Back to Our Roots!

We are going on a long-planned trip to Taiwan in a week for 10 days. I remember the last time I went to Taiwan, which was almost 14 years ago. I can’t believe it has been that long!  Now, while going and seeing family is always great, I must say one of the best things about going to Taiwan is the food.  Food food food!  I recently stumbled across this CNN article all about the wonderful foods that I’m about to partake in.  I had to laugh at the first one.  This is is so quintessentially Taiwanese: simple, affordable, delicious, and fatty!  I just LOVE going to Taiwan and having this.

I’m positively drooling just thinking of all the yummy foods I’m going to get.  At the top of my list are the 滷肉飯 (Braised Pork over Rice), 太陽餅 (Suncakes), Zhong-zhi, 割包 (Gua-bao – Taiwanese Hamburger), Do-hua (delivious tofu curd over sweet peanut soup), and the 鳳梨酥 (Pineapple cakes).  But oh, the list goes on and on!

This will be my daughter’s first time going to Taiwan so I’m looking forward to having her try all sorts of yummy foods that are part of her heritage.  If she’s anything like her dad and me, she’ll be a very happy girl!  What are your favorite foods to share with your family?

A Pencil Skirt Saga

Have you ever gone to a store and bought some item, and then regretted it once you got home?  But, you were too lazy to return it and it really was a great deal?  You find yourself rationalizing how to keep this said item until it’s too late and you’re stuck with it.  Well, a funny thing happened to me a couple  years ago that hearkens back to this very dilemma.

One day a couple years ago (it may have actually been close to a decade ago, ay yi yi!) when I had terrible taste in clothing and absolutely no idea about fit or cut, I saw this a-line skirt for sale.  I thought it was such an appealing print that I paid no mind to the fact that it didn’t fit in the waist and it was much too long for me.  I kept it hanging in my closet for years just looking at the print and wishing I knew why I never liked the way it looked on me.

Before

Well, I finally faced this skirt demon and decided that I should make it into something usable.  Since there was really too much material, I thought making it into a pencil skirt would be just the ticket.  I found a great youtube tutorial from Craftovision that gave a quick and simple tutorial on how to make your own skirt pattern and then assemble your very own pencil skirt.  It looked so easy!

This skirt took longer than I anticipated.  I ended up re-sewing the zipper 4 times because I couldn’t get it right.  I had to redo the darts since the darts from the pattern didn’t quite fit my body correctly, and I decided to move the zipper to the side and re-use the wide waistband from the original skirt, modifying it so that it actually fit me.  I also added a slit in the back of the skirt so it would be easier to move around, which ended up in me improvising a bit on the pattern.

After

Man, I really need to improve my sewing skills!  However, that being said, I’m very pleased with the result and I hope that should I happen to be so daring as to try this again, it will be much quicker the next time around!