My cat in a duck suit

This is my cat Conan.....

As you can see, he is somewhat of a fashionista and likes to experiment with his looks. He doesn't live with me anymore but I am kind of glad about that cause he used to bite me a lot... and look at that shit-eating grin.

Anyhow I thought it would be a cute idea to make him a duck suit incase he ever got sick of being a cat. I didn't make the above jumper by the way, but I did make this.....

Quaaaack. Look how stoked he looks to be wearing something so fancy!

I can't remember how I made it because it was years ago, but I thought I would share anway, if only to embarrass and shame him on the interwebz. Look how silly he looks!

He is so 'above' this....his reputation as a cool cat is in jepardy of being tarnished.

It just needed some elastic under the chin to keep it on and it would have been perfect. But I liked how it turned out. It's pretty easy, just remember to leave feet holes in the legs so their paws can hang out!

xoxo Tricky

Creepy sloth baby FTW

After getting an email forward of sloths from Maria at my work, we realised how damn creepy they are. With their Monk-style bowl cuts, permanent little smile and their abnormally long arms, it's like god slapped them together with leftover parts and to add salt to the wounds, completed the look with an untrendy do.
But there is something about them that is just so damn cute. See?

At the realisation I'd never own a sloth pet of my own because apparently they `hate' being caged, and need to be 'free' in the wild, and 'Council would never approve of me keeping one in my apartment' I decided to make my own baby sloth pet. Take that mother nature!

Here's what he turned out like....

To make your own sloth that looks like it could possibly come alive at night and murder your whole family while maintaining a creepy smile during, then here's how!

You will need:
Half a metre of grey fur
10 cm of long brown fur - for sculpting his wicked do
Two eyes
A plastic dog nose
White paint
Paintbrush
Black felt for his claws
Black permanent marker
Hobby fill
Sewing machine
Needle and thread
Scissors
Craft glue
An exorcist on hand incase of aforementioned possessing.

Everything can be found at spotlight and will cost you under $20 AU. (That's like $100 American at the moment, Schwing!)

As you know, I don't use patterns, I just make it up as I go but here is the general guide of each part you will need:

I started with sewing his head because it was the most fun part. Look how cute.

So you sew the two face pieces to the nose and use the round peice for the top of his head. Sloths heads are really round, like, abnormally round.
Anyhow, once you've sewn together all the pieces, put in the eyes and nose in the squish-face formation and stuff it.
Then you get the brown fur and cut off some chunks for his brows and his monk hair. Glue those on.
Get your permanent marker and darken the fur around his mouth and trim some of the fur away to form a little sly-dog smile.
Get your white paint and use the brush to streak it across the bridge of his nose and above his brows to give him a bit of pizzaz.
Head = done and looking awesome.

Now sew together the torso, and limbs, making sure you cut out some claws to be sewn in when doing the feet and hands, sew them to the torso and use the white paint again to give him some streaky tones and highlights to brighten up his drab colour. Because he's worth it.

Soon you will have your very own sloth to love and watch Neighbours with.

CUE SLOTH MONTAGE:

Being pensive, contemplating life

Getting stabby

Nursing a hangover

 Giving Tricky kisses

 Take him on the bus, take him as your date to the school dance, take him anywhere you like... Just don't feed him after midnight, just in case.

xoxo Tricky

Penis cake...and all the related puns.

*Language and adult theme alert. Don't read on if you're my mum.

For my sister's hens night, I thought what better way to contribute than to make a cake in the shape of a big veiny penis - if only for the related puns of 'go eat a dick', 'mmm this penis tastes so good', and 'I want that in my mouth' etc etc.

Although the title of my blog suggests otherwise, I won't just be featuring items I have sewn, but rather all the things I have created - hence the inclusion of cock cake.

So here it is...

To make this cake you will need:

Three - four packets of homebrand vanilla cake mix (or any variety) - make up according to packet.

