The time I ruined Christmas...

(Awesome drawings by Maria Lewis - aka Movie Mazz. Totally made me look hawt. She has her own blog for all your warm-blooded movie love which can be found here.)

Sometimes, there comes a time in a woman's life where she fails horribly at something. For some, it happens rarely. For me, it happens frequently and generally revolves around trying to make food. Here is my sad tale about the time I ruined Christmas....
For some stupid reason, I thought it would be an awesome idea to construct a gingerbread house for Christmas. I always wanted to be a builder when I was a kid, until I realised I have weak girls arms and hate manual labour but I DO love gingerbread - so it was a logical step to combine my former childhood dreams and my current desire to mung out on gingerbread.

I had grand plans of a multi-level construction with a mezzanine, A-frame roofing - the works. So I trundled off to the supermarket and bought close to $50 worth of lollies and other ingredients to create this monstrosity:

(note how 'clean' everything is...)

I hear you saying, "Hey, Kate, don't be so hard on yourself, it somewhat resembles a house and I'm sure it's of sturdy construction..." False... it is not.

After about 5 hours of baking, decorating and generally putting my heart and soul into my creation, I turn my back for one second and hear an ever-so-gentle, barely-audible thud. Before I even had the chance to turn around, I knew.... My life-long dream that I'd had since that morning was dashed. My roof had collapsed - and so had my dreams.

Being the cool, calm, undramatic type, I let out a blood-curdling "Noooooooooooooooooo!" and dropped to my knees in despair. In true lady-like fashion, I was gracious in defeat and punched it... I punched the gingerbread house in it's stupid gingerbread house face, cracking the shits in vintage Kate style.

I take things really well.

Lucky for Manny, he got to eat A LOT of gingerbread rubble that day... and for the rest of the week....

That is the last time I try to do something festive. Bah-humbug! (seriously, what the fuck does that mean... quick, somebody Google it..)

Tricky xoxo

  

David Bowie shrink plastic fantastic

Ground control to major Tom... how cool will you look wearing this around your neck.

It's my David Bowie shrink plastic necklace!

Remember when you were a kid and you used to eat Smiths Chips and then put the empty packet in the oven and shrink it to make a mini little packet of Smiths Chips? Or your mum bought you Home Brand ones and you shrunk them and then they looked like shit, cause they were home brand?

Well here's something to bring back that nostalgic childhood past-time of playing recklessly and unsupervised with an oven!

What you will need:

Shrink plastic sheets (Or number 6 plastic container)
Black marker
Coloured markers
Scissors
Hole punch
Oven
Baking paper
Sand paper
Leather thong string

Get the sheet of plastic ($15 for 6 sheets A4 at spotlight) and sand paper that bad boy till it's really rough otherwise the markers won't stick.

Once you've sanded it, draw whatever image you want on it and colour it in. Make sure you draw the image fairly big, about a quarter to a half an A4 peice of paper size as it will end up being just bigger than a 20 cent piece.

<--- Here's how mine looked before I shrank it.

You then put it on an oven tray over baking paper and bake it on about 150 degrees for about 5 minutes. Just keep an eye on it though and take it out once it is completely flat again.

I was really 'under pressure' when I put this in the oven because something I was warned about - but not really prepared for - the plastic will curl up and fold in on itself and will make you think 'Oh god, that 45 seconds I spent tracing this picture off a google image is wasted, I will never get that time back, I might as well stick my head in the oven and gas myself to end this world of pain I'm in'.
But fear not, because it's meant to do that and it eventually sorts it's shit out and flattens nicely to form a harder, thicker, and noticibly smaller peice of plastic which can be used for just about anything! - a necklace... some earrings... umm.... a....

I actually made my mum a mother's day card on shrink plastic so it turned into a small little keepsake I'm sure she's already lost somewhere... I would post that up here too but I wrote a hell lame poem on it, and that would only embarrass me. Plus I don't want people knowing I still write my mum poems... oh wait....

Conversation diversion....Here's before and after pics....

As you can see... *cue gasps of shock* the shrink plastic has shrunk! There must be some kind of sorcery afoot!


You can make just about any design on this stuff and it's really fun! I have more shrink plastic projects to show you later on. Yays!

Tricky xoxo