Itsumo Mawaru

I made paper! Check it out:

Papermaking results, originally uploaded by mizuhana.

It was very easy to make. The hardest part is cleaning up afterwards!

I thought I had made more white paper but apparently this isn’t true, my orange/red fiber paper outnumbers the white two to one.

Now I have many small rounds of paper and one large piece… what shall I do with them?

I’ve been thinking of things to do with my teeny useless fabric scraps and other junk such as envelopes and scrap paper. I was inspired by the show How It’s Made and decided to give a shot at making paper.

I kept my hands busy cutting up paper and fabric/fleece scraps while in our weekly DnD session. I used two soup cans to hold the tiny bits. This made it really easy to dice up the fibers finely, as I simply put a pair of sharp scissors in the can and went cut crazy.

The next step is to create a mesh frame (as always, trying not to spend a lot of money), collect some cloths for pressing, then I can create the pulp and make up some paper!

I wonder what I will do with the finished paper, assuming all goes well…

Picture’s coming!  My camera isn’t charged, so I’m waiting for mum to send the ones she took through.

Leonard’s Space Quilt is technically my first quilt top but second quilt complete. As such the top is far from perfect, but no one really cares too much, do they?

I was very meticulous with my quilting this time, I unpicked a few spaces where the machine had fucked up as it likes to do sometimes. I even unpicked an entire color group because I didn’t like the way the blue background thread showed up against the white tiles. The border was very easy and unproblematic to quilt. The binding was done up in a surprisingly fast time, but I guess that’s cause my last binding adventure was for my much larger quilt. I don’t think I’ll ever buy binding from a store unless I’m in a real pinch.

The fabrics are only abstractly space themed, other than the background fabric, which inspired me to make this quilt. The fabrics have curls or circles or spirals, generally round themed. And of course the tile placement is an intertwining chain of roundness. Symbolic yet not obvious. For Leonard, a man who loves the stars, I think it will be perfect.

I am giving the quilt to him today when we go for a BBQ lunch… I’m excited! I hope he likes it.

My charging basket, originally uploaded by mizuhana.

I made this up on Monday when I should have been working on a quilt for Tom’s dad… oh well. It’s a charging basket, it holds all my gadgets and has a little slit for wires to come through. Now all my things are in one place instead of elsewhere, which really is a key component in keeping myself organized and thus not insane.

I don’t have a shot of the back yet and I should as it’s awful. The fabric is all bunched up around the slot’s edges. That’s what I get for deviating from the pattern and not using interfacing to make it stronger I guess. I could also have probably not put in a heavy piece of interfacing. We learn!

Quilting the inside was so fun, the machine really liked it and didn’t jam or anything so it was a full quilting extravaganza. The basket is about 8 inches square.

Two types of eggs, originally uploaded by mizuhana.

I attended a potluck barbeque last weekend and decided to use the opportunity to try my hand at freestyling some deviled eggs.

I have been inspired by watching Chef Todd Mohr’s videos on Youtube in where he teaches you the methods of cooking, not the recipes, thus you can change everything up to suit your own tastes and desires. Even though he didn’t do an episode on Deviled eggs, I took his philosophy and made it happen.

The left side of the eggs are a mild yet pervasive spicy egg with chili powder, Rooster sauce, and minced jalapeno bits.

The right side are a sweet egg-salad styled egg, with carrot/celery/green onion finely minced.

Both of them use about half mayonnaise half sour cream as the binding agent. I found this gave it just a slight tart taste which I enjoyed. And it is probably more healthy too. But the main reason I did it was because I ran out of mayonnaise!

Everyone loved them, I took home an empty dish.

An appetizer to be…, originally uploaded by mizuhana.

And this one. Bacon wrapped cherries. I’m always surprised when people haven’t tried this before, but that’s just a result of my growing up conditions. This is something my mom made often when entertaining. It is so simple yet delicious. One pack of bacon, cut in half. Lay out parchment on a pan with a rim as the bacon will let out grease. Take a bacon strip, take a maraschino cherry, wrap it up and secure it with a toothpick, lay it on the sheet. Proceed another 30 times or so. The bacon is always my limiter, but since I only end up with plus or minus 12 cherries, they can be put into the bar mix for fruity drinks. Cook at around 350-400 for 25ish minutes, you may want to flip them partway through and this could reduce the cooking time. Keep an eye on them, you don’t want the grease to smoke up or them to start burning on the bottoms. And let them cool for a few minutes or else the cherry will be so hot it’ll burn people’s mouths!