A loaf tin (for the ahem.... shaft)

A heart shaped cake tin (For the, how do I put this... ballsack)

Icing sugar

Red and yellow food dye

Icing bag and tip

I used homebrand vanilla cake mix cause it's about 79 cents a packet and I'm cheap, but feel free to burn your money and use a name brand.

Step one:Mix up the packets of cake mix according to the directions. Fill the loaf pan and the heart shaped tin with the mixture and put in the fan-forced oven at 180 degrees until cooked, so approximately 20 minutes. Keep checking with a wooden skewer until it appears cooked.

Step two: Put both cakes on a cooling rack and wait until they are completely cool before performing the next step.

Step three: The sculpting begins!Use the loaf cake to cut into using a serated knife to form the shaft and head shape. If you want some inpiration, I'm sure you could google the word penis and lots of sites would come up. Then once you are happy with the shape, get the heart shaped cake and cut off the pointy end to make a flush edge to stick the shaft shape.
You can trim the tops of the cakes off if they have risen uneveningly.
Use an icing sugar mixture to stick the two pieces together.

Step Four:Mix up some flesh coloured icing sugar using a few drops of yellow and a few drops of red. Trial and error with this process. (Also, I only know how to make a caucasian flesh colour so appologies if you wanted a black one Chris Brown style, don't know if they make a loaf tin big enough Hey-oh!). Once you have a skin tone you are happy with, ice the whole cake making sure you cover the seam where the two cakes have been stuck together.
Using the same batch of icing if you have any left, add some more drops to make it darker, put the icing sugar in the piping bag and ice around the edges.
Get creative, whack some veins on that bad boy!
I used grated chocolate for pubes. Yum.
You can get candy lettering from the supermarket which I used to write a message on there as well.

You can refridgerate it if it's hot otherwise it will melt. Keep it in a plastic cake holder, you'll need a large one for this big boy!

You can make this for any occasion really, a hens night, a stag party, grandmas birthday, whenever the occasion calls.

It was really quite delicious and all the girls loved eating it.. I guess you could say it 'went down' really well....

Om nom nom...



xoxo Tricky

Meet Terry... the T-Rex.

For those of you who know me, I have a dinosaur obsession. So short of paying almost $500 dollars for a robotic Pleo dinosaur, I decided to make my own dino plush. Ok, so it doesn't move or interact or actually do anything at all, but he has a rad flanno, so go suck it Pleo!

This is Terry....

Look at how badass he is!

His flannelette says 'stoned 90s grunge fan' but his razor sharp teeth say 'I could royally fuck you up with a single chomp'.

I never use any patterns for anything and not because I'm a non-conformist and patterns are like 'so mainstream man', but because I can't read or understand patterns and i'm afraid of things I don't understand.
So I basically just make it up as I go and hope for the best.
Lucky for me, Terry turned out as I had imagined him in my brain.
I think when making anything without a pattern, I tend to think of things as a puzzle and map out what I need and how it will all comes together, I'm yet to have a massive sewing failure based on this method. So it's a 100 per cent success rate so far.....(I wish I could say the same for cooking, but we won't mention the epic gingerbread house fail of 2010 where I ruined Christmas.. I'll save that for another blog).
So basically what I am getting at is, you don't need to know much about sewing, you just have to enjoy it and maybe have a little natural flair and you can make anything you want.

So here's how to make your own terry.

You will need:

Half a metre of green felt
A square of yellow and a square of black felt
Flannelette material (But feel free to let your own Terry express himself whether it be 80s glam or 70s retro)
Some eyes
Sewing machine
Needles and thread
Party hits CD to rock out to while sewing

So I realise I said I don't use patterns so it's kind of hard to tell you how to make this but if you actually wanted to make one for yourself I could draw up a pattern for you. But with something like this, you can customise it and make it your own and you can't really be wrong if you have all the elements.

Here is a quick version of all the elements you will need, sizing isn't that important as long as he is all in proportion.

The wider panel of the nose is sewn in between the two side of the face panels and wraps around the back of the head. I also forgot to draw the lower face panel in the diagram but it's the same as the nose panel, minus the back of the head length.

