Cooking frenzy

This year I decided I'd gone most of my life not making any resolutions in the first place.. and those years I picked on the hype and made some.. I pretty much forgot them the next day. Seeing that I was climbing the ladder on the years in my thirties, I had to get more serious about life and get over the whole take it as it comes approach.

So with all seriousness I asked myself what is the one thing I suck at (apart from singing, dancing, walking in heels, playing any instrument, knowing another language, etc... ) and that was... Cooking and baking! And that was my resolution.. learning to cook and bake.

I usually avoid posting my major fiasco.. but today I realized that we're through the first quarter of 2015 already and I have not made any headway at all into this area.. so here goes...

Right after the triple choc nut muffins (which weren't that bad imo), whose success kinda got to my head, I made these brownies.. and went on a youtube journey... and burnt them! but.. turned out.. mmm... I like 'em like that (lol from Shania Twain's song.. Any man of mine).


And this afternoon I made the weirdest pasta I've ever eaten.. but again.. I liked it. It's spinach fettucini (which I didn't cook properly!) with broccoli, peas, corn kernels and pineapple (it just seemed like a good idea to add this at the time :\ ). The creamy sauce I'd made.. which had come together quite well, curdled as soon as I added the frozen pineapple! So I ended up draining the whey.. and made a fungi base instead (instant mushroom soup powder).. After all that.. I didn't quite dare eat it.. but I had a bite and loved it.. and ate rather too much of it.. normally I try to watch my calories.. but today I thought I'd stuff it and call it my over-eating cheat day (I've had too many in a row by today).


But like I said in my muffins post.. its going to take a lot to keep me motivated to continue cooking for myself.. Unemployment could likely turn out to be one the highest motivation though.... not only are take-outs not the healthiest... they're not the most cost effective either :( if my last 7 months spell of unemployment hadn't taught me better... this one might.. maybe the pink slip was just the source of motivation I needed.. lol

Crazy Crane

Visited arty brothers and sisters at yet another artsy meetup at the Cockatoo Island. This is the fisrt time I'd been there so I really wanted to do more exploring than sketching..

I ended up spending a good deal of time trying to get the proportions right for the crane.. I'm still not sure I managed to do that. Was also distracted playing the family photographer offering group photos to families who wandered to this corner of the island.. which most people seemed to leave alone for some reason.


To me, the crane really looks more like a giraffe than a mechanical thing.


Here're are the others' incredibly arty expressionz!

Loom Bands

If you've been to any arts and Crafts store, if there's one thing you just can't miss other than the super bright crayons and marker pens (that I have multiple packets of), its those looms and interesting colorful and di$counted bands (which doesn't necessarily mean they're any cheaper.. just that they stand out and scream buy me... BUY ME!!)

Being a slightly gullible arts supplies hoarder, I fell prey to their gimmick and got myself a loom.. and I immediately found myself buying every colored and fashioned set of bands I could get my hands on... not to mention trying to get some crazy beads to adorn my would-be bracelets too!

However, even after months of buying all possible supplies I could ever need, there wasn't a single band that actually got spun on that loom...

Finally after my sudden and unfortunate(?) retrenchment, I had lots of leisure time to spin yarns... lol or bands at least:

The first one I did was a fishtail band from the instructions provided along the bands.. the other two are a result of a youtube rabbit hole ride. One's called a french braid band and the other one a Royal Hearts loom band.





The plum and white loom band is happily sitting on the RV mirror of my car holding this adorable Pegasus there to keep me and the car safe.


The color of my car is 'Pegasus White'... hence the charm is very fitting!

Triple-Choc-Nut Muffins

At the beginning of 2015 when I was deciding what I wanted to learn this year that I've always struggled with, there was only one thing I could think of - Cooking and Baking. Its April and tbh, I haven't really done much in the area other than the occasional Mi Goreng (which proves that I can indeed do more than boil water!).

I missed a fancy dance class that I was going to attend because I missed my train and didn't have much to do so I pulled out the stunt of baking this:


They turned out a little too sweet for my taste.. I LOVE nuts.... so I made these with a lot of macadamia nuts with dark, milk and white choc chips in them which gave the muffins an interesting texture. I am not a huge fan of milk choc chips... but I added them anyway.

I not only had a friend over to share some with him that night, but I had a lot of fun the next day catching up with the old buds at the office over a cup of hot chocolate and these muffins.


I might enjoy this if I took it up as a new hobby... but I won't count on me doing that just as yet.. its going to take a lot of motivation to get me going in that direction. ...And I'm going to need some tasters handy as my lab rats too!

Burning forever

Watched the moon rise above the city skyline outta my balcony this evening and was totally in awe! Having just watched I, Frankenstein, I was inspired by the supernatural.. and this was the result..



