Mexican Wedding Cakes

First up on the cookie baking adventure is by far my most favorite cookie in the world and I think they should be eaten year round. Mexican Wedding Cakes!! YUM!! They are soft, buttery, sugary goodness.

When I moved into my first apartment, I couldn't believe it but my mom gave me one of our treasured cookie books! Of all things it is a collection of recipes from the Wisconsin Electric Company. They used to put it out every year. This particular edition is from maybe the 1950's or 60's??? It is full of pictures of little dolls with the cookies and is definitely very German - true to Milwaukee's heritage. It has recipes for Lebkuchen, Springerle, Pfeffernuesse, and Stollen - all things I love to try to pronounce.

Not exactly part of the German theme - but tasty are the Mexican Wedding Cakes

You should try them!!

Mexican Wedding Cakes
1 cup butter
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups all purpose flour
Extra powdered sugar

Cream butter; add sugar gradually; blend in salt, vanilla and flour. Mixture is stiff. Pinch off small pieces of dough; place on ungreased cookie sheets (actually the recipe says "cooky" and it makes me laugh). Bake at 400 degrees about 12 minutes. Roll in powdered sugar. Makes 4 dozen.

Let the Cookies Flow!!

I absolutely love the holidays. Love, love, love! My tree is up the day after Thanksgiving. I'm humming Christmas tunes before Thanksgiving and you can bet that "Sounds of the Season" is the radio channel of choice on the TV.

I especially love to decorate for the holidays and of course bake cookies.

The last few weeks I've been SWAMPED with custom orders for the shop. All of the holiday gifts, which is great! It does mean though that all I've done for the last 6 weeks is knit day and night and that's OK, but I do need a little fun in my life right?

Well, now it's Dec 8th and I am shutting my shop down for the holidays starting next Tuesday. I'm like a kid in school. The end is coming and I just can't focus anymore! I have 12 more orders to fill and hopefully be done by next Tuesday. Good luck with that.

It's too bad that I can't stay focused and just get it all done you know? Well, it's a good thing there are Christmas cookies in my life. Cookies always remind me of my mom. We always had the best Christmas cookies and we always had so much fun baking them together. Well, my mom is coming to visit this weekend and it's got me thinking of my family and I've decided to go on Christmas cookie binge! If I'm lucky (and don't run out of butter) I'd like to make new ones every day so that we can have cookies for the months to come. Stay tuned for updates and recipes!

What kinds of cookies does your family make for the holidays??

Until the next time ...
The girl behind the lama
~LMM

Who are you and what's with the donations??

I know that some of you are family, friends or have been following my blog for awhile, but others are new to Lama Works so this is for you. In particular, this is for a new team I just joined called Etsy Project Embrace. Hello to my new team!!

I am by trade a biomedical engineer from Milwaukee, WI. I have a bachelors and masters degree from Marquette University. I spent a few years designing artificial elbow, wrist and shoulder joint parts and surgical instruments to go with them. During grad school I worked with stroke survivors. I worked with a team of physical therapists to design a low cost joystick gaming device that could be used to regain arm function and work on strengthening and controlling movements.
After grad school I moved to Chicago and started working with the rehabilitation department at a Children's hospital. I worked with children with cerebral palsy, spina bifida and clubfoot that all had problems walking. I watched them walk with special cameras that are frequently used to make animated movies and video games. Our movies were used to help physicians break down how they walked and figure out how to fix any problems they might have.
\
Life brings changes along the way and while I loved what I did, other opportunities came around. After I got married a year and a half ago I found myself rather bored and picked up my crafting hobbies again. I have a very short attention span so that included knitting, quilting and scrapbooking. Well, one can only knit so many hats for herself ... A friend of mine opened me up to Etsy and the rest is history!

One sale brought on a second and a third. Before I knew it I had more sales than I could keep up with on the nights and weekends. Right around the same time my husband was offered a fantastic job in his home town of Quincy, IL. I took the leap and now I'm running Lama Works full time.
What's with the name?? My brilliant mother-in-law came up with that one! La are the first two letters of my first name, and Ma are the first two letters of my last name ... put them together and you have Lama! Not the animal ... not the Dalai ... just me :)

And what's with the donations?? A good friend of mine, Matt Wessel, has been singing, writing music and performing for years to raise money for the American Cancer Society. You can find out more about his music here. At his concert this past March, he challenged us all to make a difference. He wants to show that if a large group of people band together to make just small donations, it can have a large impact. One person can make a difference. So he challenged each of us to get creative and see if we could raise $100 by the time his next show came around next March.

