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I don’t travel as much as I did in Japan, but I have been to a few interesting places. Here are some pics of those places:



I visited the Doll House Museum in Danville, KY. I love miniature stuff! :)

I’ve been to a grocery store called Jungle Jim’s several times over the past year and a half. I love grocery shopping anyways, and Jungle Jim’s is HUGE. They have a TON of international groceries. I can spend several hours in there at a time.

Tiny fruit!!!!!

Last summer I went to Texas. I already showed pictures of the Japanese Garden there, but here are some pictures I took in Cowtown in Fort Worth:

My boyfriend and I went to Tennessee to do a quick landscape design project. On the way back we stopped at Natural Tunnel in Virginia. You can’t walk in the tunnel because trains run through it, but it was still neat to see.

That was somewhere along the road in Virginia (I think…).

Then we stopped for a little while at Natural Bridge in Kentucky. We went to the Sky Bridge and it was sooooo pretty because it was sunset and the fog looked cool.

Around Halloween my friend and I went to Sister’s Tea Parlor near Louisville, KY. I definitely recommend that place! It was sooooo cute! The tea was really good! My favorite was Paris in a Teacup. We went dressed in our Halloween costumes which made it even more fun. :) I made my own Alice costume and had a lot of fun making it. I had never made a dress before, but it turned out pretty well and I learned how to do a lot of stuff.

The Mad Hatter tea was pink and tasted like jelly beans! :)

This spring my friend and I went to Louisville and visited the Conrad Caldwell House. I wasn’t that interested in going, but I ended up really liking it. The house was really ornate (but they don’t allow pics inside so I don’t have any) and was in a really pretty area. The first picture shows the house, and the other pictures were taken in the surrounding neighborhood.

My roommate from college recently got married and her wedding was at the Basilica in Covington, KY. I was surprised how pretty it was!

These last few pics have nothing to do with travel, but I don’t have another post they fit in. Last spring I bought a couple of male Crowntail Betta Fish. I had them in the same tank with a divider. The red one died though and now I only have the blue one. The red one was named Seika and the blue one is named Mizuchi. He’s mean and always puffs up when he sees me, lol.

Since moving back to the US, I’ve made a bunch of stuff for my Etsy store, made some other random crafty stuff, and tried out a bunch of recipes. I missed Etsy while I was in Japan. I like making stuff, but I don’t really need all the stuff I make, so Etsy is a good way for me to get rid of all that stuff and make a little bit of money. My store is Strawberry Glitter: The Shop of Random Cuteness Here’s a bunch of the stuff I made for Etsy:

Polymer Clay Doughnuts

Hair Pins

Felt Doughnut Keychains

Polymer Clay Pink Apple Charm

Apple Charm Bracelet

Strawberry Charm Bracelet

Polymer Clay Neon Strawberry Charms

Polymer Clay Sakura Cake Cell Phone Charm

Lolita Hair Bow

Toast Plushie

Purple Cube Cat Plushie

Blue Cube Cat Plushie

Chocolate Chip Cookie Plushie

Now, here’s some random stuff that I’ve made that wasn’t for Etsy:

I made a doll dress for one of my friends for Christmas.

I have recently gotten into nail polish (seriously, I’m obsessed!) and I did this nail art for my birthday.

I carved this pumpkin (I used a pattern I found online) for Halloween.

I made my own Alice costume for Halloween. This shows the dress before it was finished.

The dress is finished in this pic, but I also had a pinafore, wig, and stockings, which I’ll show in my next post.

Now here are the food pictures:

Carrot kinpira, soy sauce egg, and salad with baked tofu bites.

The carrot kinpira and soy sauce egg recipes came from Just Bento. That website is amazing. It’s a great resource if you’re interested in making bento. The author also has a book out which I checked out from the library and loved. I’ll probably buy a copy to take with me to Japan. The baked tofu bites recipe came from All Recipes, another site that I love.

Here’s a bento I made using more recipes from Just Bento. I made some sort of pepper and bean sprout stuff (sorry I don’t remember the name!), orange juice carrots (my favorite recipe from Just Bento!), and tamagoyaki. I didn’t really try on the presentation here, but it was yummy!

This is miso ramen that I made. I just made the broth and used packaged ramen noodles. It turned out pretty well, but it was nowhere near as good as the miso ramen I ate in Japan.

The library had several macaron books on their featured display shelf and I was inspired to try making macarons. They’re just so cute! Mine turned out a bit lopsided, but overall they didn’t look too bad for my first time. Either way, they were sooooooo good! I used Ghirardelli chocolate for the ganache and it was super dark and went really well with the sweet macaron shells.

The peppermint white chocolate macarons turned out ok, but I prefer the dark chocolate ones. :)

These iced pumpkin cookies were amazing. Everyone who ate them loved them. Really. I’m not even a big fan of pumpkin pie, but the reviews online made me want to try these. I’m so glad I did. Click here for the recipe.

I really liked these pink lemonade cupcakes, but my boyfriend hated them. :( He didn’t like the sourness of them, but I liked that because it made them unique and tasty. I frosted them, but I’m showing them unfrosted because I like how the cake colors turned out. Both are the same flavor, but I dyed half of the batter and scooped a bit of each into the cups.

I used a heart shaped cupcake pan and frosted these to look like strawberries. I love strawberry stuff. :)

These are easy and fun to make and delicious too! Melt some chocolate, stick sticks in marshmallows, roll them around in the chocolate, and then add sprinkles.

These are the cookies I decorated last Christmas. I’m not a big fan of sugar cookies, but I like decorating them.

Well, that’s all for this post. My next one will show some of the places I’ve been over the past year and a half.