Crafts and Cooking

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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.

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Japanese Stuff in the US

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I’m not moving back to Japan until march, but I am going to do a few posts before then. Some of them wont have much to do with Japan, but I miss blogging and would like to show what I’ve done since returning to the US. I have a lot of random things to show so I’ve divided my pictures into a few categories. This post will show Japanese things in America.

I loved Japanese style karaoke and my friend found a place in Louisville, called Oasis, that has a couple of karaoke rooms. It’s a Japanese restaurant, but the karaoke systems are actually Korean. There are actually fewer English songs than there usually were in Japan, but there are still plenty to choose from.


Why were there two TVs???? I don’t know, lol. Anyways, it’s a fun place to go even if it does look a bit sketchy from the outside. It looks a lot better inside! I’ve never eaten any of the food there so I can’t say anything about that, but I do recommend the karaoke rooms.


There are quite a few Japanese restaurants around here, but most of them just have mostly sushi and hibachi grill stuff. I like those things, but there is a lot more to Japanese food than that. My favorite Japanese restaurant that I’ve found is Nagasaki Inn in Lexington because it has more variety. They have kitsune udon. Yum! :)



I love Nagasaki Inn, but what’s next door is even better. It’s a Japanese grocery store called Hibari Market. When I go in there I kind of feel like I’m back in Japan. The TV behind the register is always playing Japanese TV shows which adds to the atmosphere. Here are some of the things I bought at Hibari Market.



The melon soda was good, but it wasn’t as good as Melon Fanta. I really wish that would be sold here! Oh well. I was really happy to find melon pan (the bread is named that because of the shape, not the flavor). During my last few days in Japan, I tried to find melon pan in a few different stores, but they didn’t have any. It’s usually a very common item, but they didn’t have any right then because of the earthquake/tsunami.

Last summer I visited Texas. One of the places I went to was the Japanese Garden at the Fort Worth Botanical Garden. I went there several times as a kid, but I think it had been over 10 years since the last time I went there. It’s a really nice garden and it’s done very well. There are some differences such as really short grass in some places that would probably have moss in Japan (moss probably wouldn’t do well in the Texas heat), but it’s really really pretty. 



The koi there are crazy! There are several machines were you can buy food to feed them. It’s fun to throw a bunch of food in at once and watch them go nuts.


This bridge is an example of something that was not quite authentic. In Japan it most likely would have been stone or wood, but this one was concrete. It still looked nice though.





There was a crane and he let me get really close. It was awesome!


That squirrel was sooooo cute! I’ve read that there are squirrels in some parts of Japan, but I never saw any. It’s too bad because I love squirrels!

There is also a Japanese garden in Georgetown, KY. It’s not as big or as impressive as the one in Texas, but it’s ok. The main thing I don’t like about it is that it’s right next to a road which makes it not as peaceful as Japanese gardens usually are. But, in the spring there were pretty sakura trees! :)



Last summer there was a Japanese festival in Lexington. There were a few tables of Japanese items for sale, food, activities, and entertainment including a Japanese Idol singing competition. I’m looking forward to going again this year.




This last picture is pretty random. I saw this house while on a walk and had to take a picture. It’s probably unintentional, but the shrub looked like Totoro to me.



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I'm moving back to Japan! :)

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I'm moving back to Japan! :) Yay! This time my boyfriend is going too! We both just accepted positions with Interac, the same company I worked for before. We had the opportunity to go later this year in August, but we decided to defer until March to save up money and have a better chance of being placed close together.

I'm really excited to move back to Japan. I've missed it a lot! I already have a list of places I want to visit and things I want to do even though I don't know what area we will be placed in.

It's been a little over a year since I last updated this blog. Since then I've had a few different temporary jobs. I did a couple of landscape design/installation projects, created a 300+ page product catalog for an agriculture equipment company, had a temporary job at a bank office for a week, had another temporary job as a test scorer, and now I am working as a cashier. I plan on sticking with that until March I guess. It's not a great job, but the time goes by quickly while I'm at work so it's ok I guess.

Besides work I've been studying Japanese and training for a 5k. I've been doing the Couch-to-5k program and really liking it. I will hopefully be running a 5k on July 4th.

I picked that random picture at the top because it really reminds me of living in Japan. That picture was taken by the 7-Eleven in Toi. I took walks there a lot. It was a nice distance for a walk and it was by the beach. Plus, it had plenty of yummy snacks. :) I miss traveling in Japan, but I also miss everyday life in Japan and most of my days were spent doing things like this rather than traveling. I can't wait to live in Japan again. :)

Maybe I'll do a post soon about the things I want to do when I go back to Japan. I miss writing this blog and I'm excited to be able to work on it again! :)

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