What better way to be creative than to use my store! It not only gave me a cause to be passionate about, but it also gave me some sales goals. I wanted to grow the store of course, but have never really sat down and said, "OK I want to have 1 sale a week".

So there it started and I am so happy to be a part of this project and now part of Etsy Project Embrace. Many of the team members donate part of all of their profits directly to the American Cancer Society to raise money for cancer research. How great is that? You can find out more information about the team and a list of members here.

So go out and check out the team and help them support the ACS!

Until the next time ...
The girl behind the lama
~LMM

So Proud ...

Today is a very special day in our home. For as long as I've known him, my husband wanted to be an attorney. I was just an acquaintance when I saw him studying political science. I was a friend the summer he was studying for the LSAT, telling him that it didn't matter how he did on the LSAT - it just mattered that he got into a law school, graduated and passed the bar. I had graduated to girlfriend status by the time he was accepted into law school and was choosing where he wanted to go. I was his fiance as he struggled to find summer internships in a tumultuous economy. And I've been his wife to see him through graduation, studying through the bar exam and then the waiting to see if he passed.

Today is his day.

Today he gets sworn into the Illinois Bar Association. We will all stand beside him and hope he knows just how proud we are. Congratulations, my dear! I am so blessed to have been by your side through everything and am so excited to be by your side for the journey to come :)

Until the next time ...
The girl behind the lama
~LMM

The Year the Dog Ate Chocolate

There was a lovely comment from Midnightcoiler on my last post that is the inspiration of this post - that's for curing my writers block!

Dogs and chocolate. Talktothevet.com has the following guidelines on dogs and the toxicity of chocolate:

"The good news is that it takes, on average, a fairly large amount of theobromine 100-150 mg/kg to cause a toxic reaction. Although there are variables to consider like the individual sensitivity, animal size and chocolate concentration.

On average,
Milk chocolate contains 44 mg of theobromine per oz.
Semisweet chocolate contains 150mg/oz.
Baker's chocolate 390mg/oz.

Using a dose of 100 mg/kg as the toxic dose it comes out roughly as:
1 ounce per 1 pound of body weight for Milk chocolate
1 ounce per 3 pounds of body weight for Semisweet chocolate
1 ounce per 9 pounds of body weight for Baker's chocolate.

So, for example, 2 oz. of Baker's chocolate can cause great risk to an 15 lb. dog. Yet, 2 oz. of Milk chocolate usually will only cause digestive problems."

Now my sweet little (yet chubby) Puggle has a tendency to get into things. He will do ANYTHING for food and I mean anything. He loves carbs. Will eat an entire bag of rolls in a flash.

The setting is Christmas, 3 years ago. It would be our first Christmas with Luke. I had just purchased a plethera of boxes of Frango Mints (love them - thank you Macys!!) to hand out as gifts. We went out to dinner one night and found that Luke had eaten yes, an entire box of these dark chocolate mint wonders. He appeared to be fine. Stomach of steel. Never better!

Fast forward 2 weeks. It's our first year we are spending Christmas together. My first Christmas at my future in-laws. We head to their house and have a lovely time. Christmas Eve. We go out and about somewhere and come home to find that as much as we had barricaded him in, our cute and innocent dog had broken into the basement and had found the one pound box of Jamaican rum chocolate and ate ... well all of it.

Christmas Eve goes on ... we open presents ... Luke gets sick. Luke proceeds to attempt to expel all chocolate and rum out of his system all night long. My poor husband slept with him on the kitchen floor all night to make sure he was OK.

Christmas Day comes and everything appears back to normal. We party all day long. 9pm rolls around and we finally start out 5.5 hour drive home because I had a meeting the next morning. We are 45 minutes into the trip and poor Luke starts to get sick again in the back seat of the car. Still the chocolate?? Hungover maybe?? Either way he ended up getting sick about every 45 minutes the entire car ride home.

Longest car ride ever.

We even went to far as to call a vet at 10 pm on Christmas Day night to see if he needed emergency care. He ended up at the vet the next day with an IV of fluids and shaped back up. Poor dog.

So yes, for your own sake - keep the dog away from the chocolate.

Other dog stories to come some day. Maybe about the time that he needed a epi shot?? Or maybe the time that he was in a cast for a week?? Ahhhh ... Luke. So cute ... yet somehow so accident prone!

