Art Time Travel

Back in 2008 I had an art project which did not work out – I had tried sticking sequins to a canvas with glue which dulled the sparkly sequins. Rather than lose the canvas, and because I had already drawn the stencil onto it, I used modelling paste to build up a texture of my Denkyem stencil.

I was not sure what I was going to do with this or whether it would work out in the end. I thought maybe I would paint it one colour and then dry brush in some gold or silver over the top.

The last thing I posted about it, that is how the canvas looked. And then I got distracted by other things and/or forgot to post any further updates. I wasn’t sure myself what had happened with it, until I was cleaning up my art room and found the completed work in a box.

Now, it looks like this –

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I think it turned out pretty well in the end. :) You certainly cannot tell there are sequins under there, and the texture is really nice. The silver metallic paint helps it to jump out of the canvas. If I were to do it again, I might do a matt black underneath the silver and allow some of the black to show through in the lower areas, just to make the texture pop a little more.

You can read the original posts here – Work In Progress – and here – Short Update plus you can see another work I did with the Denkyem stencil here – Opinions Needed

About Snoskred, family, looking back, Snoskred Art, yay

The Art Room

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A couple of weekends ago we spent some serious time tidying up my art room, which had become a bit of a mess and a dumping ground for stuff that did not have a proper home. We also hung up a lot of art on the walls – some of it in order to hide where the previous people had pulled the paint off the walls when they removed some of their art work, which is why this next photo might seem like a slightly odd way of hanging art –

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The little frame you spy next to the tiger is specifically hiding one of those paint ripped off spots. Probably some people might think it is a weird way to display art, but those ripped off paint spots irritate me enormously and I actually kind of like the non-symmetrical aspect of this group of art.

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Over on this side, it is more about where the studs were in the wall than trying to hide anything, because this side of the room has no ripped off paint areas.

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This piece of art is an interesting one – it is actually similar to foil art and any photos I take do not really do it justice.

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In that photo above you see some stuff I have left on the table to sort through and find new homes for. Also some sparkly contact paper which I found at Kmart. I’ve used it to make some stickers of my Denkyem stencil which I’ve put on my laptop –

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There is also a strip of holographic duct tape that Sephy sent me once. If I recall correctly, he took me on a video walk of Walmart and when I saw this holographic duct tape I declared it must be posted to me. And so it was. Please excuse my still drying from just being wiped with an anti bacterial cloth laptop. :)

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In part this little tidy up was inspired by adult colouring in books becoming a thing, which is inspiring me to get back into art again. But also, it was inspired by things like me not being able to find all my wrapping paper and gift bags. These have now all been placed into one box –

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I love holographic things, as I think you can tell by the awesome 35 metre roll of wrap I bought from Costco. Here is a closer view of that!

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There you have a little tour of my art room, and you can expect to see some new projects appear here on the blog.

About Snoskred, Home, Snoskred Art, Who Is Snoskred, yay

Zen Moment

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When you have two kitties both of whom like to get up close and personal with, well, everything, finding a place to burn candles can be a bit of a problem.

This location is very high up and there are no places where the kitties can make their way up here, no steps to make a kitty ladder. In fact, it is probably less than half a meter from the ceiling. Tealights can be safely burned here, and this is the location where I burn my wax melts.

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I also burn a tealight in the Dusk Spinning Butterfly tealight candle holder. It puts a gorgeous spinning golden glow on the ceiling which is somehow comforting to me. The thermals that the candle throws out magically turns the turntable and it spins. Depending on the candle you use and the heat given off, it can spin at different speeds.

I tend to use two brands of tealights – I like the assorted 50 pack from Dusk – and I love the extra excellent value tealight packs from IKEA. 30 tealights for $2.49, you really can’t ask for any better than that.

You might ask – why two different kinds of tealight candles? Well first of all, they have different burn times. The IKEA ones are regularly 4 hours or so, which makes them perfect for an evening burn eg 6pm-10pm. The Dusk candles are 6-8 hours which is a good daytime burn time. Combine the two and you cover the entire day – 10-6pm or so, then 6-10pm or so, and I can light them and forget them, because they will burn out before I have to think about snuffing them.