She's free again to roam the desolate land under the stars in the wee hours of the night where angels fear to tread.... The moon totally brings out the beast.. (reminds me of R.I.O.'s song, Animal ;)

Inspired by the bling I bought to pimp my ride:


Its a shame I bought a pair of them hoping she'd found a partner to accompany her on her journey.. alas!  ..she's cursed to be the lone wolfess. Alone but not lonely.

What is love!

I was listening to Haddway's famous 90s song butchered under the name of a dance mix this morning and sipping on my liquid breakfast and my blank untouched canvas book was staring at me so I doodled this thing..


I originalIy wanted to call it 'twisted love'. But I think dj god obviously had a better title for it.. hence the postname.

Black or White

FnF 7 is releasing this April and its trailer was shared on FB by two of my most fav hunks - Rock da man and Vinsome! And I also totally loved Rome trying to mimic Dom "I don't have friends, I got family".. and he goes "am I deep enough (to sound like Diesel)" and his secretary says "go deeper".. lol priceless!

So I saw the whole trailer.. many times.... The first time.. I was on a train.. and it is just so action packed.. that the drastic involuntary movements it caused plus the splatter on my phone when I was in stitches earned me quite some looks :">

The point of the post is how much this Shades mania is annoying me. In my world, there is no grey. Its either Black or white!



If anyone chimes about watching the damn movie next weekend one more time, I'm going to puke. Like seriously?! such a chick flick! totally not my cup of earl grey.

Fruit of labor

So in the typical numbness of my work day... the card I drew during my lunch break was 'Seven of Pentacles' which had cool imagery that I just had to doodle... The card talks about having worked really hard and to now sit back and enjoy the harvest of your toil...


I'm not entirely sure what that means... its like saying 'where you're standing.. there're four directions home'! At this moment I couldnt be feeling more clueless! But hey.. listen to the green hooded man.. I kinda do agree that I couldnt have steered darker lanes than I have and from where I'm at.. things can only get better. I just know that I will make it to someplace I can call "home" someday!

Spread your winx

I've always loved Mariah Carey's song, 'Butterfly'.

Spread your wings and prepare to fly
For you have become a butterfly
Fly abandonedly into the sun
If you should return to me
We truly were meant to be
So spread your wings and fly
Butterfly

I wanted to try painting with watercolor and this is all I could come up with...


I have seen some really amazing butterflies painted with watercolors... but being a n00b.. guess this was the best I could do under 15 minutes to let my creative bug out (haha :| ) before I just had to go on one of my lonnngg soul searching walks.

----Update 2 hours later----

Sat with my temporary share mate who is amazing at art and  absolutely LOVE her work and got a little more inspired and tried a couple more bugs:





This is my reminder post-it to make sure I did something arty today to get myself out of the dumps (first day at work after a 3 week long vacation!).. which I did.. so pat on the back!

Bunnies

I think that bunnies are one of the cutest cuddly little things and so its obviously not a surprise that I adore them. 

Here's a bunny drawn with the help of this tutorial on drawing anime bunnies. The only modification I made is that he's wearing a very masculine salmon hoodie:


And here's his doppelganger called Boo Biter:


I still can't decide which one's more adorable :D

Origami Pikachu

I had these 75 x 75mm origami multi colored sheets sitting with me for ages bought from Diaso. Yesterday when I had nothing much to do and had skipped the open day of my martial arts school and was feeling a bit depressed and unproductive, Idecided to finally do some origami.

Here's the first one, a car. The instructions were soo simple I just had to do it.


Here's another one I did - Pikachu.


The instructions were quite complicated. for the first 1-5 steps it first said to go check like some rabbit instructible.. in that one it said to go look at an inflatable ball tutorial or something.. But regardless, after a bit of this monkey chase, I did get the first few steps right and the rest was easy peesy!

I think that he's v. cute. Right now he's perched up on my desk light switch.. bet he's feeling mighty proud to be at his high spot.

Here's are some more origami sitting on my work desk, there's a small boat a friend made, a bigger boat, a few tiny planes and a crane I made. They remind me that there is a creative side to me too when I"m at work :)

Dragonz

There was a poster at one of the break-journey train stations I have to wait everyday of some restaurant called 8-Dragon or something.. Ever since I saw this poster I wanted to do a sequel to Draco from the air dragon post. I did doodle some dragons.. mostly tattoos but the notepad's back home in Australia. I doodled these guys while I was waiting for my connecting flight to India from the Kuala Lumpur airport.


This a fella's done on black with metallic brush pens: (I love those markers to bits! so much that I won't use them because I'm afraid I'll run out of them.. lol)


He's the Wispering death dragon... He scared Coco a bit.. so I obviously don't like him that much:


I wasn't feeling super inspired and couldn't really think of many dragons to draw.. so had to turn to the old trusted pokemons for Dragonite here..


