I’ve done a few things between now and my last post.. one of the biggest things being attending the Austin Maker Faire.. and I know I’m going to be a few weeks late, but I’ll eventually post a few of my pictures from there.  I also made a duct tape dressform for my little sister and I’ve started a jacket.. which has been sitting in my room half finished for about a week.  Oh yeah, I just made these awesome earrings, but you’ll just have to wait for those pictures because this post is really for my… halloween costume!

I decided to be a wind up doll and I really wanted to put moving parts on it.. of course that would be the little key part on the back.  All in all, I made a corset-ish type top, a simple circle skirt and an awesome petticoat that I love.. and will definately use again.. but I don’t have any pictures of it because it’s pretty see through.  Last year I made a last minute petticoat with tulle and I just took a piece and gathered it so it was kind of like a tutu, but I really hated it.. it was uncomfortable and I didn’t like the way it looked, so this year I decided to put more time and money into one so hopefully I could reuse it time and time again.  I used this tutorial by sugardale but I shortened the length to fit the skirt.  It was somewhat time consuming, took up a lot of thread, but overall I’m super happy with the result and I know I’ll be saving it to use again and again!

For the skirt I also used a tutorial, but I cannot find the exact one I used right now, but there are pages and pages of circle skirt patterns when I searched google, so if you need one that’s a good resource.

I’m not too happy with how the top came out.. I really wanted it to be a corset, but I just wasn’t confident enough with myself and I just ended up sewing panels together and lacing up the back.. so it was somewhat like a corset.  I refused to buy a pattern and tried to make one myself, which I regret doing, but it was too late to go out and buy one by the time I was making the top, so I guess I just lived and learned

So, I’ve been building up the anticipation to see this costume I’ve been rambling on about, so I present now, the pictures!

The makeup:

And finally, the part I’m most proud of with this costume… the wind-able key!

Testing it out.

Actually on the costume.

So there’s that.  I hope you guys enjoyed it, unfortunately I’m the only one who enjoyed this costume haha, for the party I was going to attend didn’t happen, so I spent all night on Halloween playing Little Big Planet.

My little sister had some shoes she didn’t really care for anymore, and asked if I could re-cover them for her.  I had seen an article in Craft Magazine where they had done this so I knew it could be done.

Here are the shoes in question:

So following the instructions in that magazine, I whip out my exacto knife and start cutting.

Basically you cut all of the fabric off.. All of it!  Also, not pictured is me ripping out the inside of the shoe.  The bottom cushioned part.. thing.  Be careful when you do this though, because you’ll need them later.

The remains of the shoes.  As you can see, I kind of rushed ripping out the bottom parts.

Next, I took the fabric she chose and used the old shoe fabric to make a pattern.  You might not want to use markers here to draw it out… I just usually end up grabbing the closest thing to me when I’m doing this sort of thing.

I also drew out and cut the pattern out with the inside fabric, shown here.  These are the tongues of the shoes. (I also cut them with the houndstooth fabric as well)

Sew those puppies up.  I used the old fabric from the shoe as a guide for the decorative sewing.

Sorry, bad picture.. Me grommeting the holes for the laces.

A crappy, blurry picture of the new pieces with the old pieces.  As you can see, I added a little more on the bottom of the tongue because I wanted to make sure I had enough.  I ended up cutting off some when I put it in, but I figured that was better then not having enough!

More unpictured steps are where I glued in the fabric.  I glued in at least 1/4 inch of the fabric all around the bottom edge of the shoes, glued the tongue in and finally the bottom cushioned part back in place.  If done right, the fabric for the main part of the shoe should be sandwiched between the sole of the shoe and the cushioned part that was glued in last.

I waited for the glue to cure and whatnot before I laced them up because I didn’t want to accidentally rip out the fabric.

What I did though, was put the shoes on (unlaced) to put some weight on the shoes so it would be stuck real good!

Ta da!  All laced up and ready to go!

I’m hoping to take some better pictures of the shoes soon.  When I do I’ll make sure to post them up!

Here’s the recipe I used:

1 tablespoon of beeswax

2 tablespoons of some kind of oil.  In this case I used coconut oil.  You can either go out and buy some, or you can buy a coconut and extract some yourself!  Here’s a post where I made some coconut oil.

a few drops of an essential oil.  I didn’t use any for this batch because the only oil I had smelled like orange.