The spinning butterfly tealight candle holder can still be purchased from Dusk, though I do not see any purple ones or the teal green which I really wanted to get as well. I will cross my fingers that maybe our local store has one in teal when we next visit – we are nearly out of chicken, so we will be heading to Shellharbour and Warrawong next weekend. If no teal, maybe this gold owl version might come home with us.

Below I have put a couple of videos – they are just 10 seconds long each, you get a closeup of the spinning butterflies in the first one, and you can see the reflection the spinning holder puts on the ceiling in the second.

About Snoskred, Happy Snoskred, Home, Snoskred hearts, yay

In case you missed it

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Wills and Kate have a new daughter! YAY! My two favourite Kate-watching sites have excellent posts up about this.

The Cambridges Present Their Princess to the World!

William in Blue and Kate in Buttercup Yellow to Take Home HRH, Princess of Cambridge

Many more pics on the Daily Mail story – including many pics of a somewhat baffled George when Wills brought him along to meet his new sister, perfectly color coordinated with each other in navy blue. I love how Kate has made blue one of the signature colours of their family.

The new daughter is unnamed as yet. My guess for the name is Charlotte, but it may be a few days before it is announced. The family has already departed the hospital for home..

In Other News –

Here on the blog, tomorrow we start a new blog series. You will see two posts – the first telling you a little about the series and the second will contain the first post in the series.

On Wednesday you will see a couple of photos and videos from my candle burning area.

Also later this week I have a couple of how-to posts planned. One is for those on Blogger which will tell you how to add a subscribe to comments tick box, and the other is for WordPress which will tell you how to add a follow button to a self hosted wordpress site – and I might add in how to do it for a regular wordpress.com site as well, though that is a lot simpler.

Happy moments all round!

blog housekeeping, Happy Snoskred, The Royals, yay

My Magical TuffSteel Roaster

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The official name is the Tuffsteel Forge 32cm Roaster Pan. 32cm is the interior dimension – with the handles it stretches out to nearly 39cm wide.

I love this thing. Seriously adore it. At the moment I use it every second day – my meal plan has been planned out that way, so I can use the next day to get it in the dishwasher and clean again. I’m actually planning to buy a second one of these for a multitude of reasons, not least of which is in case anything ever happens to the glass lid. Glass and Snoskred is not a very good match.

Some of the reasons I love this amazing cooking unit include –

– Keeps all the cooking inside the roaster dish.

– Whatever liquid you add eg wine, lemon juice, chicken or vegetable stock, just plain water, steams up and cooks the food faster.

– Whatever liquid you add circulates through the food beautifully.

– Keeps the oven clean – we’ve had issues before with cooking food in a regular ceramic baking dish and having a mess all over the oven. This way all the mess is safely contained inside.

– I can make entire meals just using this one pan.

One Pan recipes I have cooked inside this roaster pan –

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– Chicken Mini Roast & Potatoes
– Chicken kievs, potatoes, cauliflower
– Chicken kievs, cheesy baked potatoes
– Chicken filos, broccoli, pumpkin
– Roast Beef, potatoes, pumpkin
– Roast Pork, potatoes, sweet potatoes
– Pasta Bake
Fake Lasagne
– Quiche
– Bacon and Leek Mac and Cheese

Soup recipes that use more than the roaster pan – eg you take the roasted items out, pop them into a plastic container, add chicken or vegetable stock and milk or coconut milk and whiz up to make them into a soup.

Roasted Red Capsicum and Potato Soup
– Roasted Potato and Leek soup
– Roasted Potato, Leek and Pumpkin soup (recipe coming soonest!)
– Roasted Cauliflower Soup

I am planning more soups for winter. :) Especially a mixed veg one with swedes, turnips, pumpkin, potato, sweet potato, capsicum, leek, and anything else I can fit in the roaster pan.

I found this roaster pan at DFO in Canberra while I was looking for yet another ceramic baking dish. We’d had multiple bad experiences with ceramic baking dishes cracking and breaking, and I’d just lost our most recent somewhat trusty Ikea ceramic dish, leaving us with only one baking dish large enough to cook the things that we regularly cooked.

This roaster pan was found in one of those kitchen stores with every possible thing you might ever use in the kitchen and I figured – at least it can’t crack and break – I’ll give this thing a try. It has seriously changed the way I cook in our kitchen.

