Let's Make Something! #4

I can't believe January is already almost over!! 2026 just started, what do you mean it's almost February?

Part of my resolution — or my Theme for 2026 as my friends and I have decided to call it — is to be more intentional. Your girl loves to snack (chips and salsa hate to see me coming), so I want to be more intentional with my eating habits. I'm no stranger to doom scrolling, so I try to pick more long-form content, and make it more substantial where I can. I have an art account and blog now, so I want to make time for the content I want shown on them, and do it more consistently!

With all of that being said, I'm looking forward to all the things I'll have to share with you! So let's get started on January before it slips through our fingers…

My Shop

My White Christmas Stickers gave me a scare over the holidays — I ran out of the Wallace & Davis mid-order, and had to run to Office Depot in a panic to get the order out in time! I'm not sure how my inventory on Etsy managed to get off-kilter, but I'll be keeping a closer eye on my stock. Especially since I'm already close to running out again!

Works in Progress

Last month I mentioned that I was working on Huntr/x Lil Bitties from KPop Demon Hunters, and omitted the progress picture! What is a blog for if not to share works in progress? So this month I'd like to remedy that by providing a picture for you here, because the girls may end up taking a back seat to the other characters I'm working on…

If you follow my instagram, you may have seen my latest reel, sharing the progress on Lucy from the Fallout show! My fiancé and I have been watching each episode of the new season as they've been coming out, and I'm hooked! 

It's such a fun show even as someone who has never played the games — I'm a sucker for the retro vibes of it all, and intrigued by… everything else 😅 But hearing from my fiancé about what a love letter this show is to the games has been so lovely to see, and getting to watch him re-play Fallout 4 to share the experience with me has been a new favorite past-time of mine (it's like I got a whole bonus prequel Fallout show 😉

I've been sharing clips little on my progress of Lucy, but my social media followers haven't seen my progress on The Ghoul just yet, so you get to be the first! I'm excited for these two to be finished, and hopefully up in my shop before the Fallout hype surrounding the second season is over!

The Game Chair

If it wasn't for the proof on my last post, I don't think you would've believe that I picked up my Animal Crossing Island right before the 3.0 update that just dropped! But since I did, I can tell you that it came just in time for all of the work I wanted to do, and has just lit that flame a little bit more.

If you haven't heard, Animal Crossing New Horizons dropped a new update for all players that included some new controls, items, and an entire hotel. And I think it's awesome!

Since I'm renovating my entire island, one of the things necessary has been Terraforming — building and destroying cliffs or bodies of water wherever I want. One of the more frustrating aspects of terraforming was always haveing to move, build the cliff, walk around it, turn back around, build the cliff, and repeat forever.

The 3.0 update gave us the ability to lock in and keep your villager facing one directing, and sliding across the ground to build up the next one. I was able to build up a very large area that I had been dreading in at least half the time, and it's done wonders to bring me back to the game and actually get this remodel rolling.

The other big part of this update is the Hotel that appears on the pier of your island, which — to keep it short — allows you to decorate a new hotel room every day, with access to your entire inventory of furniture items. On top of having villagers stay in the campsite, they can now stay in the hotel, and can be seen walking across the island, which has been so interested to see!

This update feels similar to the Happy Home Paradise DLC that came out a few years ago, but I'm probably a little biased when I say that I love how much the hotel directly impacts my island, and how I interact with it.

I used to share my island with my family, and through some weird glitch, my Island Representative was never given the opportunity to participate in the Happy Home Paradise DLC, and go decorate the vacation homes for other villagers. I would have to switch to the shared profile — even though I don't share my island anymore — in order to access it, and eventually, the idea of switching profiles and reloading the game stopped being worth the extra gameplay.

Because of that, I'm thrilled to have the Hotel, where I can decorate rooms as I please, and benefit from a new purpose for my crafting materials.

Good Eats

I've been making a ton of new recipes at home, and I'm so excited to share them with you!!

Starting with leftovers… I bought a bunch of crostini's to go alongside bruschetta and charcuterie boards for our Christmas Party, and I was left with most of what I had bought. Naturally, by the time New Years came around, they were comfortably stale, but I didn't love the idea of just throwing them away.

What do you do with stale, crunchy bread? Turn it into toasted crunchy bread, covered in too much parmesan cheese! Roughly following this recipe from All Recipes, homemade Croutons had wriggled their way into the regular rotation! I measure with my heart, throw on seasonings that spark joy, and try to stop myself from munching on them without salads!

While I'm very proud of my crouton achievement — it doesn't get much better than hearing your fiance say he only wants more croutons if they're the homemade kind — my crowning achievement for this update is that I've finally learned how not to kill yeast!

My first ever attempt at making bread, I followed a TikTok recipe for "the easiest bread ever" and failed to do any outside research on how my yeast packets worked. Spoiler: yeast is a living thing that needs to bloom. And I, at the very start of my Covid Bread Making career, unknowingly killed my yeast, and made a brick.

A few months ago I decided to try an make New York Style bagels to impress my New Yorker, knowing this time that I had to be very careful as to not kill my yeast. And what did he think? Well, he never tried them, because the dough wouldn't rise. It wouldn't combine in on itself (so the two ends of my rolled sticks of dough wouldn't connect at the end to form a bagel without making a deal with the devil), and overall, I just knew that something was wrong. And while I won't pretend to know which scientific aspect of this recipe led me astray, I've since learned what bloomed yeast is supposed to look like, and I didn't have it.

Which brings us to last week. I've learned what to do with my packets of yeast — warm water, sugar, and five minutes to do it's thing. I've got the pizza stone preheating in the oven… and I made Pizza Dough!! Twice!! 

Is it New York pizza? Definitely not, but it's fluffy, and delicious, and I made it! I followed this recipe from Joy Food Sunshine, and I loved it so much I scraped together enough toppings for a second pizza night, just to make sure it wasn't a fluke.

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While I can't believe it's already almost February, I've loved this January so far! I've been sticking to my yearly theme and the goals I've set for myself, and have really enjoyed all the new ways I've chosen to stay creative.

What are some of your goals for 2026? Or projects you've started working on? Let us know in the comments below — inspire someone to make something! See you all next month! 💛