The ribs are done! Well, they’re maybe done. I’m not totally sure about them but I think it is hard to make my mind up on them or alter them again until I get more of the parts done.
Below is the current progress of all of the parts I’ve done so far. I’m currently sewing up the shoulder bones, scapula and clavicle. I’m not sure on the scapula but once again I’ll see how it looks in context.
I’ve been making felt teeth for about 5 years. They are a pretty popular item being snapped up by dentists, dental nurses and anyone with something going on with their teeth. I’ve even made myself a tooth with a crack it when I found out I had a crack in my tooth and needed a crown.
I still make the felt teeth but these days I also enjoy making teeth from other materials as well as working with acrylic teeth-they are a little bit freaky! I also have a plaster version of my teeth that is used to make my mouth guard (I’m a terrible tooth grinder in my sleep).
My partner and I visited Reverse Garbage over the weekend and I spotted a lot of plaster teeth, below.
This made me think of all of my favourite teeth I’ve made. Below are some of my favourite teeth creations.
Laser Cut Tooth Earrings
Acrylic teeth into some Plasticine. This is something I’m playing with while trying to learn stop motion.
Carving a tooth stamp.
The tooth that started it all. Mr Felty.
Wooden Tooth Brooch
There is a tree in our front yard that is a home to crows, the crows fly in and out of the tree all day. During the school term the crows steal food from the grounds, they steal yogurt containers, muesli bars, and tuck shop paper bags. All of the rubbish from the food ends up under the tree. But then something started to happen, there were dead animals under the tree every day for 5 days. A rat, another rat, a top knot pigeon, a lorikeet, another rat. I started to expect a corpse under the tree after a few days.
I buried all of the animals under the tree in among all of the litter under the tree. It’s a huge pine so there are heaps of needles and dirt underneath to bury the animals.
After that first 5 days we’ve only seen a few more dead animals under the tree. Mostly old ones, like half mummified rats and bird parts. Today I was reminded of all of the animals the showed up under the tree over that week after my partner mowed under the tree uncovering the poorly buried bodies (it’s super dry under the tree and hard to dig up).
As I have a bit of a collections of bones and body bits the corpses under the tree don’t bother me and I can easily bury them when they do show up. We don’t think the crows were actually killing the the animals but that the rats were poisoned (there were heaps of dead rats in the area at the time) and that a cat originally killed the birds and the crows stole the bodies.
Bird wing from the top knot dove
Rat skull
We’re wayyyy over in the last week! Current spending today ( Tuesday; the 4 weeks finishes up this Sunday) is -$12.80. We think we’ve got all of this weeks groceries other than bread so should only spend another $5 max. this week, unless we decide to do a fruit shop visit.
Why are we so over? Specials! And stocking up. We’ve always bought groceries from the big supermarkets when they are on significant specials, e.g half price. We’ve got yogurt sachets and Salmon within the last week. The Salmon was $15.50 at Coles for a bag of 6 frozen pieces (half price). As we enjoy Salmon occasionally we snapped up a bag. I mentioned the yogurt sachets in the last post.
Today we bought lots of meat at Aldi. 1 kg Beef Mince, approx 1 kg rump, about 800g of Casserole Beef and Beef Sausages. This is 12 meals for 2! This meat cost us approx $41 making it approx $3.40 per meal of meat ($1.70 per person). This is over 2 weeks of beef for us, so the spending today takes us well into the next week.
As I said, we’ve always stocked up on groceries when we see specials. I know for many this is simply not possible as their budget is so rigid. We also have a lot of shops close to us (most within walking distance) so we can also easily go out whenever we want something rather than having to pay more to avoid going out more (which can be costly if you are using public transport).
Planning! This is a great time of year to not spend additional money (I hate when not spending money is referred to as saving money) but a shocking time to try and implement new organisation. In fact my current organisation is a bit out the window with getting orders out and trying to wrap up work (it’s impossible!) Ideally I should be sitting down Sunday afternoon and planning the weeks meals around my schedule as well as making sure my week is nutritionally balanced.
