I’ve been rather busy even though I haven’t been posting too much. We’ve had a couple of major upheavals in our lives and I’ve been taking advantage of the time before I get back into the full time workforce by sorting and organising and retraining myself.

The picture to my left is my craft cupboard which still feels like a mess because it shares space with our laundry but is really a world more sorted and accessible than it has probably ever been in my life. I’ve only got one shelf in there left. My useful shelf where all the random stuff that I might use one day gets put. It needs to have a bunch of things thrown out, probably, but I’m distracted by our study and the two bedroom cupboards we never use.

As you can see I’m a really big fan of plastic tubs. You can see everything in them and they’re easy to just grab one box when I’m ready for a beading project or want to find all my patchwork/patterned fabric. I’ve also got all the projects that I’ve started, and know I’m going to finish, registered and in specific tubs.

The biggest problem is that I haven’t got a sewing table anymore. My SO is camped out with two monitors on the table beside my laptop and it’s really awesome. We can watch the tv that doesn’t need us to really concentrate or the horror and sf flicks we’ve watched a million times. He games, and I’ve finally got a machine to game with (even if I’m mostly playing simssocial and simcitysocial on facebook – yes I feel weak). But, once the study is done I will get back to posting a million and one things because I’m gonna take over one of the tables for my sewing space!

We also had our annual Yule feast. Every year on the weekend closest to the longest night in the Southern Hemisphere we have a party. We’ve been doing it for nearly twenty years in one form or another which is pretty cool. This year, our annual bake up day was at my sisters and we made a theme of round objects. Patties and rissoles and potatoes and balls of coconut ice and cake pops and truffles and profiteroles. As usual there was way too much food!

I also managed to write my first draft of the recipe book and guide to holding Yule the way we do in time for the celebration. It’s currently with my beta-readers and I’m hoping to release it as a creative commons e-book thing in the next couple of months.

I have got some projects in the draft queue on the tumblr and a couple of other things in the works. I’m still working on the skirts project and I’ve got a dress for work cut out and, most excitingly, my new laptop is going to match the laptop case that I have been working on for a couple of years. It’s all pink!

C

 

 

I have been a little absent of late because we have had some major life changes and occurences happening on the Asha home front. There are a lot of really good things – we got a puppy, my little brother is going to become a dad, I’m looking for work,  and we got through the May/Taurean birthday cycle and came out alive. Who else has eleven people, seven of which are family, all born within three weeks? What happens in September ever year in the southern hemisphere? It’s spring, sure, but… keep it in your pants, family!

And I’ve been working hard on a couple of projects. On the craft front my Skirts from Scratch project is roaring along. In November last year I set myself the task of making 15 skirts in 15 weeks. I didn’t quite make it, Christmas came along, I was distracted, but I have kept at it and I’m pretty sure that I’ve made the goal. It’s just not official until I have a photo for each up on the Tumblr. It’s a great challenge though. It’s really helped me think about the design of skirts in a more detailed way. I now go out to the mall or to the movies and examine every skirt I see thinking ‘Uh huh, if I used my base block, cut it like that, add another layer, then voila, I could be wearing your skirt!’ Of course, I now have nearly 15 skirts that were all made in summer and it’s coming on to winter and I’m going back to work. Less casual, fun – more long or pencil skirts. I think I need to set myself another 5 winter and 5 work skirt goal. Or at least look through all the skirts I made years ago and bring them back out onto the clothes rack.

We’re starting the craft circle back up, too, and they are going to be willing victims of my pattern making. I have a skirt tutorial that I’ve written (and will hopefully upload here soon) for them to break. It’s great having the time to see people again, I went pretty hermit for the last couple of years but now I am reinvigorated and celebrating life.

I have a bunch of projects in the draft queue on Tumblr and a round up due for you guys soon. It’s all go in Casa Asha.

<3

I’m in that stage where I feel like I’ve got a lot started but nothing finished. I’m still working on my honours thesis – a project that feels never-ending and doomed to be interrupted by heat and people and lots of new and unfocused ideas.