Here’s the tablespoon of wax and two tablespoons of oil.

Heat that thang up!

After it’s all melted, I used a pipette to pour the melted oil and wax mixture into lip balm tubes.  Sorry for the blurry picture.

All done!  Just slap some labels on those things and you’ll be all set!

Here they are, all labeled and ready to be applied.

Oh, there’s more!

I also made two more batches, this time with extra virgin olive oil instead of coconut oil.

This one is orange sherbet.

This one is kind of wierd, orange and mint.

And those are what came of my random urge to make lip balm.. after I’ve had the materials for a few months!  I encourage you to try to make some.  It’s fun and you can customize it all you want!  I think my next batch will be some sort of chocolate flavor!

The first use! Coconut oil.  Here’s a bunch of pictures of when my mom taught me how to make coconut oil.

I apologize in advance for the not so great pictures.

Blurry picture of her cracking that sucker open.  She was moving pretty fast.

Mmm, this is a good coconut. Lots of meat.

You use this contraption, my mom called it a kudkuran, to scrape the meat out.  You sit on it with the skarp part stickin out between your legs.

Super bad picture, but the only one I have of me scraping the meat out.

After a little bit of scraping, here’s what it looks like.

Here’s a before and after.  I went a little crazy on that half, you’re not supposed to see that much brown.

All used up.

Time to start getting that milk out of this meat! Here we have a fine strainer, a bowl and the coconut meat.

Here she put in some water and started mushing it all around.

Take a handful and squeeze it over the bowl.

Here’s some of the milk she squeezed out.  After you have it all squeezed out, you can repeat the process again to get a little bit more milk.  You’d have to be careful with the water though so it isn’t watered down too much.

Strain the milk into a pan.

You can still squeeze a little bit of the milk out of this.

Crank that heat up!

Let it boil.  And constantly stir.

Eventually it’ll start to separate.

More separation.  The clear liquid is the oil… but wait, we can get more out of it!

Almost done.  Let those little bits get all brown and toasted.

All done!

Strain it all!  Save those little bits.  You can use them as a topper for ice cream.. or cakes.. or something.  You might want to toss it with a little bit of sugar though.

Further straining with a coffee filter.

Here’s the oil!  Yup.  A whole coconut made this tiny bit of oil.  You can use the oil for cooking or you can use it to make home made cosmetics.

Second use! As I mentioned in the pictures, you can save the little toasted bits and use them as a topping.

Third use! The meat that you extracted all that milk from is still useful.  If you like toasted coconut, you can probably spread out the meat in a thin layer and throw it in the oven for a while.. You’d probably have to toss it with sugar though.  (I haven’t actually done this, but theoretically it should work, haha)

Fourth use! A Philippine snack: Budbud (the “o”s are long.  Like Boo!  and then a d at the end…. I dunno, it’s hard to explain) also known as sweet rice.  Mm, a delicious dessert.

Here’s a recipe for budbud: Budbud recipe.  You can use the original coconut milk you extracted to make this.. or, if you made coconut oil with the original milk, you can extract milk from the meat more than once. To eat, you unwrap the banana leaf, dip the rice in sugar, or, like in that picture, dip it in coffee and eat it that way.  Either way is awesome.

Fifth use! If you wanted to, with one of the shells, you could clean out the remaining meat and dremel a hole in the side and have a sweet hermit home.  Either that or dremel some small holes on either side of each shell half and make a islander bikini top!

Like this!

So those are just a few ways to put a coconut to use.  I’ll admit, with the budbud recipe, it calls for more than one coconut, but hey, you can make more oil and toasted bits and whatnot!

]]> http://www.chezlin.com/2008/07/coconuts-101-different-ways/feed/ http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetItemData?uri=chezlin&itemurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.chezlin.com%2F2008%2F07%2Fcoconuts-101-different-ways%2Fhttp://www.chezlin.com/2008/07/coconuts-101-different-ways/ http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/chezlin/~3/321169119/ http://www.chezlin.com/2008/06/thats-hot-seriously-hot-fused-plastic-tote/#comments Fri, 27 Jun 2008 08:28:30 +0000 Chezlin http://www.chezlin.com/?p=79 Man, I haven’t posted in a loooong long time.. I had to brush the dust off of this thing before I started this post! Haha.  I apologize, I don’t even have a real good reason, but I’ll try to make it up to you with this post.

