not known for my punctuality...

Christmas!!!

yeah, i know, it's march... minor detail.

anyway, in a yarn sampler box i got ages ago there was 12 grams of 2ply alpaca. what are you supposed to do with 12g of anything?! what are you supposed to do with 2ply?!

turns out the answer is bookmarks.

crocheted butterfly bookmarks even.

cos we all know that reading is the ultimate in cool, especially reading books long enough to require bookmarking, and crochet has always been known for it's total chic, so the two together is pretty much a flawless combo.

so i ended up making 5 of these wee knick-knacks as gifts for various people! (i think they're pretty cute actually- but hey, i like long books & crochet)

still had some yarn left over too.. who would have thought that 12g of 2ply could go so far?!

(gold star to anyone who can name the book in that photo without googling!)

on a less successful front, the (compulsory) advent fair biscuit debacle.

stained glass window biscuits = fail.

they overflowed & stuck to the baking paper... and tasted pretty blah too.

i bet martha's snow cap cookies never turned out like this either-

note for future- bake sales are NOT my forte. At. All.

and on an equally successful front- how to make an actually quite cool bag look meh in one simple photographic step-

i made it for my 12 year old step-daughter for xmas - it's a Pleated Purse from this tutorial - and she loved it!! managing to please a 12 year old girl is quite a challenge sometimes, so yay ;-)

and cos i'm a total sucker, when i saw gingerbread house kits in the supermarket i HAD to have one for lexi-

needless to say she had a fantastic time decorating it with her daddy on xmas eve :-)

and with me she made simple paper decorations for our tree!

fun times :-)

i wonder if i can get the jump on easter....

going ape.

aaaaages ago one of my friends managed to score us a bunch of merino thermal tops for $10nz, from a factory store, which is fantastic!!

the downside to this particular bargain was that mine was evidently IN the factory store because not enough orangutans were buying thermals from glassons.

no really, look- the neckline is clearly for someone who needs a much lower neckline than the average human, and the sleeves are perfectly suited for "knuckling" across the floor (as Terry Pratchett puts it) -
anyway, inspired by one of my friends who has recently been embarking on all sorts of upcycling adventures, i unpicked the neckline ribbing, chopped the sleeves off, chopped 4-5cm off the shoulders, recut the armpits & back neckline, chopped 8cm off the sleeves & rehemmed them, and attempted to put it back together again!!

ta da!!
thus taking it from faintly ridiculous and decidedly ape-like to actually wearable!!

so if you've got the sewing equipment handy, don't be afraid to attack disastrously fitting clothes & try to make them better!!

hiatus

i confess, it's been 3 whole months since i last blogged!

3 months in which i have done nothing... well, not really true, just nothing within my usual métier.. well that's not strictly true either, since my usual métier includes housework (we have kids, so that is never going to go away, sadly) and reading...

so basically i've done pretty much nothing but those two things. oh and looking after the kids of course.

but the reading i've been doing pretty spectacularly! since xmas i've chomped my way through.... (in no particular order)
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - Douglas Adams
The Witch of Exmoor - Margaret Drabble
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
Visible Worlds - Marilyn Bowering
Flying Under Bridges - Sandi Toksvig
Magician - Raymond E Feist
An Instance of the Fingerpost - Iain Pears
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis de Bernieres

and am currently up to page fifty zillion out of two hundred zillion of the Asimov Chronicles!

but the past few weeks have seen a wee resurgence of craft activity going on around here, plus i've got some stuff to share from before my awol adventures, so i'll be back with updates soon!!

great balls of...cake.

paul has had a few morning tea type events recently, one for staff & a kids class party, so i thought the previously spied red velvet cake balls (the precursor to the oh-so-cool cake pops) would be an interesting & festive option....

i was kind of right....

i started with this recipe for red velvet cake... oh my goodness it uses a WHOLE BOTTLE of red food colouring!!!
and almost no flavouring. ??! it tastes to me not unlike generic pancake with no topping...??
there is a hint of vanilla & 2T of cocoa, which i can only hazard is just to add the depth of colour rather than having a pink velvet cake...??

