Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Felt Easter egg cozies

Two years ago (that long already?!) I made these little chicken egg cozies for Easter.
They make a nice Easter favor with a few chocolate eggs.

And even better, they are really easy to make: cut two pieces of felt, stitch them together (don't forget to pick a thread colour that stands out) and round it off by punching out two little holes as eyes. And you're done!

I've finally made it into a printable pattern, which is now available on the Downloads page.

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Quiche and whoopies on a lazy Sunday afternoon

It's Sunday again. My favourite lazy day! I'm not religious, but I do keep my Sundays as a day for resting and not being allowed to do any work. That is, nothing 'work' like, like design work for my studio, administration, organizing things like performances for the music group I'm in, household work or anything else that involves a certain amount of pressure -be it from others or from myself.

Since I work independently on my designs and freelance jobs, I find it even more important to draw a strict line between work and relaxation. It is so easy to keep working and working, until suddenly you crash and burn. No energy and motivation left, the smallest problems appear huge and the joy of designing seems completely gone. I've been there a lot.

Therefore: Sunday is resting day, time to reload that battery. On which my mind usually promptly overflows with ideas and plans. Pushing away the daily worries seems to clear up a lot of space in my head. So, even though it's called my 'lazy day', Sundays are usually rather productive days for me.

Today I baked a quiche for lunch from some leftover vegetables:

I also tried baking whoopie pies, or whoopies. They are a slightly dry cake with filling in between. The recipe called for the dough to be put on the baking sheet in small bolls. Since the actual whoopies appeared rather flat, I did wonder if it wouldn't be better to flatten the dough. Following recipes is not my strongest suit, but for this time I decided not to go improvising and, well, follow the recipe. But, as you can see:

Yep, the whoopies were way too round -causing them to roll over making the upper halves slide off. I re-read the recipe. It said "make round bolls of dough (check), then flatten the dough a bit (...oh.)". Curse you, Attention Deficit Disorder!

Ah well, they still tasted good.

The recipes:

Vegetarian quiche for one:

- garlic clove, chopped
- small union, chopped
- mixed vegetables, finely chopped (I used a 'soup vegetables' mix with carrot, leek and cauliflower, about 100 g)
- 2 sheets of puff pastry
- 1 egg
- some milk (I think around 50 ml)
- grated cheese
- salt, pepper, paprika powder, rosemary

Bake the vegetables and garlic in a frying pan for 5 minutes. Grease baking tin, put the puff pastry in (optional: add some breadcrumbs on the bottom), put in the vegetables+garlic, mix egg, milk and cheese and pour it over the vegetables. Bake the quiche in 30-45 minutes on 180 degrees Celsius.

Chocolate whoopies (8 pieces):

- 225 g self-rising flour
- 50 g cocoa
- 100 gram brown sugar (NL: basterdsuiker)
- 1 sachet of vanilla sugar
- 100 g butter
- 2 eggs
- 125 ml milk
- a pinch of salt

Mix butter and sugar, add eggs and salt and mix to a fluid mass. Sift the flour and cocoa and add to the mix, add the milk as last ingredient. Mix to a homogenous mass. Use 2 tablespoons to make 16 balls of dough on a baking sheet. Flatten them (and don't you forget that!). Bake 15 minutes on 180 degrees Celsius. Let them cool off and and put filling in between (I used custard, but the recipe says chocolate cream filling (to be made) or chocolate spread). Enjoy!

Saturday, March 9, 2013

Calendar download: April wallpaper

Huh? Making the deadline, this soon already? Yep! I just felt like doodling last night and finished this one in less than an hour and a half. Yay for progress! The others cost me way more time and I like this one the most so far.

Both available on the Downloads page as usual.

On a different note, this one is not in the graphic style I intended (see this post), because this image just popped up in my head and I wanted to benefit from that. So... Maybe for May. Or June. Or December. I'll get there eventually.

Thursday, March 7, 2013

My newest design: "Day/Night"

Which is really not new (see this post from September last year), but I finally got to make some decent pictures of it, so it is now finally officially 'launched' and for sale in my webshop. It's a 3D printed ceramic egg cup that functions as a candlestick when you turn it upside down. Hence the Day/Night name: it can be put on the table for both breakfast/lunch (egg) ánd dinner (candle). Well look at me being clever and all. Anyway, the pictures:

Now I still need to make decent pictures of another item, my business card stand - which is, by the way, my absolute favourite design - but this is rather difficult so it might take some time (it holds white business cards, and shooting this with a white background is really not easy). And scenic pictures of a business card stand? I still have to figure out how to set that up.

After these and a few portrait pictures are done, I can finally close this chapter - I'm kind of stressing out about all of it but it has to be done (actually, it should have been done weeks ago, I'll explain why in the future). I'll finally be able to work on some other things after that, yay!

In the mean time I'd like to share this link with you: it is a breakdown of the process of creating a stunning watercolour (mainly) fantasy illustration by artist Jenny Dolfen (also known as Gold-Seven). Very inspiring, it makes me want to run to the art store immediately to get a watercolour set and start experimenting!

Friday, March 1, 2013

Grmbl

Recently I noticed some traffic to this blog from a website I did not know. Upon looking I found it to be some shady annoying "make money with writing" site.

On it, the standard story: "I've been doing this for two weeks and now I'm earning $5000 a week while still being there for my poopsie little baby", yada yada yada, you've probably heard it before.

The beauty of it all is that at the end there is a letter in which the author claims that this is NOT a shady site, because Blogger (the '.blogspot' blogs host (a.k.a. Google)) had supposedly sent a private mail to author because people had complained. But, author claims, Blogger knows it is not a scam. So you should also believe author, naturally. Since (s)he said that Blogger said that it is not a scam. The letter closes with:

 PS: Please be assured that this is all true.

Now THAT is solid reasoning!

For those who are wondering: if this is indeed a shady Blogger site, why does Blogger not close it down? Well, because it is not a site hosted by Blogger. Someone cleverly picked a private domain name resembling '.blogspot', I didn't notice this at first as well. But still, the content says enough.

However, somehow a link to my blog is on top of their blog roll. To the people coming to my blog redirected from that site: hi there, and shame on you for clicking on links on shady websites. Seriously, please don't do this anymore.

I don't feel like sending this website an email asking to kindly piss off, because that would disclose my email address to a shady site, which is of course not a smart thing to do. So now I'm just hoping it will go away soon. Grmbl...