Until the next time ...
The girl behind the lama (and her dog)
~LMM

I ....

Have writers block ...

I've started numerous posts ...

Erased them ...

I'm out of bloggy ideas. Do you have any??

To keep everyone happy, I'll keep today simple ... with a few pictures of my dog, Luke, from Halloween. He is a bit ... well ... "stocky" ... so it doesn't fit him very well and he never seems completely happy when we put it on, but the complies and just looks up with this sad "Mom, do I have to????" face.

Happy Halloween!!

The Case of the Missing Couch Feet

It all started over a month ago ....

On a warm and kind of crazy August day ...

What we thought would be a busy, hectic, but normal move turned into one of the great mysteries of the year.

Yes ... The Case of the Missing Couch Feet.

Our belongings moved from our humble abode in Evanston, IL to our new cozy bungalow in Quincy, IL on August 28th. We immediately departed for a long awaited vacation to the great north woods of Wisconsin and returned on September 11th. Upon our return we faced the mountains of boxes that had overtaken the cozy bungalow.

When we moved we had to remove the little wooden feet from the bottom of our beloved couch to fit it through the door frame. It happens. But where ... Oh where???? could those feet have gone during the move??

The unlabeled box in the kitchen?? The one in the spare bedroom that had miscellaneous junk in it?? Maybe it was somehow still in the garage??? Please tell me that they didn't end up in the GoodWill pile!!

Hours turned to days ... days turned to weeks ...

My dear husband was on the verge of a meltdown. A few more days and I would have found stacks of 2 x 4s under the couch.

Me? It didn't really bother me. So our couch was 4" too low ... who cares?? Well my father in-law wouldn't sit on it because it was too hard to get up from. My husband grimaced every time he sat down on it. Our dog on the other hand was quite pleased that it was the perfect height for him to see out the window.

Well, let me tell you ... our lives changed last night. I was sitting at the computer working when my husband barges in ... he had found a clue!!!

A garbage can that had 3 screws and a small chip of wood! I am confused and a little irritated that he's excited about a piece of wood that had obviously broken off a piece of our furniture in the move, but I went with it - he seemed rather wound up about it. He had a promising piece of evidence!


He was now a man on a mission. He ran out of the room with the biggest clue we've had since we got here. A garbage can. Yes, dear.

I go back to work and 5 minutes later he comes back with the couch feet in hand! Who knew that that one garbage can had been all he needed to jog his memory?? That garbage can had been in our old basement ... next to the couch ... when we were packing that last box of "junk" ... you know, the stuff that doesn't really belong in a box and sits on the floor until you absolutely have to back it. Low and behold - the missing feet were in the big box of junk next to it! The box that had just been tossed to the basement because we didn't want to deal with the unknown contents.

He promises that he went through every single box we have left weeks ago. Yes, dear.

So there you have it - case closed! Our couch is the proper height, we have beer in the fridge - we are once again ready to entertain :)

Until the next time ...
The girl behind the lama
~LMM

Break time!

I have a 14 minute break from work - my time to blog for you!

Scheduled break time??? Yep, it's come to that. My day is now organized in a series of goals. Especially since I've had 12 sales in the past 13 days (WOAH!!!!). My husband pointed out an interesting factoid to me last night. After dinner I checked my email as I do quite frequently throughout the day ... walked into the kitchen and said very meekly ... "So I think I've got another mitten order?!?". Now, a year ago that would have been a jumping for joy kind of statement. So what gives??

Lesson #3 learned since working on the shop full time: It might actually be successful!

Which ties into lesson #4: Be prepared!

Now I am not complaining in any way shape or form, I'm a tad bit overwhelmed but definitely in a very, very good way. The cold weather is upon us and gosh darn it, Lama Works is a success!! How can I tell winter is approaching (other than the obvious cold weather??) ... I have 3 orders going to Canada this week, which I'm sure is much colder than Quincy, IL for sure.

Had I spent more time over the warmer months getting ready for the winter ones I might have more time now to design new things. But as it is, I'm spending my week catching up on orders and knitting like my life depended on it. What's on the agenda?

1 baby pumpkin hat
2 pairs of Bella mittens (maybe 3 .... 6 if the custom order goes through)
2 hats (one Bella, one falling leaves)
2 pairs of wrist warmers (one falling leaves, one custom)
1 falling leaves scarf (still in the design phase)
50 thank you cards (as soon as the envelopes get in)

Oh and have I mentioned that I might be doing a craft fair in November??? Time to hustle!!