then i mixed it with the required amount of cream cheese icing, which honestly seemed like too much, cos they were pretty gooey (starting to see a trend here?!), and as much as i love cream cheese icing, it tasted like a slightly odd combo..

but hey.. i mixed it up & started making little balls, which paul tells me are about the size of an unshelled macadamia (ie with shell on), because i had read that smaller ones hold together better... instead of the 50-60 it supposedly yields using the box mix + 16oz of icing (and remembering that i used 16oz of icing & it seemed too much) i got around 140. umm...

so we started the task of dipping them in white chocolate... note for future: do cake pop version, the built in stick would really help, especially not having to take it out.. we used all kinds of combos of spoons & skewers...

and gave up after 111 balls. a little after midnight.

once chilled they were pretty enough.. the white chocolate with bright red filling was particularly impressive...
but.. ummm.... perhaps it is some kind of ginormous culinary cultural difference between us and the US.. but geez the flavour was spectacularly unspectacular, to the point of being Rather Dull, with touches of Kinda Weird, and the texture seems to vary between Meh and Ugh depending on who you ask.

Doh.

so yeah, spectacular failure.

so if you are thinking of doing these this xmas, don't. Or at least choose your favourite cake, and favourite icing, so at least they taste good, add *just* enough icing to hold it together, no more, and definitely do the cake pop version both for ease of dipping & cos they're cuter.

however, mysteriously, lexi & eli really like these cake balls, so they aren't ALL going to waste...

Lesson for the day

Knitting, to a deadline, whilst angry..bad idea.

(for the non-knitters- follow the pink edge from 12 o'clock around.. all good, all good, all good, oh wait where is it going?! it's gone! oh and there it is again... it's NOT supposed to do that.)

160 stitches, 2 hours work. "oops."



(if you were wondering about the angry part, roughly 70% of the kid's 'in circulation' toys & stuff, plus $15 of wholemeal spaghetti, has now been removed from the floor of the lounge, kitchen, dining room & hallway, and are now OUT of circulation. at least until the other three rooms they have destroyed have been cleared of their books & lego. might be mean, but less stuff = less potential mess... sadly compared to many families we didn't have all that much potential mess to start with, but this lot could make a mess out of even the scantest of materials it seems. and that would be fine if they would *just tidy it up again!!!*)

The photo rotating debacle

my goodness... ok so here's the deal.

If you upload photos using (Google's) Blogger it uses an online photo album service (Google's) Picasa Web Albums. Picasa has this awesome (ha!) feature that automatically rotates photos, seemingly arbitrarily in it's choice.. for example the carrot pic above (edited- which i just just discovered since posting this has disappeared, so even this process doesn't work!! back to the drawing board..) as seen in my previous post. As you can probably tell, this was the original way the photo was taken, with the camera held in normal camera position, so it's not like this photo had been rotated by some other program & Picasa just put it back how it was originally, it's just meddling instead. Despite people lobbying for several versions of Picasa the auto-rotate function still can't be disabled.

Now you'd think it would be alllll made better by the fact that Picasa Web Albums has a rotate function, and an option to "Edit in Picasa" [the downloadable desktop based photo managing software].... except if you upload your photo to the web album using Blogger's upload function, both of those features are disabled!!

So.... it seems that the fastest way for me to upload un-interfered with photos is to open them in the dutifully downloaded Picasa desktop software (which for some awesome [ha!] reason insists on searching out every.single.image on your computer), rotate the photo which it immediately interferes with *rolls eyes* and then use the "Blog This" function to upload it into a post.

Which would be awesome (you guessed it- ha!) if it opened the normal Blogger Dashboard interface with all it's myriad features, except it doesn't. It opens a pale comparison version with no font, alignment, size, tags or Post Options options and is only capable of posting one photo per post.

Did i mention the awesomeness?!

Soooo.... because i actually like having those options i have an extra step of stealing the HTML code for the pic from the Blog This window, and copying it into the normal Blogger post composer & continue posting as usual.

