Cat. I'm a kitty-cat! And I dance, dance, dance...

I made removable (zippable?) covers for my proposed floor cushions tonight. The first one turned out a little loose. It may get fixed, but I can't be bothered right now since it functions and whatnot. The second, though, is BEAUTIFUL and TIGHT, and just generally awesome. And for those of you who just can't get enough, here's a close-up of my ungodly, eye-bleeding cat fabric:

The colors are way more vibrant irl. It looks like it belongs in a circus tent, or at the very least a color blind nursery. Isn't is just lovely? :D

Rainbows EVERYWHERE

So, we all know I make rainbow cuppycakes. But do you know what else can be made into/out of rainbows? Cheesecake.

That's right, you heard me.

It was so beautiful, I cried. Ask Salmon; she was there. I actually made it for her, upon her request. I am a terrible enabler >:3

Also, no, you don't get the recipe. There are others out there. This one is my mom's, so shoo!

Meine neuen Freunde

And now, because I just can't go without doing so, here's my shout out to all the wonderful HiNaBN cosplayers I met at MomoCon! It was so much fun, seriously.

Aaaaand sorry for the pic spam, but these are totes the most awesome ones. And the most important.

As always, Hanna is Not a Boy's Name is a webcomic that belongs to Miss Tessa Stone, and all the characters you see in this post (and the variations thereof) are hers.

Lily de Mauvoisin

So: MomoCon! MomoCon is a free convention in ATL, GA on GA Tech campus, so. Needless to say, it is not very far away, and this was my third year in a row. All my lovely Hannafags from Dragon*Con this past year, and LOTS of other people besides came, all dressed as HiNaBN characters. BUT THAT IS FOR ANOTHER POST.

The 4 D*Con-ers (myself included) decided we'd go have a picnic in Oakland Cemetery the Friday before MomoCon. Two other people came along with one of them (mostly I think because she couldn't get rid of them), but we still had lots of fun. Since it's a con, and we never actually need any excuse to dress up (but there's one anyway), we decided to swap original characters. I... do not have any. The two girls who don't live in GA swapped characters, and Salmon went as her character Adam. I thought it was lame that I couldn't think of what to do, but then I remembered this little gem that Salmon commissioned for herself from Lyndsey on dA:

 Her name is Lily de Mauvoisin, and she was Adam's first wife (feel free to hit me and correct me if I'm wrong, Salmon). That dress is in NO WAY historically accurate, but I do have a hoop skirt and I'd just ordered me some fancy white lace-up boots, so I thought, What the hell, why not? So! I snuck around LIKE A GREAT BIG SNEEKYPANTS to make sure I could actually pull this off (and really, that was silly, because I can always pull anything and everything off if I try), and I had the whole skirt portion done minus the lacing in the back by the time spring break was over.

Now, I used McCall's 6097 for that skirt, with some ornamentation on the front contrast portion, and I made it unnecessarily complicated by trying to make it look like it had layers to the skirts without it actually having anyway, when no one notices these details but me. Then, I was going to go with the top in the pattern, but I felt the bodice in the commission art would better translate to a buttoned front, based on how the shirt splits in the front (although now, looking at it, I could probably get away with saying the bodice just comes to a point). So I went back to my standard lolita pattern, drew the lines in from the contrast portion of the bodice pattern from M6097, but kept the back of the bodice the same, minus the lacing, and somehow managed to finagle the top out. The sleeves... well, let's just say the sleeves had no pattern, and are really just giant circles with a lot of elastic bunching it together. I was so afraid they weren't going to be long enough, and I had no more time or money for more fabric. BUT! It somehow managed to all work out beautifully in the end.