I’m working on my 15 skirts in 15 weekswhich is two thirds there although I’m pretty sure I’m past the deadline. I have a bunch of skirts to post to my tumblr but I’m still organising the photos for the last couple. I have written up instructions for most of the skirts in an A4 art journal and on the weekend I’m going to teach one of my friends how to do a variant on the tiered remnant-gypsy skirt that I’ve been making since I was sixteen.

I’ve also started a zine project. I love zines, in particular craft zines, and I have a bunch of ideas that I’m hoping will see the light of day. A collection of owls, for example, or a tie-dye manual, or little mini annuals like you get at Christmas in the UK. I have done a couple of fanzines and my awesome sister and I ran a newsletter (we refused to call it a zine) for the Brisbane Goth scene in the late nineties. This zine project is about the pagan sabbats. I’m currently pulling the last bits of the slightly overdue Lammas zine into a notebook so that I can make it all up.

There’s a lot of picking things up and putting them back down – my sewing machine hits my table for twenty four hours before getting put away, out of temptation’s way – and I think that’s part of why everything feels unfinished. If you go and peek at the Lolly Egg Dinosaur tumblr you’ll be able to see some of the stuff that I have done (including a Green Lantern mug mat).

I’m also planning to write some tutorials to post on this site, the first one will be the really nifty drawstring bags that my SO and I made for Christmas!

I’ve been posting my projects and finished things to my Tumblr because it’s really easy to post to and update from my phone. The pictures end up massive, which is from the phone end, but the quality that I can take from something I carry around in my pocket and isn’t even dedicated to images is pretty awesome.

Most of January has been sorting and cleaning and household stuff. This is mostly because of an addition to our family, Feyd Tesla our Chinese crested puppy, and the need to raise the last few things off the floor where he can chew them. He’s lovely and friendly and looks like a Luck Dragon. I also made a couple more skirts for the 15 skirts project, mostly because I wanted to wear a new skirt to the My Chemical Romance concert. And, as usual, a couple of testing different tutorials and quick projects to keep my fingers busy.

15 Skirts Project

It’s now two weeks into the new year and on one hand I feel like I’ve done so little. I’ve only got a couple of finished projects waiting to be posted. On the other hand we had a great Christmas and New Year with friends visiting from down south and lots of seeing our family. And we adopted a puppy to go with our two cats and eight fish. Feyd is lovely and friendly and chases and plays with our kitten Brillig.

I have also sorted a bunch of stuff, like my embroidery threads, and my craft room is looking awesome and things are getting easier to find. I have a skirt cut up and a bright blue kilt in construction. I’ve got a necklace for my mum to do this week. Lots of little bits to potter around with when I need a break from writing my horrors (honours) chapters.

The other thing I’ve been working on is getting this word press blog set up. I’m still working on my strategy and integration for my tumblr and blog but it’s in place and useable.

I shall sign off now and welcome you to Lolly Egg Dinosaur!

Based on recipe by Andy Bates on the Food Network.UK

Not vegan or gluten free. Dairy free.

Finding a good vegetarian main that’s a little bit fancy and still easy to make is pretty hard. Patties are a good stand by, lasagne, spinach and feta pasties, too but we wanted something a little different for the PCOV family dinner. About a third of us are still vegetarian and we have a rule that vego’s get to choose vego food first. You carnivores can eat (nearly) everything! Lots of salads, this year, and a lamb roast, and batter-fried veges based on a czech recipe. And these.

The recipe is easy to follow and much quicker than I expected. Sure it says 15 minutes, but cooking has steps and a new recipe can be a little intimidating. This one wasn’t. I changed a couple of things: different beans than the cannelini (because it was what I had); NO CORIANDER (cause its gross and tastes like detergent). The mix made up more than enough to cover seven eggs but maybe not eight (the extra eggs went into a potato salad and I made a burger for lunch out of the dough). And I left the made up eggs between wrapping the eggs and coating them because we were going to my sister’s (her turn).