Unfortunately it is not so easy to find online. Deals Direct do stock it but it is presently out of stock. According to other sites when it was in stock it retailed around the $45 mark. Mine cost me $80. At that price, I might even buy two extras and put one away for later on.

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You can get roaster pans with a lid that is not glass – however I do prefer to be able to look inside and see how things are going without having to open the oven and take the dish out. Plus, our convection microwave is a Solardom which uses a halogen heater to cook and that does not work very well if the food cannot see the “light”. The pan has a true non stick coating. As in, nothing ever sticks to it, for reals.

The oven in this house has never been used by us due to absolute dirtiness from the previous homeowners. Seriously, I turned it on once and it smelled so bad, ew. The design of this house means cooking smells congregate in the main bedroom, walk through robe and bathroom, so using the oven again was not an option. The landlord has finally agreed to replace it and I intend only to use this roasting pan in it – that way I will never have to clean the oven.

Do you roaster?

cooking, food, Happy Snoskred, Home, yay

Generators

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This post has been sitting in my drafts folder since November 2014 and I finally got around to completing it. I love me an internet generator! Here are some of the more awesome ones –

Goth-O-Matic – my all time favourite generator – create your own darkly gothic poem! You get to choose from drop down options.

Meme Generator – With built in images and characters.

Internet Anagram Server – ever wonder what other words can be made out of your name? Use this generator to find out. :)

Strong Random Password Generator – if you need some new passwords this generator can help out.

Random Number Generator – need to draw a prize or choose your next lotto numbers?

Harvard Referencing Generator – This generator is super useful for those writing essays that need references.

Lorem Ipsum – generates random latin text.

List of Text Generators – want more generators? This is a good place to start. There are quite a few Haiku generators listed here. :)

This post about some of my favourite internet generators was inspired by this post from Heather Woodland – Marzipan cake fruitcake tart cheesecake sweet lollipop chocolate cake

funny, internet, Linkage, yay

Food Obsessions – Potato & Egg

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I love reading food blogs. Food blogs often make me hungry for very specific things and oftentimes these will be things I would need to go to a supermarket to recreate, so in general I’ll just bookmark a recipe to put on the next food plan..

In the past few weeks it seems like there has been a fried egg thing going on across the various food blogs. Somewhat unfortunately, I always have eggs in the house, so for lunches I went on a little fried egg spree.

Then one day, the stars aligned in the universe and I had a strange thought about adding an egg to that nights dinner as I was deeply craving a fried egg.. much deliciousness was the result. Now, I don’t know how I will ever eat this particular meal without one or more fried eggs on top.

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Potato with bacon and onion has been in our meal rotation since I was a teenager, though my sister was usually the bacon and onion person and I would put on all kinds of exotic concoctions, from fresh cooked capsicum, mushroom and bacon, right up to bolognese sauce, chicken cacciatore or tuna mornay.

Recently we switched out onion for leek in almost every meal we use onion in. Trimmed leeks are available 2 in a packet from Aldi for $2.99 and we much prefer the flavour of leeks.

I still enjoy more exotic options on my potato and will usually add in things like mushroom at a minimum but the other half is all about simplicity and he loves bacon and leek.

If you have never made potato with toppings, here is my most recent recipe. :)

Potato with Bacon, Leek, Mushroom & Egg

I’m going to give you more than one way to do each step because that is how we roll here and I have prepared this a multitude of different ways.

Prepare The Potato –

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My first choice would be – peel, chop and then boil the potatoes. You do lose some of the potato goodness this way.

My second choice would be – peel the potatoes first, roll them around in a little extra virgin olive oil, add a few herbs – Paprika is a must for me! – plus salt and pepper. Then bake potatoes in a roasting pan preferably one with a lid. This option mostly keeps the potato flavour and goodness within the potato. I do like to add a splash of white wine to this, as it will steam up when the pan gets hot and permeate through the potatoes for extra flavour.

My third choice would be – wrap potatoes in alfoil and bake. This definitely keeps all the goodness inside the potato however, if you do not like the skins you will have to remove them from a hot potato which is not optimal.