I was trying to get myself out of this no crafting deal I had been having for a while by flipping through some of my old magazines for inspiration.. when I found just what I needed.

I saw this bag on the right, and I knew I had to make one.  That bag, from Keen Footwear is actually made from woven rice paper, but I decided to do mine with fused plastic.  I used a tutorial from the Etsy Labs on how to fuse the plastic bags.  After that I just made a basic tote.. with some woven details.  Here’s what was created:

I apologize for the kind of crappy pictures, my nice camera is out of commision for the time being.  Anywho, that’s the bag.

Here’s the back of it.

Here’s some detailing..

Some more details.

The insides.

The zipper..

I usually just kinda put in the zipper without thinking about it too much.. which resulted in some not-so-pretty zippers.. but I found this wonderful tutorial on how to install zippers so they look oh so pretty, so now I use it all the time!

And that’s it!  I will probably be making more of these, it’s a great way to recycle plastic bags.. You could also make some reuseable grocery totes with this technique.. I saw some that they were selling at target… way over-priced for me though, considering I can make some myself!

Ingredients:

2 teaspoons yeast

1/4 warm water

3 1/2 cups flour sifted

4 eggs (only three go in to the dough, the last is for the egg wash)

1/4 honey

1/4 oil

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

Mix the yeast with 1/4 cup of the flour and the warm water and let it sit for at least 20 minutes.  While you’re waiting, mix together the three eggs, honey, oil and salt.  When the yeast mixture is all good and bubbly mix your honey mixture into that.  Then dump in the rest of the flour (3 1/4 cups should be left) and mix it all up by hand.  When it starts to come together, dump it out onto a floured surface and knead it.  The recipe I used said to need for 5 minutes maximum.  I averaged about 3 minutes.  After you’re done kneading take your little dough ball and put it in a bowl, cover it with a damp cloth and put it somewhere warm.  When I do this, I usually set the oven at a low temp. while I’m making the dough, and then when I put it in I turn it off.  Anyway, after that is the fun part!  The braiding.  I searched around youtube for a good instructional video on how to braid challah, and I chose to do the 6 strand braid.  Here’s how it looked after braiding:

Pretty nice… except for that little area at the bottom, but whatever.  I figured I’d eat that end first.  So after you braid it all up, you get to have more fun waiting.  Another two hours.  Oh yes.  Cover it with a towel or plastic wrap and stick it back in that warm spot.  After two hours it should have doubled in size… but for me on my first attempt this did not happen.  It didn’t even double in size after the first two hour wait.  Stupid yeast ended up being too old.  Oh well.  I’ll show what it looked like when it didn’t work and when it did, so you guys can kind of tell if you decide to try to make this.  Here’s the stupid after the second two hour wait.. and how barely grew:

Stupid thing…

Anyway, I still tried to bake this thing.  Set your oven to 325 and get out that egg to prepare the egg wash.  Crack it in a bowl and mix it up and you’ve got your egg wash.  Brush it on carefully.. you don’t want to push out any precious air.  Some places I’ve read that you’re not supposed to put that much, but some places say to use a lot, so I’d just say go with what looks good to you!  That’s what I do.  After the egg wash you top it.  Traditionally it’s topped with sesame seeds, and sometimes raisins… but I wanted mine to be sweeter, so I topped it with cinnamon sugar… yeah, I cheated.. but it’s delicious.   

Now throw it into the oven!!  Bake at 325 degrees for 35 to 40 minutes.  The recipe I used said to stick a pie pan full of ice cubes in there with the bread to keep the conditions humid inside the oven, but to take it out for the last 5 minutes of baking, to let the crust really get brown and harden.  Here’s what I pulled out of the oven after 35 minutes…

Eww.  It looks wierd.  It ended up being so dense because it didn’t rise.. that the inside was still dough.  It was pretty gross.  I still ate the butt ends though.  Yum.

On to the second try!

I got newer yeast and tried again the next day.  I meant to take a picture right after I braided it and before I let it rise for a good comparison shot, but unfortunately I forgot… I have a good shot of it after rising though!