So back to that scheduled break thing ... I'm trying to structure my time each day with goals. OK I'll have this hat finished by 10:00. Then from 10-11 I'd like to have this hat done and then at 11 I work on things around the house. If I finish any segment a little early, that's me time to read, surf the net or even take a nap. So far, so good I think! If all goes well I'll have 3 orders packed up and out the door this afternoon and I'll even have time to go on a date night tonight. Date night on a Tuesday?? Heck yeah! Matinee prices in the evening and free popcorn at the movies?? Date night on Tuesday for sure!

OK, gotta run ... just enough time to finish the post and get on to my pumpkin hat!
Thanks for joining me on my break :)
Until the next time ...
The girl behind the lama
~LMM

A little bit of time for me!

It's an interesting position to be in .... my hobby is not my work ... my work is now my hobby. How does one separate those two things???

I find it hard to set aside time that is just for me, because in that spare time that I used to have ... I'd knit. I am trying to be strict about my work day and spend just normal business hours working on things for the store. So I organize, I do paperwork and I make projects for the shop. I'm trying really hard to spend my nights just hanging out with my husband or out with friends, but if I do feel the need to knit - I make sure it's a project for me or at least a present for a friend (Sweetie, I promise that the scarf I promised you last Christmas is going to be here before winter is!)

Hence the great sweater project - which I'm still plugging away at slowly but surely. I'm back to about where I was when I ripped it all out 2 weeks ago. I went down a needle size and a sweater size so hopefully this will do the trick. I've decided that I'm just going to keep going this time. If it's too big, it's too big and someone in my life will get a lovely present.

I also got back into quilting this weekend which was fantastic! My new sewing room actually was my husband's Grandmother's sewing room back in the day, so I channeled her energy and decided that Sunday was finish a project day! I found a Thimbleberries quilt top that I had finished and conveniently also found the backing and batting.

I really do love the house that we are living in and it has such a rich history with the family, but I just had to share some pics. There are a lot of rooms that need ... well ... updating. There is quite a bit of wall paper and shag carpeting. I'm loving the yellow stripes ... With the matching yellow ceiling ...
Oh and of course the cork lamp :)

But I digress. I didn't quite finish the quilt, but I made pretty good progress! I've got the top all sewn together and even took the time to do the decorative stitching on it that I tend to avoid. I'm trying to do things right. Too often in my past I'd slop together a project and call it done, but now that I have more time in my life to work on things, I want to do them completely and get it done correctly. That means I do rip things out now when I make a mistake and I'm going to try really hard not to fudge it ... I said try ....Anyway, that was the fun craft of the weekend... it sure is nice to have my supplies all back in order again! I can finally find my yarn!


Until the next time ...
The girl behind the lama
~LMM

Where does the time go?

Ok I know, I know ... I've been MIA ... but really that's a good thing!

Why??? My husband passed the Bar exam!!!! We've been waiting and waiting for those results to come in and they sure did last Thursday! We couldn't be happier and we are so looking forward to just settling into a groove of normal, quiet life.

First thing first.. where have I been?? Working! 6 sales in the last 7 days! I can definitely tell that the cooler weather is here and that people are thinking about the best way to stay warm. I'm getting a lot of custom requests which I love! "Hey, do you have a scarf that matches this??" "What about mittens that look like this??" "Can you make me this, but in this color, and make it this size?" It has given me a good chance to be creative and tweak some patterns a bit to my own liking.

One project that I've been working on for 2 different clients are some accessories to go with the falling leaves collection. I managed to take a fantastic pattern for some fingerless mittens and convert it from sock yarn into a worsted weight variation. Next up is a scarf to go with it!

I also had a fun bud vase order for a little girl's tea party which was fun :)


I'm still toying with the idea of doing a craft fair yet this year. There is one that I might be able to have a small table at in November, but do I really have enough to stock a table?? I'll tell you that if I keep getting this many sales in a week, there's no way I'll be able to keep my stock up and ready for a craft fair, but I'm going to try!!

Enough shop talk though. I was also out of town this past weekend for a beautiful wedding at the Milwaukee Art Museum. It was great to see all of my family and we even got in some time with our friends while we were there. Enjoy some pics from our weekend!




So it's been a pretty good week! Here's to another great one!
Until the next time ...
The girl behind the lama
~LMM