Random pics...

Got caught in a Monday morning traffic jam. There I was in my nice, comfy air conditioned car. Having a nice little picnic breakfast... When I looked out and saw this bus ahead. Made me feel very spoilt and over indulgent. This is Jakarta for you.






A scrapbook I made for my friends the Cs'. It contained photos of our holiday together in Sambolo. A lovely beach resort about 4 hours away from Jakarta (with traffic). Unfortunately, you have to lug everything, including microwave and ovenette, along.



A 'clip' board inspired by the 'handmade' magazine that I borrow from my friend and fellow crafter L. Kiddo has many, many clips. But barely uses most of them as they are chucked into a drawer. So she always uses the same 5. This way, she can see all of them and match them with her clothes too! Asked her what words she wanted on the board. Reply, 'Clippy things, of course!'. Hmmm, yes, of course... Duh...



The trampoline in the apartment complex. Kiddo is the one with her legs in the air. The other 2 kids belong to the Cs'. Lovely, sweet kids...



A little accordion photo holder I made for my friend's birthday commemorating her first year in Jakarta.

Shrink film is the bees knees!!

Yesterday afternoon, I tried out shrink film for the 1st time. I have decided that I love the stuff! In fact, I like the little medallion I made yesterday so much, that I made another today to wear as a pendant. This time, I took blow by blow photos. The shrinking is unbelievable! If you look at the photo, the large circle with flower on the right is the original size. The little one on the left is the finished size.




Step 1 : Cut and stamp. I used a 3 3/4 inch circle die with prepunched hole and a Stampin' up flower stamp from the fifth avenue floral series. The ink was reflective interference ink in sterling frost from the Tsukineko Opalite range. The instructions suggest sanding the film 1st, but I decided to just give it a go with and see what happens... It's pretty slippery, so stamp with steady hands!







Step 2 : Shrink! I used my heat tool instead of the oven although the product sheet says you can do both. I figured I would get better control with my heat gun. Just run the heat tool over the cut and stamped film and watch the show! Try not to get too caught up in the theatrics of it and keep moving the tool around, or your film will look like something out of Picasso's dreams. Not to worry even if it happens though, just flip it occasionally from back to front and it will sort itself out. After that, squash it in between 2 books while it's still a little wobbly, give it a few seconds, and you're done!























Step 3 : I decided to go on and emboss it with some glitter (cause I LIKE sparkly things. No better reason than that...). So I just lightly pressed it on my embossing pad and sprinkled some Tsukineko sparkly embossing powder over it. Don't ask me what colour it is. The only words in English on the bottle are emboss and Tsukineko. Everything else is Japanese. Heat it again like you would embossing paper, and...

Voila!! You're done. Easy peasy lemon squeezy...

Bottom pics are the finished product before and after it became a necklace.

Points to note... Make sure the surface you're heating it on is not going to melt and warp while you're in the middle of your masterpiece. I suggest tweezers 'cause that bit of film can BURN! I found out the hard way.

Fun day with the ladies

Yesterday was a morning of indulgence for me. I packed the kid off to school accompanied by the maid and stayed home to await the arrival of my crafty ladies, L and A.

L is a friend from church who makes the loveliest cards. Check out her blog on . Long story short, we both realised that we like crafting and, well, birds of a feather and all that. Ever so often we troop off to each others homes to oo and aa. She has lots of embellishments, I have a lot's books; she's a traditionally creative cardmaker, I'm an experimenter. Lots of dramatic disasters using my way... but it's fun.

So, the morning was spent with the 3 of us gabbing away like magpies. Not to forget L's yummy food. She has an amazing cook, PakM, and we had otak, siu mai and pound cake. Talk about fusion! L is ALWAYS feeding me. It's embarrassing, but I can't resist it. Isn't that worse!?

A, the other lady who came, is a born entrepreneur. She has, I don't know how many different projects ongoing for various yayasans (charitable foundations). She also sells dried mangos. Very yummy. Apparently, according to a friend in the US embassy, agricultural wastage in Indonesia is around 40%. In the US, it's a rounding error. So A's husband has a friend who taught some local farmers to dry their surplus stock. So far it looks like it's working really well...

