Finally finished another laptop bag a good friend requested. After finishing this, I have decided they are definitely works of love as I don't think I could be paid enough to motivate me to sew these. After 1 bent and 3 broken needles, I ended up sewing half of the cover and the straps by hand. (I was only able to get the cover halfway sewn on before I gave up - my poor Singer machine!)

Anyway, she requested a one-eyed, one-horned, flying, purple, People-Eater. I designed a pocket on the bag shaped like black wings but they didn't end up very wing-like so I'm not sharing pictures of that. But you can see the dopey face with the goofy teeth & matching little horn on top. I cut out little people in beige felt and sewed them on his mouth (lol) but the flash turned them white so they blend in with the teeth a bit.  She wanted to use a black zipper for the strap and I sewed it over a piece of black belting to make it a bit sturdier. All in all, it's a cutie!

Ok, I've been following SMASH, more out of morbid curiosity than anything - I find it mostly horrific with occasional good songs. But last night's episode with the Bollywood number?! ROFL ahahahaha - that was awesome!!! :D

Ok, there are two other crafts I've done this year. None are nearly as elaborate a project.

The first is something I impulsively made on a whim after seeing it on Pinterest. An orange candle! 


Isn't it cute? You can find more detailed instructions online but basically you carefully cut around an orange and peel off the rinds in two whole pieces. Make sure the bottom part has that white stubby part from inside the orange. Trim the "wick" fairly short (less than half an inch, maybe 1/4") and put a largish shape on top, light the "wick" and cover! (You can see my shape wasn't quite big enough and the edges slowly singed.) It took a couple minutes to get the wick to light - I think maybe if I had let it sit 15 minutes first, maybe some of the oil would have been drawn up? I used an old candle and held it there a long time.  The candle burned for over an hour though - didn't smell orangey but it did smell nice like a candle usually does. Right toward the end of its life it started to burn higher and actually did more than singe the top so I put it out. But it was fun while it lasted and super easy.

It's been several months since any updates on my activities. Lately I've been on an Asian drama torrenting binge. I'm not really watching, just downloading a ton and then this summer I will have an epic watching spree. :D I'm also trying to download all the old BillaSub releases on torrent so I can reup now that Megaupload is kaput. Having a very difficult time getting most episodes of Easy Fortune, Happy Life and a few of Calling For Love. *sigh* I should just not worry about it but I feel bad that so much effort was put into translating/encoding those.

However, I was very crafty the first part of the year. First was Munchkin's 8th birthday. She had her first real party ever (we don't believe in having a big bash every year - usually it's a family affair) - at a large indoor water park in town. She wanted it Barbie: Fairy Secret themed which was almost impossible - all the stores were either sold out completely on Barbie party supplies or had some shallow Barbie in Shades merchandise which was ugly and boring. I wanted her cake to be special since it was her first party and all so I went insane and bought a Wilton's Doll Cake set and some fondant molds. I even decided to really go extreme and make my own marshmallow fondant. 

Well, the fondant turned out really well. Was definitely fondant but I think tasted a bit better than the store-bought variety. I made it, colored it a variety of colors, and let it rest overnight as that's what recipes seemed to recommend. The next night I shaped dozens and dozens of flowers, leafs, flowers, birds, more flowers, etc. and set them in a pan to dry out and get slightly hard. Next night I baked the cake - the instructions with the Wilton pan tells you how many cups of batter to put in the mold. I was using a mix and really didn't want to measure it out cup by cup. So I baked a mix worth and the cake turned out over an inch short in the pan! Was pretty peeved but didn't know who to blame. I decided I was working hard enough as it was and blamed the unclear instructions by Wilton. Grr, grumble, grumble.


So then I baked another cake in a 13x9 pan, inverted my partial doll cake on top of that, and cut around to add a little layer underneath. The instructions suggest laying rolls of fondant around the "skirt" so that a layer of fondant, when draped over the whole cake, would give a nice, wavy skirt effect. Even though I had homemade fondant, I didn't really want to add more fondant to a cake that was already going to be pretty fondanty. So I had the brilliant idea to use rice krispie treats instead. Worked pretty well but it was hard to get the top points to smoothly meet the cake. I guess that's why they recommend fondant.


After adding the skirt of fondant (had to recruit Hubby to help with that - lifting a huge flat circle of fondant is hard!) the top of the skirt looked really wierd so I added another layer of rice krispie and a smaller circle of fondant over that. You can see the skirt isn't perfect - there were some creases in the fondant. But altogether not bad. Especially considering this was only my 2nd time ever working with fondant (though I suspect my polymer clay hobby has given me an edge;).


I tied some string around the doll body so I would have a way to attach the wings later and then covered it all in a little fondant shirt. I left off the head since I didn't want to worry about the hair, and then attached it to the cake body. And I set to work decorating with all my premade fondant flowers, etc. The flowers along the bottom were long, attached ribbons of flowers and they were to hard after drying out to bend around the skirt. So I popped them into the microwave for just a few seconds to soften them slightly and used a small brush and little dish of water to attach. I also had a tub of frosting on hand for the stubborn pieces that wouldn't attach just from water. 


