random life & musings – Page 55

March 2, 2006March 3, 2006

uni, a dairy fairy and japanese magazines

Well Uni started on Monday and I am in the midst of getting back into the hang of doing my readings, taking notes and trying my hardest not to fall asleep in class and trying not to strangle a certain professor and making some new friends.

Due to some staffing changes at work I am now back in the dairy and freezer where I belong playing the role of a “dairy fairy”. I was trained at my previous supermarket in the dairy but then due to a staffing change I was jolted out of the dairy and into grocery before getting a spot as a meat packer which I quite enjoyed. However when I got my job with the company I am with now, they only had night fill roles open so that is what I took and since then I have been moonlighting as a dairy fairy when they have needed me but alas I have always had to hand my “wings” back after a couple of hours but not any longer! Nothing like lifting milk-crates and filling the ice-fridge to give the arms a work-out 🙂 Yay for the Dairy.

A while ago I mentioned getting some Japanese patchwork and quilting magazines out of the quilt guild’s library, well I scanned them in the other week and uploaded them to Flickr last night so for your inspiration goodness I share with you 🙂

The first set come from a magazine called Patchwork Club. Click on any of the photos to be taken to it’s gallery where there are more scans.

The next set come from Patchwork Quilt Tsushin, again click on any of the photos to be taken to it’s gallery to see the other scans, these come from seven different editions.

Hope you enjoying looking at the pages I have selected as much as I do 🙂

February 26, 2006January 14, 2007

Total Bargain

For all things that come to an end, something else begins, well that was my reasoning in arguing for the Christmas Tree to stay up till I went back to uni. Well actually it was that Mum and I would be away for the twelve days of Christmas and we wanted to be able to enjoy the tree 🙂 Yep I go back to uni in 17hrs so the tree was taken down today. Even though I had rigged up a watering system for it this year to ensure it stayed green for as long as possible, it died quite a few days ago. Almost everyday Pabbi would whinge and whine asking if the tree would be taken down today, the answer was always just a couple of more days. The living room now has a bare patch and the curtains lack decoration now as well. Oh well, Christmas always comes around soon enough.

Whilst on my lunch break yesterday I spent a delightful time at the clearance racks in Myer and I walked out with a pair of stone coloured Italian cotton Country Road pants (which means I now have 3 pairs of gorgeous CR styled pants) and a gorgeous emerald green silk v-neck top. Which I wore of course when I went out last night to farewell my night fill manager, who at the tender age of 20!! is going to be trading manager (i.e. 3rd in charge) of the Bi-Lo store at Airlie Beach. He’ll be a store manager in ten years or so probably.

Whilst looking on the racks I also saw this gorgeous pleated silk Country Road balloon skirt which I tried on and loved except it had this one problem, I didn’t like the balloon look, which Mum tells me was high fashion in 1957 and that people would add netting so that they would balloon up even more.My plan was/is to unpick the skirt from the lining and kill that balloon look and hem the bottom so it would just be a straight pleated skirt but I am slightly sort of starting to like the mini balloon. Who knows?

Mum and I went back this morning to look at the balloon skirt which I did pick up and I managed to get another Country Road skirt which will be nice for uni and a pair of cropped JAG jeans also perfect for days at Uni when jeans would just be death due to the heat 🙂

Grand total for 1 top (AU$99.95), 2 pants (AU$99.95 & AU$189) and 2 skirts (AU$229 & AU$ 139) at RRP AU$756.90.

Price I paid after staff discount and two stages of clearance? AU$267.27

Total bargain, I say 🙂

February 24, 2006September 25, 2020

More Layouts from Tasmania

Well Uni starts back on Monday and I am doing five subjects this semester instead of the usual four to gain an extra major so I won’t be creating as much. I am thinking at the moment to designate each interest a week so in that week any free time I have, I will spend doing X. That is the plan… but here are some layouts I did the other day from our trip to Tasmania. Click on the photos to be taken to a larger image and their notes. 🙂

February 15, 2006

A Bag for Jemma

A ducky little bag for sweet little girl, this bag is going to Tracy’s daughter, Jemma who loves cats

The bag was made using the Jordy Bag Tutorial at Crafster.org which is a slightly different construction method to how I made Rachel’s bag the other day. I created the shaping of the bag by first pressing the connecting lines between the four corners and then pressing from the corners up to either side of the handle which creates the sloping sides 🙂

I went with Mum to Queensland Quilters last night for the sole purpose of browsing the library for interesting books to check out and I came home with 6 issues of Patchwork Quilt Tsushin and 1 issue of Patchwork Club. All of which are chock full of great bags and very nice quilts 🙂

February 13, 2006September 25, 2020

shoes, ornaments, a bag and so much more.