After a couple of hours of my showing off all the bits and pieces I've acquired over time from Pasar Mayestik (a fantastic fabric, craft, food and pretty much everything market) which is just around the corner, we decided to head over there anyway. Might as well, since L lives pretty far away and goodness knows when she might next get a chance to head this way.

There we were, 11am and browsing through Toko Maju, the best stocked, messiest, dustiest, most incredible craft shop in town. It's been at least a month since I've been back, and they had new things in. Oooo... ribbons, buttons, clips bases... Lets put it this way, I left a little poorer but very satisfied.

L and A eventually left for home at 2pm. I'm going to head back to play with my 'new toys'... Craft time!!

Origami bowls

Fiddly scale : 6 (0 is I can do it plastered, 10 is I couldn't even work out how to start)

Picked up this paper folding book from the Indo book fair and decided to try out one of the projects. Problem is it used washi paper. I don't have any and am too skint to buy some. So I decided to do it using left over scraps of cloth instead. I did the same thing the book suggested to stiffen the paper. I.e. sandwich a piece of aluminum netting in between the pieces of paper and glue the whole shebang together. Anyone who has glued fabric will know that it's messy, fiddly and doesn't ever seem to dry clear even though the bottle says 'dries clear'. Anyway, it worked. Sort of.
1st effort. The glue is visible along the top edges if you look closely.

Today, I decided to give it a go again. I couldn't believe something that appeared so easy could end up so incredibly complicated. This time, I decided to sew a square, stuff the netting inside and slip stitch the open end together. Much better. Though I have to say that someone who has better slip stitch technique would make this look infinitely better. I also managed to smash my thumb with a hammer trying to crease the corners. There is a reason origami is meant for paper...
2nd effort. Better, but wasn't very careful so the edges are a tad wobbly.

3rd effort. It's do-able!! Note to self, take time with measuring and cutting. Rulers were invented so idiots like me don't have to eyeball stuff and have it turn out crooked...

10 days to the bazaar now. I wonder if anyone would buy them for charity??

Halloween party

Kiddo and I attended our 1st ever Halloween party today. Costumes required for all attendees. Parents included. Being cheapo mummy, I decided to make my own. After all, why pay loads of money for something I would only ever wear once? My home made fairy costume cost about US$10 and 2 hours of time. It will now be cut down to kiddo size. Voila!! More money saved on costumes.

The morning was spent helping N carve pumpkins at her place. Great fun. The kids played all morning and then some, but that meant we were free to unleash our artistic abilities (google images is great!) without interruption (or not much anyway)... After multiple different knives and tools (some of which names I couldn't even tell you on pain of death) including a drill set, we had our 7 carved pumpkins. N was initially thinking 20, but just the 7 took us from 930am till 2pm to complete. With a short lunch break, of course. At that point, we realized 20 was clearly unmanageable. All in all, pretty proud of our efforts. No injuries either, bar a small nick on my left thumb that probably happened as I was trying to stab a hole with the knife angled towards myself. D'oh!! Still, it didn't bleed (or was pasted shut by pumpkin goo), hence forgettable in my books. Especially since I only just noticed it while hitting the space bar rather vigorously after the computer hung (AGAIN!!) as I was trying to upload photos...Photos taken by kiddo before any knives or drills were put to use.

The fruits of our labour. Far left is a cat. Middle small is hello kitty, on top of the medium beigy pumpkin on right is my version of a 'pocket God' pygmy (You really have gotta be playing iPhone games a lot to get this one)
All lit up. For some reason, the hello kitty candle kept blowing out. Oh well. No one could be bothered to keep relighting it...

After that, it was nap time for kiddo and mummy. Daddy is in Bali on some team building thing so no tag team parenting this weekend. Monster mummy's just begging to emerge. Safer if everyone gets lots of sleep. Then hopefully it'll just be growling instead of screaming and raving... I hope...
The dressed up mummies. That's me in the pink fairy outfit (with the cheapo skirt) in the middle...