I’ve also done baked potatoes and then you open them up and take out the innards, mix the potato and fillings together and then stuff it back into the potato. This is fiddly and time consuming and to be honest, I am not a huge fan of potato skins. I would do this if we had people coming over and I wanted to make something relatively simple but special. But if stuffed potatoes is your preference, you’re eating it, so go to it and enjoy. :)

Prepare Your Toppings

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First choice – chop bacon, mushrooms, onion/leek, add a tiny bit of butter to a a non stick frypan, fry toppings until cooked the way you would like them.

Second choice – chop bacon, mushrooms, onion/leek, add butter or margarine, cover, and microwave on medium heat until cooked to your preference – this usually takes approximately 3-4 minutes on 600w with my microwave

Third choice – chop bacon, mushrooms, onion/leek, in a saucepan put in some butter or margarine, half a teaspoon of garlic, add in the bacon, mushrooms & leek, stir about and allow to cook a little. Then add in 1/2 cup of white wine and an extra touch of butter, allow to simmer and cover the saucepan. Simmer for 5-10 minutes and it should be done.

Mash The Potatoes

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Once the potatoes are cooked your way, add them to a bowl, add in a little butter and cheese, and smoosh them up some with a fork. We are not talking a perfect mash here, you want them a little chunky. Sprinkle a little cheese on top

Prepare Your Egg(s)

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First choice – fry eggs in a frypan until they are cooked how you like them. Mine, I like to flip, but sunny side up would work too.

Second choice – poach your eggs in your egg cooker or poacher.

Third choice – soft boil the eggs. Peel eggs – this can be difficult with soft boiled eggs which is why this is a third choice.

Fourth choice – scramble the eggs. You can also add back in your bacon and leek with a little cheese. The only downside to this choice is – no gorgeous yolk to ooze into your potatoes.

Assemble Your Meal

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Add your topping mixture to the potato mash, put the eggs on top, cut into the eggs with a knife and allow the yolk to ooze, and you are done.

It is time to eat!

Now bear in mind, you can take this recipe and make the ingredients your own. For protein you might prefer to use chicken, sliced beef, pulled pork. You might be out of bacon so you could use ham. You might have leftover turkey and so you might slice it and cook it in a frypan and then top with some cranberry sauce and you might use sweet potato or yam as your base. Some people like to put avocado, bacon and prawns or shrimp. You might want vegetarian bacon or no meat at all.

You might even want to use mashed cauliflower, broccoli, turnip, pumpkin, sweet potato, swede, baked mushrooms or even a combination of these instead of potato as the base. You might not want leek or onion – some people have a bad reaction to those.

You might have leftover pasta sauce which you can heat up and pour over some freshly cooked potatoes. As I mentioned above, I love to put chicken cacciatore or tuna mornay over potatoes.

The only limit is your imagination, ingredients on hand, and your preference of what flavours you prefer together.

Over to you!

What do you like to put over the top of potatoes? I’d love new ideas if you have any. :)

cooking, food, recipes, Snoskred hearts, yay

30% Off @ Spotlight

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So, yesterday, I was watching Judge Judy on Channel 10 at 3pm, as I sometimes do when it seems like the wait to 6pm double episodes of Judge Judy on Arena is too long to wait..

I should point out that I had my little cordless headset on, and I was actually in the kitchen trimming up 1kg of bacon which was purchased on the weekend. I guess that is more like listening to Judge Judy. I got 5 lovely packages of bacon bits, 1 package of bacon bits for dinner that night, and 2 packages of offcuts which we like to grill up in the oven till they are super crispy.

One of the downsides of not watching a lot of free to air tv is missing out on local ads. Sometimes they are not very interesting, but today I heard that Spotlight was having a 30% off sale. My little ears connected with my shopping brain, and the message I heard was THIS SALE SEEMS NICE!

I did some maths in my head, working out that 30% off takes $9 off a 29.95 candle. I should go to Spotlight and buy some Yankee Candles, I thought, as I drove to my 4pm appointment to see my amazing psychologist.

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And a couple of hours later, I did go, because Spotlight were open till 8pm. They told me that in the ad too. I got a couple of the “medium” candles in Black Cherry and Vanilla Lime and 4 wax melts, 2 Mango Peach Salsa and 2 Pineapple Cilantro.

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Apparently the 30% off is for Tuesday as well, in case you did not catch an ad and you want to go get yourself some Yankee Candle, or something else.. :)

Happy Snoskred, Home, shopping, yay