Root Beer #1

So a while ago I decided to try to make cola syrup, using all natural ingredients. It came out pretty good. So... I decided to try to make root beer next.

Found one recipe. Tried it. It smells like root beer while it's simmering for the first few minutes...

Then it starts to smell more like an old fashioned general store or the Herb Garrett museum...

The recipe called for molasses and dark brown sugar. This is where it went horribly wrong, I think... those things are very strong in flavour and it was completely misplaced in the flavour spectrum. I think I'm going to go back to my cola recipe and use white sugar, glucose syrup and caramel colouring (actually gravy browning...) to get the right colour if necessary.

A Just for Shiny

I remembered having a velvet choker as a teenager and i felt the need to have another... so this is a homage to that one. Pretty much the same construction but I made this one rather than bought it. Obviously needed to be done since all the other 90s fashions are coming back it seems... skater dresses and leggings... I even saw bodysuits (! those were painful...)

Warning! Taxidermy ahead

Disclaimer: Mice sourced were ethnically bred, raised & killed for snake/reptile food and were coming to the end of their frozen shelf life. This post contains dead mice. Not for the squeamish.

I follow a blog called Morbid Anatomy... mostly via twitter. I was very excited to find out that they decided to visit the UK for a month and host a series of events/lectures at The Last Tuesday Society. One of the things on offer was Anthropomorphic Mouse Taxidermy. 4 hour class, not too expensive and rather unique... so why not?

First off, I highly recommend a visit to The Last Tuesday Society's shop. It is amazing. It's like wunderkammer heaven. So much weird and dark things. Actually, it is literally dark in the basement but that just adds to it... there's a few very small but brightly lit cabinets there that help to keep your eyes from ever properly adjusting to the light levels so there's always something luring in the shadows.

So... the tables were laid out like a macabre dinner party for cats. Dark paper table cloth, paper doilies, shiny little plates, cups of borax substitute and disposable scalpels.




There's no gory pictures because my hands were gloved and I was a bit busy! It's not really any different to taking the skin off a chicken. Here's what my mouse looked like before...


Then after

Like a little mouse slipper.

The tricky bit came after the skinning. It's very fiddly work wiring up the arms and trying to keep the tail/spine wire into the back of the head.

I actually struggled quite a bit with the body shaping. Using air drying clay used to bulk out the body made it a bit awkward. I spent so much time on everything else, I almost missed out the anthropomorphic bit (except for the fact the mouse is in a standing pose)... then I happened to spot some interesting lacy trim and knew it'd have to be a skirt for the mouse.


Thursday, I'm going to be trying to make another stuffed mouse... with quite an audience it sounds like! I'm a bit nervous, I'm still a newbie... but I guess that'll make me more interesting for everyone.

Embroidery

Two of my friends decided to share a flat together... We're kind of taking the piss out of them so made them His & His towels and then I decided they'd enjoy the rude tea towels too.





Happily, they seem to love them, especially the tea towels as they were needed.

Raspberry... P.I.

Another joke gone horribly wrong. Overheard someone describing a raspberry pi as a "raspberry pee eye" and then decided this needed to be celebrated with a raspberry sporting a Tom Selleck 'tache.

Giant T-Rex

Oh so funny... something that was vaguely a joke...

Somehow on the trip back from Derby Mini Maker Faire, we came up with the Amish T-Rex as a description for me. T-Rex because I have short arms and I have to ask other people to get things off of high shelves for me. Amish because ... well, I like to think I had a hippy upbringing but maybe it was more coddled/sheltered/not allowed to do fun & dangerous things. Also all the previous domestic skills tend towards being "amish".

Somehow I found a 6ft t-rex made out of plywood on Instructables. This idea escalated to Let's Build This For EMFCamp then ... it must glow. Yes it must. I originally thought I'd use UV paint but then decided glow in the dark pigments would be better... It'd react to light and also to the UV Lights.

I gathered a budget, I got granted a budget (materials only), bought plywood, begged for base-coat paint from friends, and somehow... it all came together. Under a bridge under the M1 in Milton Keynes.

Mobius Pizza

This was actually TomW's idea, I just helped with construction and making.

It still occasionally boggles my mind that even a year ago I had convinced myself I just cannot collaborate with anyone and now I do so on a regular basis without being a control freak.

So, last Thursday I mentioned I was making pizza and Tom suggested making a Mobius pizza. I mixed up the dough in my kitchen-aid mixer and brought some into the hackspace along with other pizza ingredients.

Actual construction was interesting but we've now worked out that we should just wrap/layer the dough in foil before pre-baking it. We had issues with losing the twist in the dough due to slumping.

I have a really weird way of making pizza sauce... it involves using tomato puree from a tube then sprinkling with dried herbs and seasonings. This actually works pretty well as it won't make a soggy pizza base ever. It also works pretty well for a mobius strip where the sauce has to defy gravity at some points. Also good to know for next attempt: Mix in the herbs into the puree before trying to apply. I doubt the pizza was well-seasoned in all places.

Cheese application was strangely easy... Just squish it on in a two-handed fashion to "both sides" ... Mobius strips only have one side technically.

Next came the toppings. or bottomings. or... somethings... This is very mindblowing stuff when you realise the pizza only has one side. Tom stuck on the pieces with some cocktail sticks. Once the cheese had melted in the oven, it acted like glue to stick the toppings on it.

It somehow disappeared very rapidly after being photographed. I assume this means it didn't taste too bad despite the double-baking and squishing the dough after it had been halfbaked and the sauce not being very flavourful etc etc. Mobius Pizza 2 will be much, much better. There is also plans afoot for Mobius Cookie(s)... We shall see if that works out.