Sew it all together, put the eyes in before stuffing, stuff it with hobby fill, hand sew the openings after stuffing, stitch on the limbs, bung up some type of garment and hey presto! You have your own prehistoric pal to hang out and listen to Smashing Pumpkins with. I made the shirt myself and totally winged it, so I'm sure you can too!

So have fun making your own Terry! Or if you paid me some sweet moolah I could make you one... Your call.

He is so Rawesome.

xoxo Tricky



P is for Party...

Ah costumes parties. The place of endless possibilites where girls can dress as slutty cats, slutty nurses, slutty policewoman, and slutty nuns. The only acceptable place to show as much T and A as you want in the name of costume party spirit. So my delight at being invited to a P-themed party conjured images of prostitues, pilots, pimps, policewomen, porn actress, and prescription drug-addicted whores.
So which of these viable dress-up options did I choose?
A pizza.
Well to be more specific, I made an entire `picnic' of costumes for my friends so we could arrive in tasty style, sporting a pizza (Supreme flavour), pasta, popcorn, pink-iced donut and a poached egg - which I realise is a bit of a stretch on the P theme seen as it looked like more of a sunny-side up but hey, this isn't masterchef.
So armed with metres of different coloured felts and a shitload of quilt lining, I set out to create five different costumes to fit the food theme, which if I do say so, turned out pretty rad. As you can see....
  

(L-R) Me as the pizza, Sophie as the pink-iced donut, Mark as the pasta, Kara as the popcorn and Kyle as the poached egg.

They weren't too hard to make, just a bit time consuming, but if you're like me and love to get in the 'sew zone' (patent pending) then you will enjoy making these.

Introducing Marky-Mark Lawson...

This is my bro-in-law Mark, but I refer to him as BIL. He makes quite a tasty looking dish, am I right ladies? *crickets*
This was the easiest one to make. I got a red hoody from Big W for about $10 bucks and the noodles are just wool ($2 a ball form Spotlight) with brown pom pom for the meatballs (about $2 a packet from Spotlight too). I just looped all the wool over and over and stitched it to the hoody. Finish off the look with a colander - slated to be the new trend in headwear of the season. I went with chrome as it really brought out Mark's eyes.
Yum yum.
Cost: Under $20.


Hiiiii Kyle...

Next is the eggcellent Kyle. This one is also pretty easy to figure out. Cut some big white circles stuff lightly with hobby fill or use quilt fill, leave holes for the head and arms and seal the two pieces around the body with velcro, and don't forget the yolk which I stuffed so it stuck out like a preggo eggo.
Kyle BYO'd tights from Supre which left little to the imagination. Two sunny-side (thumbs) up!
Cost: Can't eggactly remember, but I think it was about $20ish.

Whose got the hots for what's in this box...
So this is me, I admit, this made me really hungry when making this one and it probably took the longest but it was ultra comfy on a cool, cool night.
If this sexy number doesn't bring all the (eagle) boys to the yard, I don't know what will!
Cost: About $40, but this look is clearly priceless.


And here's Not Kate.

This is my twin Sophie who is married to Marky the pasta. My boyfriend aptly named her Not Kate, cause, well, she's not me. But she's still as sweet as a donut, look how cute.
Totes made everyone Krispy Kreme their jeans. (argh, my puns are becoming smuttier as I go on... But we knew this would be the case).

Cost: About $15 and the option of looking skinny.

And lastly, this is Kara the box of popcorn which I think was shed about 10 minutes after arrival due to the inability to sit down, or basically do anything in this cumbersome box.
However it still looks rad. I can't take all the credit for this one because Kara and Sophie painted most of it, but it's still part of the Picnic Gang so yeah.
Cost: Free as we used an old moving box of mine, acylic paint which I already had and used left over fluff for the pieces of popcorn.

So there you have it folks, a tasty picnic who are ready to bring the party.

Om nom nom....

Oh, and we also won best themed costume as a collective, so in your face sluts!

xoxo Tricky