The other day I picked up a pair of Source Stream sandals and they are just pure bliss, I have a hard time with shoes from wearing a 9.5 but mostly finding shoes that are always comfortable and can wear all day. Well these certainly fit the criteria and they are so funky as well – the images on the straps are sunflowers 🙂

I have been after some new work pants for a while now but finding good work pants is hard as well. Pants need to be loose fitting, breathable, big pockets etc so that I can actually fill the shelves instead of standing like a bean post, well I found a pair in the most unlikely shop. I was in Mountain Designs and saw some travel pants, which fitted all the criteria – black, loose, pockets, breathable. Score! What makes them even better is that they are a 55% Hemp/45% PET blend, dude my pants are a bong! (yeah I know that the hemp they grow for fabric is different to the pot kind but still), the best bit? They were reduced from $90 to $40, score!

How cute is this little cake stand from Mikasa? It is 5.75″ wide and 4″ high, perfect for taking photos of a single slice of cake or some biscuits 🙂

Two more purchases, as my family and friends know, I have a very good relationship with Christmas Ornaments, we go together like Vegemite and cheese or milk and milo, so when I saw these in the Vileroy & Boch store at DFO, nothing was going to stop me taking them home with me. They are from the Scandinavian Christmas 2004 series, which was the second year in V&B’s Christmas round the world annual collection, Russia was 2003 and America was 2005.

This is a bag I made for a friend who loves cats and is quite fluent in Japanese, so what better than a bag based on a pattern in a Japanese craft book and Japanese quilting fabric? Idea for the bag is from this book (the middle one on the front cover) – ISBN4529040011. Crafting Japanese entry for the book.

I love Pandani! They were such cool plants to play with whilst in Tasmania, the way the leaves formed corkscrews was just so cool, so here is a layout I did on them earlier today 🙂

Well that is for the moment, I was in the middle of making a bag but I ran out of thread 🙁 so now I am playing in photoshop and chilling out to the crazy/beautiful soundtrack.

February 9, 2006February 9, 2006

Dolce Bacio Ice-Cream Cake

For the last two, perhaps three Christmases, Matthew and I have looked curiously at the various Italian Christmas cakes that appear in the stores where we work early each November. This year instead of talking about getting one, we did on the post Christmas sales of course 🙂 which made the price a lot more attractive. The cake we picked up was a Dolce Bacio Panettone, that is described as

(the) Most famous Italian chocolate is transformed into a panettone (traditional Italian Christmas cake). This is the origin of big Dolce Bacio (Sweet kiss). Soft cake filled with chocolate and hazelnut cream in the shape of a chocolate. This panettone is a nice present to be eaten in company of friends, family or colleagues. A sweet present to be made to everyone who deserves a kiss. Source – ItalianfoodsHQ.

However imagine our response when we had each had a slice of cake each and both didn’t think it tasted that nice. We still had 2/3 of a cake left and we were going to get our monies worth, so we brainstormed and I came up with this idea to make it a lot more palatable.

Step 1 – Line spring form cake pan with baking paper.
Step 2 – Crumble cake and using roughly half form a base.
Step 3 – Press cake down well to create a well formed base.
Step 4 – Spoon thin layers of ice-cream onto cake layer, not worrying if you have thick and thin patches.
Step 5 – Use the other half of the cake and create a another layer in the same method used before.

Step 6 – Spoon another layer of ice-cream on to the cake, trying to get a relatively even layer this time.
Step 7 – Cover pan with some baking paper and place in the freezer for 24hrs or until set.
Step 8 – Serve with fresh fruit and enjoy a cake that tastes a whole lot nicer than it did originally.

Notes: If we had, had any chocolate or chocolate sauce in the house I would have drizzled the sauce or molten chocolate between the layers for extra goodness. The idea would also work quite nicely with any cake even if it tasted nice before hand 🙂