Songs: Stay Out

I love this song!   The lyrics are just so funny and so relatable: 


He's got a Rolling Stones tee, But he only knows one song, They think they're from the sixties, But they were born in 1991.

Checkered shirts and chino trousers, Is this some kind of uniform? It seems that they think they're gangsters, They've barely started 6th form.

She thinks she's in Barbados, But outside it's minus three


All true!   Exactly what a night out is like!   Catchy tune too.

Baking: My Disney Birthday Party, Part 2: The Cake

As a continuation of this post, I decided to take on the challenge of baking myself a Disney castle cake.   I thought about doing a three tier cake with ice cream cones for turrets, and even after looking around online that still seemed like the best idea.   I decided to rent a set of tins from a local cake shop for the occasion.   No sense in buying tins that big when I wouldn't use them often.   So I bought large amounts of cake ingredients and set about baking three cakes.  

That's where the trouble started.   The baking itself should have been the easy part, but it still went wrong.   I used a simple sponge recipe, and one that I'd used lots before, but for some reason on this scaled up level the big cakes sank.   I have no idea what went wrong!   Maybe you need special recipes for very big cakes?   Something to research and improve anyway.   Luckily though the cakes were solid enough that I could just turn them upside-down and hide the sunken bits.   Next came the piling the cakes on top of each other part.    Easy enough, except that the top two cakes were too wide to leave much space for ice cream cone turrets, so I had to cut them both down to size a bit to make room for them.  Next came the icing.   I'd chosen to do the castle in pale blue, with darker blue turret roofs, and purple decorations.   I decided to use fondant icing, dyed with fondant icing pastes. 

                                        Fondant icing with pastes and edible glitter and stars

                                          The three colours of fondant icing I used.  


Icing the cake went smoothly enough.   The icing for the turret roofs had to be cut into skirt shapes before it could be put onto the ice cream cones, but still, it went well.   I then decided to stack up multiple cones so that the turrets would have walls as well as roofs.   We decided to ice the cones with butter icing, because it would stick well.   So we made and dyed some butter icing.   Annoyingly, because of butter's yellow colour, it's hard to get the exact colour you want, and our butter icing didn't quite match the rest of the cake.  Ah well.   I'm sure no one noticed.

  

So iced turrets were set onto the cake in as castley an arrangement as we could manage.   Next the whole thing was decorated with edible glitter, edible gold stars, flags, doors and drawbridges, windows and purple icing flowers.   Perfect!   Very Disney.   I also bought fountain candles to be like the Disney castle fireworks.   Good effort all round, I feel.  

Blog Housekeeping: New titles and entry content amount changes

Right, so I've had this blog a wee while now and I've decided to start doing things a little differently.   It seems there are a few categories of things I seem to talk about quite a lot, eg: songs, photography, films...   So I've decided that from now on I've decided that before an entry's title I'm going to write a category so that people can decide more easily whether or not they're interested in reading it.   To that end, my first entry under the new system has been given the category: blog housekeeping.

Also, I often review the same types of things three at a time.   I'm not going to do that anymore.   It just seems a bit messy.   From now on each item is going to be reviewed in glorious isolation.   This may make some entries pretty short, so I'll try to blog a bit more often to make up for it.  

Peace out!

Diane Young

Today I am dancing around my room to this:

Great band, great song.  

Blossom and Flowers

In April/May Edinburgh is carpetted in cherry blossom.   I, of course, like to photograph it.   Here is a cherry blossom photo I took last year in George V Park near my flat:

 Ah, lovely pinkness.   I love how it's so thick, and just everywhere.   Notice the new signature in the bottom left-hand corner, added after this incident.   


This is another one taken the same day and same place.   Possibly my favorite ever cherry blossom photo I've taken.   It's a different type of blossom.   It's not the pale pink one that's everywhere, but the bright magenta one.   What I like most about this one is the contrast of the magenta against the bright blue sky behind it.   Gorgeous!   To get this shot I had to find a low-hanging branch with the sky behind it and shoot straight upwards.

And just for good measure, here are some blue bells in someone's garden right by the park.   All three photos were taken with my macro lens.

    

Red Hands

Lately I have been enjoying this song:

This is a great band called Walk Of the Earth.   They found internet fame by doing a cover of Gotye's Somebody That I Used to Know with all five members of the band playing one guitar.   They do a lot of covers, but this is one of their own songs.   The song is great and the video is AMAZING!   Well, the video itself isn't all that special, but the way it was done is truly amazing!   They filmed the entire thing in one take with the band singing and playing the song at different speeds.   Then things were sped up, slowed down, fast forwarded and rewound to make the video.   Genius!   If you're completely confused watch the unedited version of the video and you'll see what I mean:

My Disney Birthday Party, Part 1: The Dress

For my birthday party this year I decided to have a Disney theme.   What a fun idea!   At first I was going to limit it strictly to old school Disney classics, but then the more I thought about it, the more I decided I wanted to go as Merida from Brave.   Because she's awesome and taught me that you can have masses of ginger curls and still be a princess.   Hurrah!  So I went online and started looking for Merida costumes.   There didn't seem to be any adult ones anywhere.   Nevermind, I thought, I've got two months.   I'll make one.   I've made a dress already, so I have a bit of an idea what I'm doing.   It'll be fine!   So off I went to Mandors to look for a pattern.   They're the best place I've found for patterns.   This is their website.   I decided to go for this one:

I did pattern C (bottom right) only without all the fancy decorative bits and millions of buttons on the sleeves.   Next stop was fabric.   I went to Edinburgh Fabrics for this (http://www.edinburghfabrics.co.uk/).   This being a costume I decided I wanted to make it as cheaply as possible, so I settled for some very cheap satin lining material.   Once again, going for a cheap fabric proved to be a BAD DECISION!   The fabric turned out to be fairly horrible to work with.   It unraveled itself pretty easily, so that I often ended up having to sew seams a couple of times to get them to stay.   Not only that, but it turned out to not be ironable, as I found out to my cost while trying to iron on interfacing.   Not only did I have to make a whole sleeve again, but I also had to buy a new ironing board cover.   So yes, no more cheap fabric!   Anyway, this was my fabric:

So I took my measurements and got started with the cutting of patterns, pinning the patterns to fabric and cutting fabric.   Boring!   The fabric was also annoying to cut.   I had to keep it absolutely flat to the floor to stop it pulling itself out of place.   I had to use lots more pins than usual while working with it.   Some pattern pieces pinned to the fabric:

  



So I started with the pinning and sewing, following the instructions.   They were pretty easy to follow, and when the dress was done it fit me pretty well!   Hurrah!   I added a bit of ribbon round the neckline, to be a simplified version of the white bits around the top of Merida's dress.   Pretty convincing, I thought!   I make a great Merida!  This is the finished product (I swear it doesn't make me look that chubby in real life; camera flashes seem to have an unfortunate effect on the fabric):

The final stage for the costume was for me to dye my hair extra red and make it extra massive and curly.   Fun!

 


All in all, I'm going to declare this dress a partial success.   I mean it served a purpose, which was to be a costume for a party, but after just one evening it developed four holes along the seams, due to crap fabric.   It's also stained and to be honest I have no idea how to wash it without destroying it.   On the plus side, it was pretty simple to make, feels AMAZING to wear, got lots of compliments, and even won a costume prize.   I do really like the design as well.   Perhaps I'll try this again sometime, but with a nicer fabric.