By 530 we were dressed and tiara'd up. For the 1st time ever, I pulled out my green and blue eyeshadow. I was aiming for the whole glittery butterfly look, but to be honest, I couldn't see the difference between that and using my normal brown eyeshadow. That shows you how little skill I have for applying makeup. Later I found out that in order to make the colours more vibrant, I should have started with a layer of concealer. Too bad, I don't own any. Should have just gone for kiddo's face paints.

The party was a riot. Sat down and margaritas started magically appearing in front of us. The kids were wonderfully occupied by professional entertainers. And parents could eat and chat to their hearts content. Funny how all the men just ended up propping up the bar. We had a surfeit of vampires tonight. One of them was so artfully made up by his wife that his kids wouldn't go near him. Even after all the red lippie complete with faux dripping blood was wiped off. Hilarious. The girls, by and large, were princesses and fairies, with the boys generally superheros of some sort. Not very up to date on superheros I must admit, though I could probably recite the cast of pixie hollow given a chance.

Later, we had a modified trick or treat session. Parents brought tents and sat inside while the kiddies came around. I'm pretty certain I handed out stuff multiple times to the same kids, but who cares, it's not like we're going to eat the sweets. Kiddo doesn't like sweets (weird, but I'm certainly not complaining), so her stash will be carefully examined and subsequently redistributed to our staffs' kids.

I scooted off with kiddo at 9pm. 2 hours past her usual bedtime. She was still going strong. But if I waited till she was tired, no doubt fairy princess mummy would have morphed into evil fairy princess mummy. As it is, grumpy fairy princess mummy was definitely in charge, despite several margaritas (exactly how many I couldn't say, the barman was a fantastic topper-upper). Hopefully by tomorrow calm mummy will be back in charge...

New country, new hobbies

Some people have hobbies, some don't. Some people are collectors, some aren't. Some people are obsessive-compulsive, some laid back... I'm a compulsive hobby collector. And (not so) proud of it.

When I was growing up, I did the usual girlie crochet and knitting bit. That was about all. School and golf left very little time for anything else apart from story books in the car and while waiting around. Hmmm... that's probably how I developed the habit of always carrying a book or two in my bag wherever I go.

When I was working in London, knitting and crochet (and the books, of course) were portable. I could take them on the tube with me. They were great stress busters. Very soothing. Except the time when I completed a sweater and realized it was too small! Very annoying. I think I chucked it in the bin in a fit of pique. Anyway, we moved back to KL and had kiddo. She consumed all of my time for the 1st two years of her life (What can I say? Obsessive 1st time mom) until she started school, and there I was, at loose ends, with NO hobbies! Knitting in a tropical country is pretty pointless, and after the 5th doily, even crochet gets pretty dull. So I started taking beading classes. That went on for several years, pretty much everyone in the family got stuff thrown at them whether they liked it or not. Rosaries, necklaces, bracelets, whatever...

Then... Jakarta. The land of cheap materials. I carried on doing my beading initially, then a friend, BR, who paints the most gorgeous plates, introduced me to ceramic painting. Initially I was very resistant. After all, I was the kid my art teacher told never to give up my day job 'cause I would starve as an artist. But after some persuasion and lots of, 'It's ok to copy stuff you know.' I finally capitulated. Me being me, I bought every colour paint I could find. I had 2 different browns, 2 different greens, 2 different reds etc. That year, my parents got painted plates for Christmas.










Since then, I have added, to my hobby collection, scrapbooking and sewing. I still do the other stuff. But depending on mood, sometimes I feel like something completely different, so out come the sewing machine, or the beads, or the paints... The Man got so fed up with only having about 2 sq.ft. on a 2m long dining table for meals that he 'gave' me the dining table and bought a new one. It's now covered with 'works in progress'. Some I don't think I'll ever complete, but if it's in front of me, perhaps I can fool myself into thinking they'll get done at some point. The powers of self deception...

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My 'boredom busters'. Some of the things I've done over the last 2 years... (I just dragged and dropped the photos wherever. This whole uploading photos business stumps me...)