There's Always A First For Everything

*Burp*

Well, this is my first attempt in:

+ Making a cheesecake

+ Using a new Canon Macro 100mm lens Dad got not too long ago

Last week, Peggen brought a homemade oreo cheesecake that tasted heavenly and a couple of days after a girl in planetUNI brought blueberry cheesecake as well for a rehearsal we had for an upcoming event. So those cakes where my main catalyst in making my own too! For some reason, I never knew that these sort of cheesecakes didn't require any baking.

The recipe was found here, as I looked it up on google :). It's a great recipe. It said that it only requires 30 mins to make the cake but I ended up taking 1.5 hours, since there was quite a few washing to be done and I like to keep the sink empty/ kitchen tidy.

Make sure you follow the recipe though. It was stated that only half a lemon/ lime was required. On the fruit rack at home I could only find 2 really old lemons hah. Even though one entire (dried) lemon was used, the cream cheese mix was not sour enough. Hence the 2nd lemon was used. Decided to use the entire lemon as no one would use it if I left half of it in the fridge. Bad decision. The mix ended up a little too sour. What was worse was the frozen blueberries I got from Safeway was extremely sour too. So mum and I decided to just put some icing sugar over the cake, and it tasted better :).

Lesson learnt: Always follow the recipe!

As with the macro lens, I love honing in details so it was awesome!


 

Winter Loves

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I absolutely love just seeing what real people wear on a daily basis. It beats just always looking through fashion mags for inspiration. 

Did you know that streetstyle and chain stores emerged in around 50s- 60s, when youths became more financially independent from their parents?  Opportunities arose for full-time employment for this age group in the 60s. Having financial freedom, coupled with rebellion against the previous generation's mentality, way of life and cookie-cutter looking clothing, the youths in the 60s decided to live and dress drastically different from their parents. Hence most of their earnings were spent on music, movies and clothing. With an increasing demand on individualistic pieces, that's how streetstyle and chain stores emerged. The prominent influence of couture, ever popular before the 60s, as a result, dwindled in power and couture houses began to even adopt streetstyle fashion as part of their design. 

The Sixties was a decade when new syntheic materials emerged, streetstyle and chain stores appeared, people went to the movies, Rock & Roll real popular and the ensemble of a blue jean (inspired from labourers/ miners), white T-shirt (usually only worn as undergarment) and a black bomber jacket (from fighter pilots of the World Wars) symbolised the epitome of youth rebellion coz they'd look waaaaay too different from the squeaky-clean, buttoned up, prim and proper look of the society. 

It's interesting what my course has taught me so far, always learned most whilst writing essays. Maybe I'd put up a post one day about my essay and some of what I've found. 

Above are just some favourite photos from some blogs I visit regularly these few days. :)


Have a great holiday!

Gouache Painting for CAD

Was painting my roses for the CAD project, ready to be scanned and manipulated on photoshop and illustrator. The colours used here were all leftovers from previous projects and I'm really happy to see how nicely the colours have worked together!! It's like an unusual mix of colours that really do complement one another. 

One of my lecturers, Emma, said that my real strength in my paintings is my unusual and somewhat clever use of colour :), which I didn't really quite realise till she said so! Yay! :P

These are two shots I've taken at my desk whilst finishing up the painting at night. 

Making of the Baba Nyonya-Inspired Shawl

Hi!! I'm back to blogging now after a month of neglect. Too much to do, too little time.

Here are images I've taken of my shawl, a design project based on our personal interpretation of 'Happiness'. What's my security blanket? What makes me happy? I wanted to make a shawl that was all black/ white with different fabric manipulation like gathering, puff etc.  Looking at them may make me happy. But I thought about my travels back home to M'sia, which I look forward to most of the times, and I remembered how Grandma used to always wear her kebaya. Never had my past projects any cultural references. They've always been inspired by catwalks or contemporary Western art. They definitely had nothing at all that told a story of my background or heritage. So this was the perfect chance to showcase the art of the kebaya from the hybrid culture of the Baba Nyonya! Instead of embroidering the motifs, which I definitely can't do (yet), the scarf was silk-screen printed by myself. Motifs were inspired by typical Chinese motifs of the peonies and butterflies, each with specific meanings behind them.

Corner design

The scarf is to measure at 1m x 1m, making it a square shawl.  However the stretchiness of the fabric made it into a rectangular one! The design process was not that bad. I only had to design a corner and have them repeating and mirroring at the other 3. Hence the challenging part was only to make it as symmetrical and as perfect as possible. Motifs of the flowers and butterflies were all hand-generated, scanned, enlarged, printed, laid on corner design and traced. The in-betweens were filled with leaves, stems and the cut-out webbing so commonly found in kebayas.

Five colours were used: 2 tones of porcelain blue, 2 tones of brown and 1 pink, which I gave fancier names in the resource book. 

Outlines of the motifs were all screen printed and the gradients of colours were filled in by hand. Petal by petal, leaf by leaf. All in all, a super labour-intensive process, from coating and exposing of screen to the painting of the motifs. Not to mention stupid colour testings. This doesn't even include fabric tests, samples produced, steaming, bloopers and....omg, the sewing. Nearly killed me and cost me a few precious tears. It was such a soft and delicate fabric to sew (wool/ viscose blend), which makes it extremely hard to sew to the ribbonned border. 

 Close-up of freshly handpainted butterfly with a brush and handpainting solution

Now, washing out of the shawl was vital to ensure all excess colours are taken out of the printed fabric, before sewing. I nearly got a heart attack when the dark blue kept washing out and I came back to my bucket of Mesitol (this liquid fixes the dye even more) being totally dark blued, when there was only dark blue at the outlines of the motifs!! Fading or washing out was my enemy :( 

 Photo taken before shawl was washed and soaked in Mesitol

Anyhow, boring bits aside, somehow, the shawl did transform into something really beautiful and I've already worn it out once, though the colours faded a fair bit from washing. Had to do a photoshoot for the project so I've asked some help from David. All I could remember was him asking me to roll my shoulders forward, chin lifted, and lips parted, man! We ended up mucking around with the scarf towards the end of the photoshoot, which in turn STAINED my scarf with my lippy. DAVIDDDD!!! Hope it is still washable after I get my scarf back from marking.

Here's the result of the photoshoot :)

Resembling some Indonesian Tai-Tai?? (meaning a lady that lives a pretty well-to-do lifestyle with much financial support from husband)

Here's a shot that may jeopardise my image. An attempt looking like Audrey Hepburn in the 50's with her huge sunnies and sun scarf which failed dramatically. Faux sunnies actually was David's 3D glasses. How glam.

Oh well, in the name of fun and a bit of a laugh, it should be worth it, I hope. :P