DIY Recipe - Chickpea Mushroom Egg Mayonnaise Brinner

It’s such a long time back, but the first time that I heard of the term “Brinner” was on the Scrubs episode My Bad Too during which Turk decides to take advantage of the fact that he has secretly learnt Spanish in order to get Carla to make him breakfast for dinner.

Based on the basic idea of using the ingredients that you would use to make a continental breakfast in a recipe for another meal, I came up with this concoction from various things that I found in my cupboards (bought cheap-ish courtesy of my local ALDI).

Snail Shell Protection in Metal Pomander Case

One of the things that I’ve noticed in high street fashion jewellery shops lately is the popularity of necklaces/pendants that are essentially a hollow ‘cage’ of some sort with a fancy bead sealed inside it. To those who are unfamiliar with the history of jewellery, these ‘cages’ were originally used in the medieval/renaissance period for people to carry fancy smelling things around with them – either to make themselves smell better or to hold up to their noses in order to prevent them from smelling too much of the sewage that lined the streets due to the bad sanitation of that time period.

So anyway, the really great thing about having a dad that loves to travel is that during high school, we got to visit a different place every summer. Given my love of the goddess Aphrodite (the official Greek version from their holy texts opposed to the popular modern myth version), one of my favourite holiday momentos is a white snail shell that I picked up on the beach at Cyprus when we went to check out Aphrodite’s rock.

After letting it sit in the bottom of my jewellery box gathering dust for a long time, I finally figured that I wanted to turn the shell into some sort of necklace. Originally I thought about doing something so that I could turn it into a pendant in the style of the gold one that Ursula wears in Disney’s The Little Mermaid.

After googling for a long time on how I could make this possible, I finally realized that I didn’t have the tools nor the skill to do this. So in the end I decided to settle on either using a spiral cage that you often see in new age shops that have gemstones inside or something in the style of a pomander case. 

The issue with getting my hands on a metal case is protecting the shell from getting chipped as it’s really thing. So it was off to lacquering it with several layers of my trusty clear nail varnish. This turned out to work pretty well, although I am a tad disappointed that I now can’t remove it from the cage and use it with something else, due to my mistake in not checking on how runny the nail varnish that I’d put inside the shell to solidify it a bit was, before I put the shell inside the case to check that it would fit.

Very First Crocheted Flower (21 March)

Given my love for lacy things, part of me has always had a soft spot for crocheted items. 

So it’s a bit of a no-brainer that I also wanted to add crochet to my list of things that I could do…

Seeing as I already have a crochet hook that I use with my knitting, some bright multi-colour wool that I couldn’t think of what to do with and that I’ve always loved the look of crocheted lacy flowers, I decided to give this tutorial that I’d found on youtube a go…

 

Procrasti-baking the Cheat’s Way (March 18)

I got it into my head to make the guy I’m sub-letting my room in a sharehouse a birthday cake (partially motivated by the fact that I’d badgered him into cleaning out the oven and not used it for something like 1 ½ months).

As there are no measuring cups or cooking scales, I figured it’d be safer this time round to use a ready-made mix and just eyeball guess the amount of water I needed to add. It also gave me the opportunity to use up some of the marmalade conserve that I pretty much never touch. It also confirmed my personal belief that spring-form baking tins are the best type to use as they make it easier to remove the cake from the tin without breaking it. 

Red Ruffle Yarn Knitted Triangle Wrap

I’m usually more of a cardigan girl, but I’ve always been kinda curious about how and when to wear a triangle wrap shawl.

One of my favourite stories is a variation on the selkie wife story which is about a firebird lady with a beautiful feather coat.

I’d stockpiled 2 balls of red Elicia ruffle yarn for a special project, so am really proud of myself that I finished making the ruffle yarn triangle wrap in about a week – inspired by that feather coat…

N.B. It turns out that as the ‘triangle’ became ‘wider,’ the ‘netted part’ became more and more likely to get tangled at the ends. This problem was solved by using stitch holders…although I have 2, I somehow managed to lose one of them, so I solved the problem by tying the first 8-ish stitches from the end together using a piece of string.