They were a success but really heavy and I definitely put more on my plate than I could eat but that just means leftovers! If I was doing a dinner party I’d only make one per person even though they look small. Also, I want to try nuts, maybe instead of the breadcrumbs (or with) or instead of all the beans. Bit of extra crunch.

This one gets a thumbs up and added to my recipe book!

I haven’t forgotten about my skirts, I promise, I actually have another two that I need to photograph and post and at least one more cut up but it’s Christmas time and I’m distracted making presents, waiting for presents from the internet and eating way too much.

This photo is at my Gran’s retirement village where we had a picnic with the Martin contingent of my family. I have three family things every year and it means we have a couple of weeks of random events.

The skirt was cut out and then dyed (during my last dye batch) then sewn together. It’s made from Calico and I think done at two different stages of the purple so that it’s got two tones for the colouring. I love the circle skirt’s purple.

The necklace is also one of mine, plastic butterflies on twine.

I couldn’t find any of my pin cushions so I made a new one.

I took a triangle of fabric, sewed two edges together, twisted it and sewed the other two edges together leaving a small gap. I pulled it inside out and stuffed it then sewed the edge with the hole in it. In total it took me less than ten minutes.

The silver pins look like stars on a dark blue sky.

I bought an A4 Renoir easy-carve printing block after my experiments with rubber stamps because I wanted to try a different medium. I’m pretty impressed. It’s given me much more space than an eraser and it’s really easy to shape/cut. The images were drafted and then transfered with pencil and cut around. I made these two stamps in an hour and a half with a test run (above) to check for edges. The ink cleans off under a tap pretty easily (although the red has stained more than the blue) and they’re all ready for the wrapping paper that I’ve wanted to print for three years.

I made the bag up with the intention to hang it off the end of our bed so that we can be practical and prioritise underwear when we’re doing laundry runs. I am, and my SO is, a bit of a clothes horse and I have been known to do 10+ loads in a week to get through all the washing. It’s why I don’t always wash everything every week – I’ve still got things to wear, right.

My SO also said that I needed to make it obvious, next to our Calico washing bag liners, that this was for undies, and so, I used a traditional Japanese method to create underwear shapes on the bag. Using small stitches, stitch a shape that you want to see after dyeing and gather it tightly and tie it off. Throw it into the dye bath as normal. When it’s out, cut the strings open and little pictures will appear. I’ve had better success (nifty star curtains) with bigger shapes and with two layers of stitching but this is still adorable.

The colour is an awesome pale aqua that’s great with our new sheets (b-day present) and hexagon quilt cover.

This is a combination of an experiment in dyeing (the twine) and a knotted necklace.

The cotton, just generic twine that’s often called butcher’s string or something like that, was placed into the dye pot during my dyeing extravaganza last weekend. The plan was to use it for tyeing brown paper packages for Christmas/seasonal presents but when I was going through my active bead box (the one’s I want to use soon) I spotted a match. Also, we’re going a different way with packing.

The knotting between beads is a traditional method used for things like pearls and while I’m getting pretty tasty at knotting between chunky plastic beads, I’m still not sure my skill would transfer to beading silk or fishing line or anything very thin. I’m still enjoying the aesthetic of natural materials up against apocalypse-proof plastics. I am worried, however, about the longevity of the string but I think it should last a few years of regular wear and tear and it would be easy enough to cut out and replace making the necklace eternally changeable.

19 garments, that’s how many things have gone through the hot water and dye pot on my stove in the last twenty-four hours or so.

I started last night with the assistance of the lovely Ivy_says and the colour green. The I-dye amazon is not the green it thinks it is. It’s an incipid grass green when I was looking for something bold. Sky-blue from Tintex was added and teal was realised.

We also made an experiment with wax-resist which was not very effective, just saying. Think maybe need to use cold-water dyes like the instructions say but I always think of batik as a traditional craft and cold-water dyes as a modern invention. I know pretty weird connection but it means that everytime I’ve tried batiking it hasn’t worked because I think that people have been doing it in hot water for centuries and there is always a lovely ring of wax around my pots.

