Tag: felting

Wooly Strawberry Cake

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This week has been a rather quiet week. I’m done celebrating the end of Odd Thomas 3 (House of Odd), so I’m settling down into doing some doodling while the next book is being figured out. Apart from doodling, also crafting, of course. And catching up on some reading and gaming.
 

Strawberry Roll

Step 1: I bought this off Rakuten.co.jp again. I belated noticed that this one was listed as "challenging" (ie. the hardest difficulty level). Be prepared for bloodied fingertips!

 

Strawberry Roll 2

Step 2: Pull everything out of the box, and check that it's there.

 

Strawberry Roll 3

Step 3: Start stabbing the main body of the cake. This one takes the longest, since you're taking a big wad of wool and making it shrink and adhere to a certain shape.

 

Strawberry Roll 4

Step 4: Finally get the roll cake done. Add some nice strawberry filling and cream to it.

 

Strawberry Roll 5

Step 5: Hash out the remaining bits and pieces, including the strawberry and blueberry. The strawberry was a specific shape, so it took ages to do.

 

Strawberry Roll 6

Step 6: Stick everything on top, and needle it in. Only the small flaky bits left!

 

The final product! Pretty nice, methinks:

 

Strawberry Roll

Toy Poodle

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I’m going to Melbourne next Sunday to Tuesday, to do a two-day series of workshops at Scotch College! Haven’t been back to Melbourne for over a year!

 

Internet Explorer Woes: I’ve been looking at my new blog with Internet Explorer (instead of with Firefox, which is what I normally use), and I have noticed that Internet Explorer is crazy in the way it displays my blog. If you have Internet Explorer 9 it seems to be okay, but it you have version 8, it has a weird tendency to center all the text on the page. Worse still, if you have IE version 7 or less, the blog posts I have actually overlap the side bar on the right hand side of the page.

So, I’ve been going through my old posts and manually aligning the paragraphs to the left, which is the only thing I can do to get my Internet Explorer 8 to show the page properly.

If anyone knows how to fix this issue, please let me know. I have heard from other programmers that Internet Explorer is a broken-down piece of software that no one wants to program in, but Google Analytics tell me that 52% of visitors to this site use IE. So if you’re one of those people who’s looking at a messed-up blog, I’m truly sorry. I have no clue why this is so! Not yet anyway.

 
 

Wool Felt Toy Poodle: This wool felt toy poodle ended up about 8cm tall, and it was quite difficult to do! It seems I jumped into the deep end of wool felting, without checking the difficulty level of this toy poodle kit. As a result, I’ve shredded and pricked the fingers of my left hand a fair bit while making this. I now have to wear band-aids on my poor non-drawing hand.

For this reason, wool-felting has lost a bit of its glow for me. I’ve never, in my whole life, ever pricked a finger while sewing. But while wool felting, I’ve managed to riddle my left hand full of holes. From now on, I shall only wool felt in moderation… or with an insurance policy.

 

Toy Poodle - Part 1

Step 1: Here's the kit. Once again, from Rakuten.co.jp, the Japanese shopping site that wonderfully caters to international folks at a reasonable shipping rate.


 
Toy Poodle - Part 2

Step 2: Open it all up and have a look. Once again, no wool felting needle included, so I used my old one.


 
Toy Poodle - Part 3

Step 3: Stabbed the body, head and snout into shape. This was hard, and took a long. The shape of the body was truly difficult to shape properly.


 
Toy Poodle - Part 4

Step 4: There was extra fluffy material to stab onto the dog as fur, while the ears, arms and legs, and tail took a while to make. They were small and kind of hard to get compact... and harder to get the fur on too.


 
Toy Poodle - Part 5

Step 5: Attached all the arms, legs, ears and tail. Added some of that excess fur to "bulk" the dog up a bit more. Only the face left!

 
Finally, the face. The end product looks a bit odd, because the snout is too big. But at least it looks sorta like the cover of the kit:
 
 
Toy Poodle

 

Slice ‘o Orange Cake

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It’s the end of June, and the third “Odd Thomas” book with Dean Koontz, titled “House of Odd”, is up to the final stages. I’ve done all the pencils for the whole book, currently around 190 pages, and after the last 50 pages are inked (and toned by fantastic toner Dee DuPuy), it’ll be officially over. The book is due in April 2012, just after the movie, so keep your eyes peeled for it!

 

On another note, I’ve been doing some more “Knits and Bits” projects on the side. To show folks how my little cakes are put together, I’ve taken a series of step-by-step photos of how I make them from the kits.

 

Step 1: Slice o' Orange Cake
Step 1: The full kit, in its original box. I bought it off an Internet Shopping site, Rakuten.co.jp. It’s kinda like a Japanese eBay of sorts, but with English translations.

 

Step 2: Slice o' Orange Cake
Step 2: Take everything out of the box, and make sure it’s all there. The needle is NOT included in the kit though, and I didn’t know that. Luckily, I had one leftover from a previous project.

 

Step 3: Slice o' Orange Cake
Step 3: Roll up the large white wool, and put it into the cup. The size of the rolled-up wool was huge, and it took a LONG time for it to be made compact enough. Lots of stabbing.

 

Step 4: Slice o' Orange Cake
Step 4: Stabbed the thin layer of Chocolate to the top of the Vanilla. Easy, this part.

 

Step 5: Slice o' Orange Cake
Step 5: Made each of the orange slices. This took AGES and a lot of stabbing all directions, since they have to be shaped in a particular way. My hand got pretty tired.

 

Step 6: Slice o' Orange Cake
Step 6: I then added the little fluffy brown bits, which was quite difficult as the wool felt was kinda disobedient, and was flying all over the place. I struggled to get it under control, then stabbed it down too much. The brown topping is supposed to look more fluffy than this, but oh well. Started stabbing the oranges on.

 

Step 7: Slice o' Orange Cake
Step 7: Adding the little bits of green. Mint? This is the last step. Afterwards, Viola!

 

And now for the finished cake, the Slice o’ Orange Cake-in-a-Cup:

 

Finished Cake
Final Product: This took me 4 hours to make, in-between working on “Odd Thomas 3”, listening to music, watching a Chinese Martial Arts movie on Youtube, and random internet surfing.