piece into a circle. Wrap circle around snake and pinch off at the bottom.

Now I KNOW I could have made those flowers thinner and more perfect, but to be honest, I’m a little attention-challenged. And impatient. But I swear no one noticed the extra thick petals. I’m all about the gestalt anyway, know what I’m sayin’? Plus when you’re getting a surprise kayak wedding cake for free, you really can’t expect me to give myself carpal tunnel over the frickin’ calla lilies. Thought that counts and all that.

In conclusion, this was a super-fun project, and if I could go crazy like this with other wedding cakes and also make them somewhat imprefectly with no negative consequencs, I would most definitely be more amenable to making them! So keep that in mind if you’re planning to ask for one…

YaYa Chou, a Taiwanese artist, created this bearskin-shaped rug out of Gummi Bears and fake nails, and it’s amazing.

I have no words. I love it.

Visit YaYa Chou’s site for more info and photos of this and other works!

It seems I’ve been serially bookmarking a whole bunch of odd and unusual DIY lighting ideas so I thought it was time to clean it out and share a few with you.

Latex Glove Lamp by Katarina Britse
STUNNING- the trick would be keeping them inflated for more than a couple hours.

Globe Lamps on Craftster
Crack open a globe and voila. I like this idea!

Milky Way Chandelier by Alexander Reh
ingredients: 14 1-gallon milk bottles, 1 hula hoop, 1 string Xmas lights.

The Slinky Light from Bouf
You can buy it for £45, but why would you when you could make one?

Chiquita Chandelier by Anneke Jakobs
Made with old banana boxes. She must have great potassium levels. Apparently there’s a how-to manual available at her website but I couldn’t find it.

Bettine Ping Pong Ball Lamp by Studio Kleefstra

Check out these stylish bracelets made out of dead Starbucks gift cards.

Now I’ve seen everything. Young whippersnappers today are really just way too crafty, talented, creative, patient, eco-conscious, and skilled for their own good, I SWEAR, it’s almost enough to make you sick- that is, until you realize you’re just feeling sick because you’re jealous of their mad skillz and ability to execute ideas successfully and efficiently.

See the full scoop and more espressoccessories* on Confessions of an OCD Knitter.

*espressoccessories = espresso-inspired accessories. That one didn’t really work, did it? Did it?

I am so enamored of this decoupaged table I saw on Craft:! I want one!