So while I was thinking about all these dragons and that train station and all.. I couldn't help but doodle Vegeta here from the Dragon Ball Z



And a collage of these from the PhotoGrid app (guess you can really tell that I'm super bored here already right!):

Bumbles

Heres a sketch I made of BB with the help of an app called 'Draw transformers' with an 'engraving' effect from my camera modes.

The app was downloaded being super inspired after watching the Transformers 4. I don't care how much critics diss it.. I loved the movie to bits!!!

Crafty Framez

I saw this item for sale at a craft/thrift store that was pretty cute.. but it brought a lot of ideas to my mind so instead of buying it, I thought of DIYing it... I bought these super cute wooden crafty pegz:


Had a tealy piece of yarn at hand and this came to life:


Photos courtesy of an old friend'z facebook profile.. no..  actually, pinched from his profile... Aint' he adorable!

State of Originz

I know that the crows aren't quite soccer.. but I was rooting for them anyway.. it didn't matter that I looked a bit like a nutcase at work that day. but I enjoyed showing my support and loyalty to my team.

I crocheted an infinity scarf the night before:


I had originally intended to make full blown crows style pulse-warmers but it got really late in the night and my hands were ready to fall off their sockets... But I loved showing these off anyway:


...If only my handsome Raven was here to show his matching scarf (which made its appearance in this post) I made for him, we'd have made a super cute couple!

Air Dragon

This is my first real try with water colors and markers.. he's from the how-to-draw app.. its real handy.. I do admit that my proportions are a bit messed up and he doesn't quite identical to his illustration... but since this is not a portrait of him.. I hope he's a little forgiving.. to the rest of you.. I don't think you've seen the original Draco so don't grumble! I like him.. but I'm not sure this was the effect I had in my mind.. I think my ideas of watercolors were way more lofty than they are in rl..


While painting the underbelly of the dragon.. I remembered why I used to hate watercolors as a child and always have fantasized oilz.. still.. never fear my dears.. I'm not throwing the other water colors palette away just as yet.. I"m hoping to experiment a lot more before I arrive at a final verdict on water colors.

The Grumpy Cheiftan Cat

I've got more company in my shared house a real sweet girl, Ari. She was telling how the cat was giving her judging looks in the middle of the night when she was fumbling her way around in the dark in the new house.. That's so like the cat. She's always grumpy and reminding us of our place in her house!

I visited the Gold and the Incas exhibition last weekend on its very last day and was lucky enough to view everything in leisure unlike at other times when one of my friends got tired because she and her family couldn't see anything and got tired and just decided to leave.

The Ancient Peruvian civilizations art exhibition was just superb.. took me to an entirely different time and place and on a mystical magical journey..

The Incas depicted the three worlds - heavens, the earthly world and the underworld in most of their creations. They used birds to represent the Heaven, feline for the earthly realm and serpents and monsters for the Underworld. Their paintings, carvings and smithy also included a lot of elements showing duality.

I have to say I'm extremely fascinated by their culture and the civilization and their advanced knowledge and technology, especially their inclination to trepanate and modify human skulls..

As I was browsing random images.. this one caught my eye and I decided to make my version of it..

Hybrid Painting

I just got an awesome new tool.. this:


A watercolor pen thingie! Not that I have anything against brushes... I think its kinda sexy to hold paint brushes in one's hand.. but alas! My painting skills could use a lot of improvement.. This pen thingie is the perfectest thing for those that are better with markers than brushes and helps to break through the damn holding-the-brush-in-your-hand barrier.. if there's such a thing.. or maybe its just me.

Anyhow.. this pen brush is simply amazing for this hybrid thing I wanted to try - mostly use markers for drawing but have watercolors for very light and soft shading.. and I personally love the result.. here's my first watercolor doodle with the pen brush:


And another one:

Notice that the orange bands are a little more shinier which is a little sus for a watercolor effect? hmm.. maybe you can't in the photo.. but I can.. I know exactly why.. See I'm a total noob to this watercolor arena.. and when I wanted to buy watercolos.. I had no clue as to what I was looking for. So I got two of these watercolors to statistically improve my odds of getting-it-right:


The one on top which is a 16 color palette that looks unusually shiny is.. god alone knows what! It feels like its some sort of glue with color.. the pen/brush doesn't seem to get any color on.. just gets a gluey sticky yucky thing on which has no pigment but only gloss.. The thing went straight into trash.. I don't have too much money to waste at the moment.. bt more importantly I don't have the time or energy to waste it on useless things trying to make some use out of them.. kinda like holding on to the palette just in case I wanted to have a glossy finish.. something I'll never want.

This is likely going to be my style of choice.. and I love it. I always thought that nothing beats oil painting.. but I think I can learn to like this... and liking it I am :D

Oh.. and I got these cool paint pots too.. I'm terrified of keeping them on my desk because I inadvertently spill a lot of things anyway and water is definitely the last thing I want to spill on my laptop desk! But they're too cute to pass:


....and if you can notice.. the red one is resting on its own paint-pot-coaster which is really the vestigial wing of my owl from the owly phone pouch.