This is with the egg wash and the cinnamon sugar.  My mom said it reminded her of chicken.  My braiding is pretty shotty for this loaf… this is a picture of the pretty side.. the other side is wierd and uneven.  I was preoccupied with the season finale of Lost.  You can compare the last loaf with this one… I used the exact same sheet pan to cook the bread, and you can see just how much bigger this one got.

But of course, something had to go wrong(actually, it’s not too bad, it just makes it not as pretty as I hoped it’d turn out).. the oven decided to bake unevenly so the pretty side of the challah is a lot lighter than the ugly side.  The ugly side got as dark as challah’s supposed to, so I didn’t want to keep it in longer.  Well, that and because I’m impatient and I wanted to eat some.  Here it is:

There we go.. Looks MUCH better! 

Here is a picture of its insides:

Mm, so yummy.

I’ve heard that this bread is great for making french toast with because it’s already sort of sweet because of the honey.  I’m totally going to make some sometime.  It’s also good just by itself. Mmmmm.

My sketch on the right, with my two plates covered with asphaltum and etched in to. You’ll see why I did two plates in the next few pictures.

Dun dun dun! The acid room!

Here’s the acid, you dunk your plates into it and it eats away where there is no asphaltum.

After 30 minutes to an hour, they’re ready!  There are a few steps I skipped here.. it gets repetitive.  According to how you want your plate to be, you stick it into the acid until it gets to how you want.  You take them out and clean all the gunk off, and then you’re ready to print!

I’m using the knife to spread out the ink so I can pick out any dried pieces.

Smear it on!  Make sure to get it into all of the etching!

All smeared in.

Here, you take a tarlatin(basically cheesecloth that has starch on it) and use that to wipe up the excess ink.

There should only be ink in the etching when you’re done.

Here I’m smearing ink into the main plate.

All wiped up and ready to ink!  I didn’t wipe the first plate too well, you can still see some teal around the etching.  Oh well, this was just a test print to get the registration right!

The printing press!  For intaglio you have to use damp paper, so what’s not seen here is that I had to soak the paper for at least 20 minutes.  I taped it to the press to get the registration correct.

After it’s been run through.  You can see the additional tape I put down to help me place the plates.

Replace the plate with the other one, put the paper down and run through again!

Here I’m pulling the paper away… hopefully the registration is good!

And… it’s not.  It’s off a lot

Here’s another.  I just ran another piece of paper without inking up the plates again.  You can see just how much ink the paper soaks up in the first run.  I didn’t bother to ink up the plates again because I was just trying to get the registration right.. It wouldn’t make sense to waste ink.

Here’s another shot to show how bad the registration is.

Thankfully I finally got it sorted out when I actually went to print the final edition.  I used pink instead of teal as well.  I’ll post all of my prints on another day!

What I used:  shoes, dye, a container, gloves, cotton balls(not pictured)

You need rubber gloves unless you want colored hands for a while.. I got a dye concentrate, so I just poured a little into the container and got going.

Here I am, about to start the dying process.

Oh yeah, here we go.

Pretty much done!  And this is why you need gloves

Ta da!  A pair of black shoes.

Thanks go to my older sister who dyed the left shoe as I dyed the right. 

Again, I’d like to apologize for my absence lately.. End of school and whatnot has calmed down, so I should be able to start posting regularly again.

• pictures of my printmaking work
• lip gloss! yay
• probably some type of plushie
• a pinhole camera (which is already made, but I want to get the photos developed first)
• a purse I’ve been itching to make
• shoe recon
• and many more!

So there’s the list, for everyone to see.. I promise I’m not avoiding my blog because of a lack of ideas, it’s just a lack of time!!  If I don’t post anything tomorrow, I’ll definitely post on Saturday!

I’ve had these for so long!

So I got to sewing and cutting.  I had just vacuumed my floor and now I have to do it again because of all the seeds I had to cut off of this fabric so it wouldn’t break the needle in my machine..

Here’s the finished product!

Don’t pay attention to the green shirt, it’s just what I was wearing at the time haha.

Kinda blurry, sorry

Again, apologies for the lack of posting.. I have a lot of things lined up, I just never had time.  I do now though!