Incorporating more beans, lentils and chickpeas etc into my meals. Nutritionally I should be doing this but I’m only really just starting to eat these foods and I’m still learning how and where I can use them. I don’t love beans so figuring out how to disguise them is what I’m working on 😉
I can’t say we buy much junk food at all. I was gifted chocolate for my Birthday which is still in the cupboard and we don’t often buy biscuits or chips. When we do it’s a good special or a special occasion. I sometimes pick up shortbread from Aldi (they’re $1.70) but as I go in to shops with a clear shopping list I don’t often vary from it and when I do it’ll be cheese or chocolate (headache makers!)
Knowing I’m doing this food challenge has really stopped me buying impulse items and I think it has really impacted both of us in so far as we’ve made changes to the quality of food we eat-FOR THE BETTER! We make sure we’re eating nutritious food as there is no point spending money on rubbish foods!
I’m keen to continue with the $70 challenge again after this 4 weeks is up but not straight away-first thing in the new year. Let’s get that pesky Xmas out of the way first.
We’ve currently got only $30.44 left for this week and quite a few items on the shopping list that we’ll probably need before the end of the week. And it’s only tuesday! The reason for the $40 spend… I was given a yogurt maker by my sister for my birthday and Woolworths had the yogurt powder sachets at 2 for $7 so we spent $14 on those yesterday. This is 4-6 weeks worth of yogurt so we’re ahead on that.
We’ve been eating a lot of salad sandwiches lately which was something we started a couple of weeks before the $70 challenge. Andrew worked out that we are eating about $1.70 worth of sandwich for each one we have (so $3.40 per day out of the $10 per day budget). We usually have wholemeal bread, although pictured here is white bread (The One by Tip Top). Our sandwiches have lettuce, carrot, sprouts (we sprout our own in a sprouter using an approx. $4 bag of mung beans, this probably makes each lot of sprouts 5 cents), beetroot (I pickle my own, here), tomato, cucumber, mushrooms, capsicum, celery, cheese and ham. Andrew prepared the salad and makes 2 days worth at a time.
I mentioned the hot chook, $8, we picked up last week which served us for 3 meals, 2 lots of sandwiches and a chicken soup. These chooks go a long way and I have to say that each serve we had was more than enough.
Chicken soup recipe
*Chicken from a hot chook, make sure the bits of chicken are chunky
*2 chicken stock cubes OR 1 chicken and 1 vegetable
*some mixed veg. I used carrot and sweet potato and frozen peas and corn
*Noodles (whatever you want, I used 2 minute style noodles)
Boil your hard veges in the stock, about 1 litre of water with the cubes. They should be tender after about 30 mins. Add the peas and corn. Add the chicken and cook for about 5-10 minutes which enough to heat it through. Add the noodles and cook til they’re done.
Super easy and damn tasty! This whole meal would have been about $4 in total.
The thing I am thinking about at the moment is that it is really essential to spend time planning meals as well as thinking about what foods you need to make sure you eat to get the correct nutritional requirements. I feel that if we were more on top of the planning part of it we’d be able to spend at least a little less.
It’s Friday and we’ve spent $61.41. I don’t think we need to buy anything else this week. If we do it’ll be a visit to the fruit shop.
We’ve been to Aldi twice to pick up general groceries. Cheese, bread, milk, muesli, etc. We even bought a brownie mix from Aldi and I made that yesterday. Aldi brownie mix is $2.99 and is really yummy for a packet mix. Making brownies from scratch is actually quite costly as it has so much sugar, eggs and chocolate in it. We bought beef mince at Coles which for the 2 of us is 2 meals, 2 left overs. It’s $7 a pack for the 4 star stuff. I made Taco’s last night and we’re having the left over’s tonight. I chucked 75g of red lentils into the Taco mix (as well as lots of veg). Adding lentils adds protein and is also part of a serve of fruit/veg and a meat substitute. I think it’s something I’ll be doing a lot more.
For the taco meal we used an Old El Paso box, I only ever buy these when they are half price. I can’t remember the exact price but its around $3.25. This has the soft taco’s, seasoning and salsa. Of course you need mince, or a meat substitute& some veg (onions, grated carrots, grated zucchini). I made a tomato salsa mix to add to the Taco’s. We grow tomatoes so I had heaps to use. I also love picking green tomatoes for salsa.