Little Rose

I saw this tutorial in the FaveCrafts newsletters. I always wanted to make a crocheted flower and I was stuck in front of my PC listening to one of the ITIL trainings for about 2 hours so I thought of trying it.. I goofed up and saw step 5 as maybe row 3 and ended up with an additional row... pulled it apart and my rose was ready just after about 30 minutes after the class was over. (its 2:15am right now)..

I assembled it and sewed it like the tutorail says.. I had no idea how I could make it flatter or looser.. so I just sew it making sure I had all the layers together.


It took me about 2.5 hours to crochet it and seems like a pretty big effort for such a small outcome. I hope you disagree :D

Black Rufflinezz

As I mentioned in my other post about Ruffly Scarves, I have a lot of Lincraft's Elicia yarn at hand (24 colors to be precise ;) So I have a ton of scarfinezz that I can get on.. I made this blackie in a day when it was raining all evening.. I started knitting it at 6:30pm kept telling myself that if I finished it today.. no matter what time of the night I finish it at and the rain/wind/hell outside.. I will still go for a walk.. that would be my reward for completing the scarf.


And I did finish it at about 11ish.. I walked over to Broadway and grabbed 4 tees I'd been eying and walked back sashaying with my new scarf on all the way :D

Grid Maker App

I don't know if I tooted having gotten a new phone (samsung note3) enough.. but in case I didnt.. here's  super cool output from a cool app I just tried called 'photo grid'. Here're some random images stiched together with some effects applied to a couple of images. It has function to apply effects to borders, individual images, rotate, zoom or crop them, has various layouts.. thats all I checked so far..

Also this is the first time I'm posting from the phone using the Blogger app.. and its not really lettin me do much here.. I dont even know where its going to post the photo so please bear with me. (16-04-2014 7:38 am - modified the post form butchery of the blogger app)

Vampire Skull

I recently got Adobe Photoshop CS6.. soooo excited.. I just made this doodle.. I know it isn't anywhere close to being perfect..... but I couldn't help but share it... oh btw, I did this while I was attending an online ITIL training of CSI :D


The Vampire skull is one of the how-to-draw thingies provided in an app I got that I was super excited about.. totally love the stuff on the app.. loving combining how to draw and how to photoshop :D

----------update 26-04-2014 2:34 am-----------
I haven't tried photoshopping after this endeavor.. but here's a sketch/painting of the same skull from the how to draw app. I think he looks a lot more vicious than the above slightly comic vampz

Run, Forest, Run!

The title of the post is also the title of the alarm I've set up so I can go train for the park run.... Its a great line.. unfortunately some days I need more than just it for motivation enough to get out of the cozy duck feather quilt (ugh!!).. and the weather is still pretty warm... its not even begun to be too cold yet.


But today I think I may have found another source of motivation... This was my 4th run today and I beat my PB each time ......annnd I think my pants are a little too big for me now.. they kept trying to slip right off of my rather fleshy tush.. that was well.. somethin'!!

Owly Phone Pouch

As you may already know.. I absolutely looovvvvvvee owls.. so that was obviously my first choice of pattern for a phone pouch ...for my new phone!! yayyy I got a new phone btw.. Samsung Note III woohoooo.. I decided to order it on a whim from Kogan one day when I realized I had enough money in my bank account after getting the money for my flight I'd reserved in case I needed to leave the country.. guess I was too used to seeing he balance close to zero and wanted to return it to there so I placed the order.. Another crazy thing I wanted to do was to go and get the costliest plan there was for phones to have unlimited calls and texts even though I don't need it at all.. The day I went to the store in Broadway the asian guy there somehow convinced me that if I only paid a $140 extra over the course of 24 months I could walk away with the phone right now (it wasn;t going to be shipped until 2 weeks from Kogan).. and I thought that was a good deal.. don't ask me how or why :D and I came home swinging my new phone with immense joy.. The is super gorgeous and immediately begged for a cover.. So I began searching for some patterns.

I found this sahweeet pattern on the internet that was free. But being a noob to crocheting I kept telling myself stick to the pattern and DO NOT use your head! and obviously I goofed up.. The pattern doesn't mention how to end a round so I just went in spirals :D


Here's my owly phone pouch.. I know my owl's a bit too tall.. but hey.. so is my phone :D


Now I know you can notice this guy doesn't have wings.. and I notice it too.. I meant for him to have them.. I made one set too.. But like I said.. I got impatient by the time it came to making the wings and fudged up.. and the problem is the same as with the pouch.. because it didn't tell specifically to end a round I just kept going in spirals.. I may end up making proper wings and stiching them up to him.. but for now I will leave him with broken wings...(or none actually)