Today was ultraviolet by the i-dye guys which is a lovely colour but still not as bold as I would like. It comes out like the second and fifth from the left in the picture above. Both of these were t-shirts, one cream and one white, and done in different runs so the colours faded in the later one.

The third batch was an experiment in mixing. Tintex red with Tintex sky-blue (1:1) makes a gorgeous wine or rich red colour (first shirt from right). The addition of a little more sky-blue to refresh the dye created the purple in the fifth calico skirt (you will see more of this – it’s the base for this weeks skirt).

After the camping trip to Moreton a couple of weeks ago we had some oranges left over. My SO and I are not great at eating fruit and so, even though they had been carted to our campsite and back again, they have been sitting on our bench doing nothing. Ah ha, I said, I like marmalade and I’ve never made marmalade. I have oranges and they make marmalade.

I searched the internet for recipes and decided on the Clove and Orange Marmalade Recipe from Taste.com minus the cloves and roped a companion, R, my mum, into helping (and maybe instructing as she has made jam before and I haven’t).

So far the results are successful. I am waiting for the morning to put it on my toast but the peel, which we tested to see if it would set, tastes gorgeous.

eta: Now in the morning, it’s all set and it is so tasty. Still no toast, though, we have to go buy bread. Really stoked with this ;)

The recipe was pretty easy to follow and adapt even though we were a little bit slap-dash about the timings. We soaked the orange peel before starting, so we cooked it for a shorter time.

Interesting fact: you cook the orange with lemon juice and the seeds in a little bag because the seeds, like the seeds of apples, have peptin in them. It’s the stuff that actually sets the jam when it reacts somehow to the acid of the lemons and the sugar (as I understand it).

The picture is not fantastic and may get replaced: be warned ;).

This is the second skirt in my 15 skirts in 15 weeks project. It’s made from material I picked up in a remnant bin for a couple of dollars. (The rest of it forms the bodice of the babydoll dress that I constructed the pattern from previously). It’s synthetic and has a great shine to it but I’m not actually sure what the fabric is.

I used the basic skirt pattern from Skirt 001 and created a yoke. The skirt was gathered onto the yoke and the waist uses a casing to enclose the elastic. It took about two hours to sew, interspersed with breaks from the horrid heat on Monday and distractions while watching The Walking Dead and Once Upon A Time and The Misfits and Hell on Earth. Lots of distractions.

This week has been quite crafty – I’ve got a few more posts to write up – with some baking and sewing and getting in supplies for Christmas presents.

On Wednesday my sister (D), step-sister (AS), step-mum (J), dad (AM) and I were in Maleny (which is about an hour and a half north of Brisbane and a 100 metres or something higher) doing a german baking session.

We made six different kinds of cookies all using a “stollen” style. All of the ingredients are piled on a bench. We start with the flour which forms a mountain and then sugar and butter are sprinkled around the edges and eggs or milk go into a well. We call it a volcano. The dough is then kneaded (and at least one of these took us half an hour to turn from ingredients to dough). We roll the dough up and throw it in the fridge before making or cutting into shapes and baking.

J, who grew up in Germany, always bakes like this but it’s really different to our bowls and electric beaters. Both D and I ended up with bruises on our hands from the kneading. The biggest change, though is having to fridge batches of dough in between cutting and rolling because the butter needs to be kept cold for some chemical reason. And the dough crumbles too much if it’s not cold enough, which, in a Brisbane summer, can be an quite a trial.

There will be a couple of action pictures of the two aprons that I made this week. One is a promise to AS awhile ago which looks great over her very pregnant belly but she may wait to send me a picture. And the other is a purple and black harlequin basic apron for me. The last one I made got kidnapped by my Mum and now it’s only Dad and my brother that don’t have patented-Chani-aprons.

Oh and the cookies are all really tasty. My allocated lot has nearly been eaten: definitely too good to survive till Christmas but really nice with a cuppa.