Salsa
Tomatoes cut into little bits, mix of red and green if possible
Capsicum
Salt
Sugar
Splash of Apple cider vinegar
Pepper
We recently tried the Lyttos Greek Yog from Aldi and it’s really yummy, and cheap! We used the yogurt as a sour cream substitute as we always throw out sour cream left overs. It was pretty yummy. I think this yogurt will be really versatile for sweet and savoury meals. We don’t eat yogurt by the bowl full but usually have it in smoothies or a spoonful here and there.
Andrew, my partner, has made some notes of what we’ve eaten and thinks that between us we’re having $8-$12 of food between us a day. I’ll later do some posts telling you what kinda things we’re eating and what we’re buying. This is already long enough!
The last time I made Brain Earrings (of the needle felted variety) was in 2012. They were something I made quite a few pairs of over a few years and I had become a bit tired of making them. Making small brains like this is a bit of a challenge. Half they time they don’t look very good at all and I’d started making them bigger and bigger, to get better details. I wasn’t really happy with the size or the process and stopped, for 4 years.
Recently I got to thinking about them again. Why? I don’t know. I just decided to give it a shot. Forget about all of the OTHER work I need to do and spend way too long making brain earrings. Yeah, they take forever!
The brain earrings come with a little glass jar so you can store them like a brain specimen, also available in my shop.
I’ve been playing around with Shrinky Dinks for about 4 years now after learning about them in a Hands On Brisbane class. Hands On Brisbane is my “day job” and one of the perks is learning all sorts of crafts (I have to be able to assist the facilitators).
I started making Your Organ Grinder pieces from Shrinkies soon after. I use an old refurbished Canon printer at the moment. Oh and FYI, you can’t use the ink that is made for archival printing, or the high quality art printing. Just the regular printing ink.
If you want to learn how to make your own Shrinkies you can check out the process I use for shrinking and adding doming resin in my instructable here. If you are in Brisbane I sometimes teach Shrinkie Dinks workshops and Resin workshops at Hands On Brisbane so join our mailing list, here.
Images above are Uterus Earrings, Dodo Earrings, Tapeworm Brooches and Dodo Brooches all made using the shrinky dink with doming resin technique.
Sometimes you just have to make something new. Making new products is always a gamble but there is an absolute joy in making something new. That feeling when you are working on something new and it is going well. That is what I live for.
I picked up some of these hoops a while ago (and recently grabbed more). I’m slowly choosing anatomy to fill them using calico and the stem stitch, one of my favourite embroidery stitches. I think the next one will be a kidney.
A couple of months ago I got a Fitbit Charge HR. I was keen to get one as I’d recently started doing a couple shifts in a cafe and was keen to know how many steps I was getting in a 3 hr shift (it’s up to 6000 on a busy shift!) and I’ve been doing Ellen Barrett Live workouts since the beginning of the year and wanted to know how many calories I was burning and how much activity it was adding to my day.
What I found out was this…
Just after I got it I had an eye infection and was scratching the hell out of my eyes all night. I’d wake up with itchy, gluey eyes and rub and rub them. Looking at the sleep log in the app I was able to see just how broken my sleep was and the periods I was awake rubbing my eyes. I could also see how restlessly I was rubbing them whilst still half asleep.
Other people have mentioned the benefit of the sleep log to show to their doctor where their sleep pattern is at and how much sleep they are getting. I’ve also noted that I don’t need quite as much sleep as I though, or get as much sleep as I thought.
The one HUGE benefit is the extra motivation it gives you to get up and get moving. You want to beat yourself, you want to get involved in challenges and beat others. You want to see just how many steps you can get and how much activity you can do.
So what’s the down side? For me it is the comfort of the device. At first it was so uncomfortable. The heart rate monitor is raised at the back and really uncomfortable at first. Perseverance pays off and within a week you don’t notice but if you then take it off for a while you have a short readjustment phase. On top of that the fit is not great. Even though I got the smallest available the part holding all the electronics is large and it doesn’t wrap well around the wrist. I have noticed that the Charge HR is currently in sell out mode so perhaps a new version is on it’s way that fits better.
I would only recommend a fitbit to those who are already motivated to move and workout. I don’t think it will magically get you moving but if you do want the added bonus of tracking your activity (and you’re already motivated but want a little extra) then one of these is probably a good investment.
Your Organ Grinder 