Everyone is here and ready to roll!

Keeping these hard waste finds together to take to my parents' house for my nieces to play with, was best done like this:

Chanel Toilet Roll Clutch

The title says it all. From Vogue, October 2013

Odd Spot #122

I Odd Spot #122 brought to you by Libra.

'Dolphins sleep with one eye open' as should the future owner of this little treasure at the op shop. There may even be gripping of a pillow while those flaccid, blue intestines/waves lurk in the mind's eye.

Never double peplum

I dislike peplums and I am not alone - just run a google search on 'peplum ugly' and get results like this. This is ridiculous. Never double peplum/ruffle. Some stylist at thought this was a good idea. WTF. She looks like she's a moulting kangaroo with a prolapsed pouch.

Good eggs and bad eggs - An old fashioned test

So your eggs are close to or past their recommended use by. Or maybe you have your own chooks and you're not sure how old your eggs are. Before you throw them out you can test them to see if they are still good. This is an old trick your grand mother would have used.


First take your egg. Funny face drawn on is optional (done with a Chinagraph / wax pencil)

Gently place it into a glass of water.
Make sure you choose a glass big enough for the egg to sink to the bottom.
If it sinks, it's a good egg and it's fine to eat.


If it floats, it's a bad egg so do not eat it!
It floats because of the gas created as it decomposes.

I usually test a whole carton to see if any need to be disposed of, then retest them as I use them. I break our bad eggs directly into the compost bin.

Forest Spirit Tree

This dead tree overgrown with vines near J's house used to remind me of The Forest Spirit (Shishi-gami) from Princess Mononoke by Studio Ghibli. It was cleaned up and cut down last year. That's a full moon in the sky behind it.

C'est la vie...

...That's life as a shy, colour blind, queer heart. It's like they channelled Freddie Mercury and completely missed the mark.

Ladies' t-shirt seen at Target.

Captain Ketchup versus the Intergalactic Dutch Oven

Captain Ketchup novelty sauce squirting bottle has a funny side panel.

Cupcake Wreck

Outside a Cupcake Bakery. A late 30s/early 40s woman and her male companion are checking out the window display. She says
"It looks like poo. It looks like poo upside down."
After they went I checked out the display and could only conclude it was this.



At first I thought she meant the turdish blob* on the top which made me wonder if there was a right way up for poo. When looking at the photo after uploading it I realised she was probably talking about the word 'Dad' on the side - it's Fathers' Day tomorrow.



*What is that anyway? It looks like a complete male appendage with an accoutrement on one end. It's how a man becomes a dad so that works doesn't it?
EDIT: A bit of research has revealed it is a tie! Of course it is. I think that shape around the word poo is a shirt pocket. Though if you're looking at this upside down it's a house. This all ties in rather nicely because clearly the cake decorating skills on display here are s***house.

Harvest Fish

I harvested a bunch of limes, mini capsicums and chillies in the garden on Friday afternoon. After dumping them on the kitchen bench I noticed an overall shape. I worked with that, embellishing it with the chillies which I collected in a bowl.

Apricots: pure happiness and sunshine.

It could be said that our apricot crop is pure sunshine and happiness...


January 2013

...Or that a short shelf life and susceptability to bruising from the harvesting basket is a small price to pay for the ultimate in zingy, sweet, flavourful tastiness.

Either way it was awesome :) Store bought apricots are to our crop, what a chocolate coin is to a Belgian chocolate truffle.

Listening to: What Else is There? by Röyksopp from The Understanding

Google image search 'vampire cakes'

It's sad how many Twilight cakes - usually cake wrecks - come up when you google image search 'vampire cakes'
This however tickled me pink :*)


From someone with a sense of humour when it comes to vampires and some decent photography skills to boot, doll collector, Nataloons™.

Toy to the World

The Toy to the World biennal features customised vinyl bears from both Australian and International artists. Entries from almost 100 artists will go up for auction to help fund Victorian HIV research.

This is my contribution to the Toy to the World project, and my first customised vinyl bear:

Le Fils de l'ours : The Son of Bears, after Magritte.

More images here.

Toy to the World

In association with the Midsumma festival
Under the umbrella of Queer City's 2013 show, Play-Full

Spring Street Convention Centre

Art @ 1Spring Street

1 Spring Street, Melbourne

Victoria

Australia 3001

Enter via Flinders Lane

Opening night: Tuesday, 15th January 2013, 6pm

Exhibition/Silent Auction Runs: 15ths Jan - 1st Feb

Mon - Fri: 9am - 5:00pm

Register to bid at the venue and bid on Item 74!
In the next few days you will also be able to bid online at the Toy to the World Facebook page.

Mali in the City: celebrating 150 years of Melbourne Zoo

Mali is the first elephant born at Melbourne Zoo. To celerate 150 years of Melbourne Zoo, lifesize, fibreglass sculptures of the baby elephant Mali were painted by 50 different artists. The sculptures were then dotted around Melbourne's CBD for 6 weeks, and then displayed for another month at the zoo itself. More about it here.

I didn't see all of them up close but these guys did.