Once that was complete, I had to behead a Barbie as the doll that came with the Wilton pan was brunette and Munchkin was quite adamant that she had to be blonde! I hadn't wanted to hollow out the cake to fit an entire Barbie body so I thought it would be easier to just swap the heads. Not so sure that was the correct assumption. Let me tell you beheading a Barbie is hard!! I remember my Barbies growing up - they were easy to pop the heads on & off. Well, not anymore! After my first failed attempt, I researched online and thought I understood what I had to do. I had needle nose pliers for backup. And 30 minutes later I was successful. The plastic knob in her head was an inch long with multiple prongs. What the heck?! It was even more elaborate than the ones my Google search had prepped me for. Munchkin's barbie will probably never be the same again - I don't think the head fits the way it used to. I have pictures but they're a little morbid to share - lol.

Lastly I had to design wings. She really wanted her cake to be specifically based on the Barbie: Fairy Secret movie. And since I made no attempt whatsoever so match the dress, I tried to match the wings. After much Google image searching, I found a decent quality picture with most of one wing unobscured. I then spent an hour in Gimp, deleting, pasting, copying, and finally had a set of wings that was perfect. I printed it, cut it out and attached it to the back of the doll using a cleaned drapery pin. The pin was large enough the wings had a little space from the body so there was room for the head with all the pretty hair (which I brushed and tied up nicely).



A lot of work but it was worth it when I saw the expression on her face when she saw it. Whew! I'm glad we only do parties every few years, though. I get some breathing room before next time. And how am I ever going to top that?!

Asked the new neighbor if she'd mind scooting her extended-cab pickup in a bit as she's been blocking the drive the past 2 days and we have been having to back out. (Which I know for a fact is always supposed to be parked up by the road, not down by the apartment due to the fact that it is an extended-cab and too big for our tight driveway. But I didn't bring any of that up - trying to be a nice neighbor and all.)  

She replied quite nastily, well, we blocked her the other day.  All I could do was blink & stare. And? What kind of a thing is that for her to say? I told her that, if we did, it was an accident as we try very hard to always park close since we know how tight space is and that we never mind moving if needed. This woman is single and yet has 3 different vehicles always parked haphazardly all over the sides of the driveway and she never appears to be home - I caught her just now at 9:30pm as she was backing out of the drive in one of her other vehicle.  At this moment, her truck is still blocking the drive. If I have to back-out in the morning, up a steep hill and around a sharp corner into the road, she is going to hear about it!

I honestly thought she hadn't realized we couldn't get by. She's a new neighbor and I had hopes of possibly meeting someone who might be friendly. Especially as my best friend locally is moving in less than a month to the literal other end of the country. But it was a purposeful, spiteful action?  *sigh* Why do so many people instantly assume the worse in others and retaliate childishly? Trying so hard to think nice thoughts and resist the urge to be immature.  My childish, comforting thought is that I don't think this woman knows yet but I've got a special connection with the landlord. The landlord's day-job is as a CPA - and I'm an accountant - in her firm...

I read an amusing/interesting post on my F-list last week about writer's minds and how unique they can be. You know, wild imaginations and random thoughts that would never occur to others. I consider myself part of that crowd & had to share this weird example.

Last week, driving to the dentist, I noticed that there was a funeral parlor directly across the street from one of those fancy-ritzy assisted-living facilities.Now most people probably wouldn't even connect the two. When I pointed it out to Hubby, all he said was, "That's a little morbid. I bet they get a lot of business from across the street." But where did my mind immediately go? A boy visiting his grandparents, exploring in the basement, and stumbling upon an conspiracy somehow involving an underground conveyor belt used to shuttle bodies. Possibly not just to the funeral parlor but even back again after who-knows-what-evil. I definitely have a weird mind...

There's quite a few books coming out in the next few months that I can't
wait to get my hands on. It's going to be an awesome year for reading!

*Bitterblue* by Kristin Cashore - coming May 1, 2012
*City of Lost Souls* by Cassandra Clare - coming May 8, 2012
*Ouran High School Host Club - Volume 18* (Final!!!) by Bisco Hatori - coming June 5, 2012
*Starling* by Lesley Livingston - coming August 28, 2012
*Full Disclosure *by Dee Henderson- coming October 2012 (her first book in years due to a neck injury)

The other day we were joking around that Hubby should run for president or mayor. Munchkin piped up from the backseat of the car, “Daddy, you can’t run for president. The President has to work every single day, except holidays, and you’d have no time for me!” 

"Great" is rather ambiguous. But the last books I read that I epically loved, despite imperfections, was the Wondrous Strange series by Lesley Livingston. The books themselves aren't epic - I just really latched onto them for some reason. I think it was the clever mix of Shakespeare and mythology, the humor and lack-of-idiocy.