And all because the Google boffins haven't bothered to add the option of disabling the auto-rotate OR enabling the editing of blog based pics... it can't be *that* hard, since Flickr & Photobucket are perfectly capable of letting people autonomously decide the orientation of their photos!

So anyway... the point of this story is just to let you know what is going on, particularly for anyone who suffers the same problem, and also so that you know that if any of my pics come up looking sideways, it's because i didn't have time or inclination to go through any of that palaver! ;-)

Project Monday #5 - sad but true...

It's a sad tale i'm afraid... a whole week later and i'm *still* working on the never-ending tofu socks (duh), pointy secret & fluffy secret of almost a whole month ago.. and still going on the penguin skittles too.

so no Finished Objects (FO's for short) and no new work-in-progresses, or should that be works-in-progress??

hopefully i'll have something to share tomorrow, though judging by the little not-sleeping boy about to accost me, i'm thinking perhaps not.

good thing i didn't sign up for the blog post per day in october challenge huh? lol...

Eat cake.

now let me preface this by clearly stating that i have of late become rather a fan of a little blog called Cake Wrecks. Yes, a website dedicated to when professional cakes go horribly, deliciously, hilariously wrong.

and for part two of this tale, it was the day before the m.o.t.h's birthday, and he wanted a banana cake with cream cheese icing. no problemo.
and we needed to be packed for the weekend, cake included, and out of the house by 2.15pm. i can do that at a pinch..

so lexi is helping me bake the cake & asks what kind of cake it will be, i tell her "just a plain cake". see where this is heading?

sure enough 1.45pm, cake is out of the oven & iced, and a little girl is crying because daddy's cake isn't an aeroplane. So under much duress to decorate the cake somehow, i take my inspiration a) from Cake Wrecks, and b) from some of the glorious "Descriptive Writing" efforts that he has the pleasure of translating, sorry, reading on a daily basis... thus -

Wobbly writing? Check. (had to conciously fight myself from trying to do it nicely!) Phonetic Spelling? Check. Words bending or heading off the page? Check. Overuse of the word "and"? Check. flicks on the end of hair? Check. Mysterious but ever-present comment on personal happiness? Check.

awesome.

and would you believe that it only took me 8 minutes to do, and that *includes* making a piping bag?!

ah well.. it was enough to satisfy lexi anyway ;-)

and completely at the other end of the scale, check out the cake that his mother made for the baby shower!!!!
that baby is EDIBLE!!!

go! or not. not at all in fact.

as sharon so rightly guessed, we were making little basketty things made with glue-soaked yarn over a balloon.. like these.. with the intention of then weaving plant matter into the yarn to make a cool lantern for tonight's midwinter lantern festival.

they did look like this-
so anyway, this morning they felt suitably dry & crispy, so i decided to pop one..

yeah you've probably guessed it by now....




















yup.

are you supposed to *grease* the balloon or something?!?!

luckily i didn't pop it in front of alexis, so i'm going to leave the other one to dry for another day or two & see if that helps!

and now to come up with a new awesome lantern idea!!

felted crown pt2

well this has definitely been a learning process for me, having never felted a knitted item before.. and i still haven't!

lesson one-
before commencing knitting check that your yarn is NOT machine washable!
checkheaton country 12ply is, for future reference, machine washable.

lesson two-
you know the great debate over whether food colouring is a suitably permanent dye for wool? well if you go all gung-ho trying to felt machine washable wool, then the food colouring will fade a bit.. not terribly, but a bit.

lesson three-
if only a few rows into to-be-felted project you suspect that it would be faster & easier to create it from roving, then it definitely would be.

on the upside, despite machine washing it on hot 3 times, putting it through the drier 5 times (in with other washing, i'm not crazy), trying to hand felt it 3 times, and microwaving it for 8 minutes on high before dumping it back in the drier in a last ditch attempt, the yarn is still extremely frogable. No idea what i'll make with 100g of flame coloured pre-shrunk 12ply tho!?!

Tigger Cardi on alexis

The Tigger cardi on alexis... yes, it is much too skinny for her! lol
Still cute though, i reckon...