Here are my shots:

A Pattern of Orange-bellied Parrot
Vanessa Bong (sponsored by Queen Victoria Market)
at Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne



Ming Vase Elephant
by Brian Cheung (sponsored by ecoFuture)
at Queen Victoria Market

I was chatting with a lady who said she travelled about to see the sculptures and that this was the best one she had seen. I was very impressed by it myself. I didn't endeavour to see more because I suspected that I had seen what I would conclude was the best one too. It's hard to convey the tonal quality of this piece in a photo.




Detail of side facing wall:

Even more Spring blooms.

This time the blooms have been chosen not so much for their beauty - which is still there - but for their unusual structural qualities.

A rose reminiscent of a love heart:


Some rose buds:


Cephalopodlian Aquilegia buds (I think they look like squid, my housemate F thinks the greenish ones look like seamonster heads):



The same bud but a pretty shot:

Interesting car plates

I don't play with Lego as an adult but I can understand this one. Old school Lego is cool! I quite like SpongeBob SquarePants and it really suits this slightly boxy, yellow hatchback. I can not explain this one. Colour me bemused.

Street art: crushed can, Melbourne CBD

Another cast concrete sculpture in the Melbourne CBD (near corner of Bourke and Elizabeth), possibly from the same artist as this burger and fries. I ran a few random words through Google Translator in both Chinese and Japanese to see if any characters resembling it came up.  The character is Chinese meaning 'dead'. If anyone of you can clarify/confirm I'd like to hear from you in the comments.

Happy knitted dumplings on a tree...

... Yarn bombing at Melbourne University.

Dandelion root coffee tips

Previously my housemate F, and I went to CERES open day back in July where I enjoyed a dandelion latte at the cafe. It has a pleasant earthy, nutty taste. After that it seemed worthwhile to try making my own dandelion coffee.  I dug up about a bucket's worth of weed, trimmed them back using poultry shears and washed them as throughly as I could, chopped, roasted and food processed them into a coffee like powder. The washing part of the process is the most labour intensive.

Among the countless roots we handled there was this little guy who deserved a close up and is the main reason why you get to read this at all. Other tutorials are sufficient, though after writing this I realise they don't give you exactly the same tips about cleaning. What started out as context for a picture post has become a partial instructional piece.




We had a two person working bee* collecting all of the dandelion we could find to make dandelion coffee. We had decided to reseed the 'lawn' so harvesting dandelion was a byproduct of that process. We made several batches of coffee and found it was slightly less onerous doing it between us. However F no longer finds the smell of it appetising and has not drunk any of it as coffee. More on that later.

After about six or so batches within a week this is what I found to be the best way to clean the roots:

• Agitating the roots in a bucket of water gives limited results. A sieve or mesh and a hose - over a bucket if you want to collect the water - worked a lot better and used less water.
• Trim away all trace of stalk and greenery using poultry shears. They're good for fine snipping and wet objects.
• Wash them in the kitchensink, immersing them in a bowl of water - wear rubber gloves because you're going to be there a while. Use a butterknife to gouge out any fiddly cruddy bits.

I popped online to read a few tutorials and slapped it together based on more than one set of instructions. You could say I followed this one, however this one seems to have some goods ideas that I might try if I/we ever do it again. We used a granite mortar and pestle to grind the later batches for a more even grind and less to clean up. The roasted roots caused some slight scratching to the food processor bowl and discolouration so processing before roasting might be worth exploring. Note that 250F is about 121C ie a cool oven. I made the mistake of thinking that the instructions mentioning 250 degrees in more than one instructional were in celsius and over roasted my first batch. The coffee beverage from that was fine but an unappetising grey!

One bucket - about 10 litres - of untrimmed roots yields about a quarter of a cup of coffee grounds at best. I make dandelion coffee by running it through my stove top coffee pot using similar amounts as I would for regular coffee grounds. It's lovely sweetened with honey. Limit yourself to one cup though because although it's caffiene free, like coffee it can still have a diuretic and a laxative effect.

F made a rum infusion and served it at our party on the weekend in a cocktail. She took a quarter of a cup of dandelion root grounds and infused it for about 3 weeks in a 700ml bottle of light rum. She then strained it using muslin. We came up with the idea of serving it with a melon balled scoop of vanilla icecream in a shot sized glass as a sort of affogato. It was delicious and our guests seemed to enjoy it. This infusion cocktail is recommended only for recreational purposes in responsible amounts - other sites mention similar alcohol infusions for medicinal use by the spoonful.

F writes: 'White rum. 4 shots infusion, 3 shots milk, 1 shot honey water. Shake with ice, put little ice-cream balls in 8 glasses, pour over. Honey water = honey:water 1:1'


*Can it still be called that if it's just two of you?

Tarzan's endless chin

I found a bag of mostly boys' toys at hardwaste in my area. In amongst the obligatory McDonald's toys was this odd object. It is most likely for the Disney version of Tarzan.



Gorilla carrying a human baby aspect aside, there is something weird about this toy. I think it the way the baby's head has an endless chin as it shoves its head out of the blanket - like he's poking his creepy little head out of a cannon. Yes I think that's what it is.