So I added in my mother's blonde wig (which I didn't realize had glitter in it until we got to the MARTA station and Salmon was like, "WHY ARE YOU GLITTERING ON ME? WE ARE NOT THOSE SORT OF VAMPIRES."), and I ordered the feather fascinator/hair piece from someone who's work I really trust on Etsy. I made the bow on the front of the bodice with double wide ribbon tape stuff (idk, I got it from my mother's bag of tricks), and the hair bows on alligator clips that went on my shoes. I also decided the night before, somewhere around midnight, that I wanted a plain petticoat to go under the hoop skirt and over my knee-length bloomers (which are not very opaque at all, and btw, totally made those for this dress too), aaaand I ran out of white thread just as I started to sew it together. And then I ran out of the light purple I had been using for the rest of the dress and had to use yellow. And then I gave up with the waistband portion, and it looks TERRIBLE, but you don't ever see it anyway :P

Salmon has affectionately captioned this photo "Huge...tracks of land!"

Lily and Adam (me and Salmon): a spat between partners that has been going on for centuries (I'm totally trying my hardest not to crack up laughing there)

Sitting in hoop skirts is hard :( Here you can see my extra petticoat, and my boots

My boots :)

And there you have it. You wouldn't recognize either of us walking down the street based on these pictures, since we are that good at disguising ourselves (or at least Salmon is), so I'm not apologizing for giving away my non-existent secret identity with a mass overdose of pic-spamming.

Rainbow Cupcakes

I am always in the kitchen. Making things (mostly dessert things) is apparently my lifeskill. And, I mean, rainbows. They are everywhere in my life. So! Rainbow cupcakes:

They're super easy to make, guys! So first, you get a box of white cake mix: it has to be white, so that the colors set in without changing during the baking or whatever. You mix it like it tells you to, and yes, you even follow that bit about only adding the egg whites and leave out the egg yoke. It's interesting and messy the first time you do it, but it totes gets easier, I swear.

So you've got your mix made, and you split it up into different containers, one for each color. I usually do 5 colors, since any more gets tedious and any less = not enough color. So my 5 colors for this particular batch (and this was back in February, when I didn't have all my colors) were pink, purple, burgundy, blue, and green. These are all Wilton gel colors, because those cheap liquid colors you can get at Target and WalMart? Don't come out the color you think it will. Never. Just trust me on this one.

So you color your divided mixes. I don't have fancy spatulas or anything, so I usually end up using butter knives. Just make sure you mix everything really well! The advantage of having clear containers to do the mixing in is that you can see the bottom, where you've managed to miss mixing in the color. After you're done mixing, just spoon the colors into the baking cups in a muffin/cupcake tray and pop them in the oven!

The cool thing about it is that the colors just sit on top of each other. Sure, they expand and move around some in the oven while they bake, but for the most part, they're stationary. Unless you want to swirl them together a bit, in which case you can take a toothpick, a fork, or something similar and stick it in the poured mix and swirl it around a bit. Just be careful not to completely mix it together, because that comes out some weird, nasty brown. And who wants to eat brown cupcakes? Lame.

And when they come out, they look like this! (This is the other pan, so of course it looks different from the previous picture, but you get the idea.) And because it's not a cupcake without icing, and I'm fancy like that, I made pink icing (regular icing, but add some of the same coloring I used for the batter), put it in a bag with a fancy tip, and had at it!

And there you have it. Rainbow cupcakes! Go forth :3

Covered in Bees

So I do actually do things other than sewing. Point in case: bees.

This, darlings, is my dorm door. Why bees, you ask? Well, St. Valentine is the patron saint of beekeepers! So these were made and put up the week before Valentine's Day, and stayed there until I returned from Spring Break, which is when one of the guys from next door refused to take my bees because he "lives in a man dorm, and you can't just put bees in there! [They're] guys!" So I made a short beeline to their door, and then covered their door with bees and a sign that said "I like my women like I like my coffee: COVERED IN BEES," which is an Eddie Izzard quote, btw. About a week later, we decide to use the bees to make a beeline that stretches all the way down the hall. And guys, there are enough bees to go all the way down the hall with, at most, 2 feet between each other. Maybe. So now I walk down the hall, and they've been moved by the other residents into sexual positions, and it all makes me very, very happy :)