Food Friday : Purple Potatoes!

Have you ever seen purple potatoes? We had not until Nick came upon them at one of the produce shops in Kensington Market. He bought some to give them a try.

Here we were thinking that these were a new vegetable, a result of experiments in cross-breeding ... "beets and potatoes maybe?", we wondered. But in fact, purple potatoes are an ancient food, native to Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador and are among the many varieties of potatoes that have been cultivated in these regions for more than 8000 years.

Nutritionally, they are better than regular potatoes due to their deep colour, which provides more antioxidants. For our serving Nick just added a bit of sea-salt and olive oil and he roasted them in the oven. Taste-wise they were very similar to regular potatoes, though they were more dry in texture.

Recent Card Making : Embroidered Thank You Cards DIY

ass="aligncenter size-full wp-image-7922" title="3-handmade-thankyou-cards-0" src="http://www.loulou.to/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/3-handmade-thankyou-cards-0.jpg" alt="" width="640" height="426">Last month I found myself in the position of needing to send three thank you cards! (Lucky me ... Ok, it was my birthday but I don't talk about that.) Also a few posts back here I showed you the embroidered bookmark I made for an online friend to thank her for a blog give-away prize I won. Reading this you might think I am continually showered with gifts. I'm not and don't expect to have to make any more thank you cards for a while!Back to the embroidered bookmark. Making this sure did pique my interest in stitching on paper and now I am hooked! For this Thank You Card project I wanted to combine the textures of thread and paper cutting, while making use of pre-made supplies. Basically I took commercially manufactured cards and dressed them up, adding handmade touches.For this first card featuring a vase with flowers in it, I embroidered the thank you message, using a computer print-out of the words as a pattern. Them I free-hand cut some heavy paper to make the rest. Sometimes what you picture in your head does not come out as intended. I got the parts all together and showed the card to Nick, who jokingly said "I like how you did the smoke-stack with flower clouds coming out of it." Waaaa. So I added the detail on the vase and the leaves, with more embroidery on them. He was right ... my vase did originally look like a smoke-stack!

A Place to Help You Deal with one of Life’s Little Problems

I have never done a Wordless Wednesday post before but I thought this photo could stand on it's own!

xo loulou

Music Making

Nick and I are (part-time) musicians, who have been writing songs and playing together since our 4th date, so it's something we've always done with one another. I don't talk about this very much here because I really don't want this blog to have the undercurrent of trying to persuade anyone to listen to our music. But since this is a space where I talk about what I do, it's relevant to bring it up with this post because we just did two live on-line shows in the past week. These were both within the social networking game called Second Life. In a very small nutshell, we are on-line live entertainers within this gaming platform, which is essentially a web of chat-rooms with avatar representations for each person there. (It's hard to explain actually, but I think most people have heard of Second Life by now ... there's a ton on-line about it if you're curious to know more).

For these two particular shows we were invited to perform at parties being held by other SecondLife residents, whose guests mostly live in Europe so for both shows we went on from 5 to 6pm our time, which is around 10pm their time, give or take an hour depending on where they live. The Wednesday show was to celebrate the 4th Year Anniversary of a nightclub called The Notes Shack Pub, and the second show on Saturday was to celebrate the real-life birthday of one of the hosts, with donations being given to Doctors Without Borders, in lieu of gifts. Both were a lot of fun and had excellent turn-outs.

Here are some pictures of our avatars I took after our second show. The venue, called Fride Club, was set-up like Super Mario Brothers. I couldn't get any shots while we were playing but to give you an idea, our avatars were up on a stage, dancing around and mimicking a real-life concert, with mine playing a little model of the exact keyboard I have in real life, and Nick shredding his tiny red guitar!

Herb Garden