The Christmas Meal

Hi All,

I just realized I never got around to posting what we had for Christmas...so here goes.

Asian Glazed Roast Pork. Garnished with chopped Parsley

Roasted Irish Potatoes with Mint and Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Roast Fish Fillet...With Peppers, Cherry Tomatoes, Parsley and Butter. Yum!!!

Ice Cubes made out of freshly juiced pineapples and lemons

Cocktail: Pineapple, Pineapple Punch and Red Grapes

Ready to Serve

 

Seafood Gratin: Fish, Shrimps, Carrots, Spring Onions, Dark Soy, Garlic, Heavy Cream...etc.

Apple and Cucumber Salad dressed with freshly squeezed lemon juice, chopped mint,  salt and black pepper

Roasted Honey Glazed Chicken

Beef Sauce: Minced Beef, Bacon, Chipolatas, Capsicum, Dark soy, etc

Beet root and Feta Salad. Dressed with Pineapple chutney, Balsamic Vinegar and Mayonnaise

And Garnished with parsley and toasted peanuts

Oh and there was some cous cous (Far Left) for some added starch.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, I guess this will be one of my longest posts :D.

After the chaos of Christmas cooking I decided to lay low on New Years and didn't entertain any guests. I also did minimal cooking...only roasted a chicken. I should have a picture or two somewhere...will update when I locate em.

Until next time, God bless you.

Love, Preye.

Sewing Update: Pillows

Hi People!

A couple of weeks to Christmas a friend commissioned some throw pillows and after a few days of back and forth pinging (via Blackberry Messenger) we finally settled on the fabric and styles she wanted for her pillows (Well she picked just one style and I just flowed with the rest).

And here are the results (Pictures were taken at night so apologies for the less than stellar quality)

Pillow One: I call this one The butterfly pillow.

I worked with a black fabric for the base and used her chosen fabric for the butterfly effect with the aid of a big black belt buckle...I like the sound of that :D...The Big Black Belt Buckle Butterfly Pillow.

Ok moving on. Next is The Ruffle Pillow with button accents.

This one kind of reminds me of Cultural Dances in Secondary School...we'd tie little wrappers around our waists and shake our bums to beautiful traditional lyrics. Yeah, Beyonce copied that booty shake from moi :P

Zipper

Next up, The Cool Dude. After the dancing lady above, I wanted something a bit more masculine to balance things up and The Cool Dude was born.

Bow-tie effect with a silver buckle

And last but not least, the most time consuming of them all (And the only style she chose herself), The Pinwheel Pillow...

If you recall I made this for my home sometime last year and blogged about it in this post. And if you also recall, we had a little incident with over-stuffing. Well, lesson learnt and applied :D.

I used an invisible zipper for this one as well

Here are the pillows together.

And here are a few construction pictures.

Prior to stuffing

Fully Interfaced

I used a regular zipper for this one since the ruffles covered it completely

And that brings us to the end of project "Throw-pillows"

Until next time, Stay Strong and be blessed.

Love, Preye

Sewing Update: Checkered

Happy New Year!

And welcome to 2014...Our year of unusual strength.

I am not much into resolutions but as far as targets go, I have loads of them and I'll get into them in a bit.

But before that; a proper wrap up of 2013. I have quite a line up of projects I haven't posted from last year so I'll get right into them.

First off, The checkered dress!

I made this dress the week of Christmas..the Saturday before Christmas I think. I actually started out the day with a project for myself but the client (who was very persistent) wanted her dress and wanted it NOW. Since she was a first time customer I decided to oblige and leave the twenty-something other pending projects originally scheduled before hers. 

She is pretty conservative so the target for this project was to create a style out of the two fabrics she provided that would still stay true to her tastes. We had the basics down as she wanted pleats...so I decided to play around a bit and eventually ended up with the checkered details...and I knew I had struck gold :D

I started out with the belt detail then had a little glitch with the original sleeve I inserted which resulted in my having to redo the sleeves. So I figured the patchwork could make it to the sleeves as well. At the last minute, I decided on the Tulip variation for some added pizzazz.

I also piped the bottom of the dress with the black fabric...all in the little details people.

Here is a close up of the belt.

This project took a lot longer than expected but turned out great. And save a slight issue with depth of the back neckline; the client loved the dress.

Sadly, my dress which I had planned on making that faithful Saturday lies there unfinished and awaiting the day I'll have a break from sewing for others :D

Until next time, God bless you.

Love, Preye.