"So What" Doodle, Pride and Prejudice

I'm not sure what Pride and Prejudice is actually about. I heard that it's a very cute romance novel, but that's about all I know. So far, with what I've been reading, this is what I got out of the meaning of the past few chapters. 

"So What" Doodle, 50 Below Zero

Pie Review

Alright, so I found this pie recipe and decided to try it out because it seemed good. I got it off of this site: http://www.thecountrycook.net/2012/09/butter-crumble-apple-pie.html?m=1

I had been craving pie for about 2 months now and finally decided it was time to bake one. I'm not entire sure if I had made the pie wrong, but I found that it didn't work out at all.

I give this apple crumble pie 2 stars out of 5.

I'm not the type of ever give out no stars because there's always something good within the bad.

I found this pie to be very dry, and after being baked, the crumble on top seemed to still be a little overbalrd in some areas and underbaked in others. The filling was also quite dry, which was surprising considering the filling should be wet and moist, but it was not. The bottom crust was too crumbly and not flaky at all. It would make sense though considering the ingredients for the crust resembled a crumble rather than pie crust. I wasn't very satisfied with this pie and I'm upset the ingredients went to waste.

**Update**

I made a caramel sauce to drizzle on top to add a little moistness. That really helped with the flavour of the pie!

Sunday Mornings

Nothing like fresh, straight out of the oven, homemade bread on a Sunday morning/afternoon!

These butter topped buns are so good!

Starcraft Cake

So tomorrow is my boyfriend's birthday and I had no idea what to get him as a gift. One day I was talking to him and he said that I should make him a Starcraft cake, as a joke. Since I didn't have anything else in mind, I just decided to do so.

Starcraft is an online game run by Blizzard, the same company that made World of Warcraft. Starcraft and WOW are very different though. In Starcraft there are 3 races; Protoss, Terren, and Zerg. Kyle, my boyfriend, likes to play as Protoss best, so I decided to make him a Protoss themed birthday cake.

Here is the final result!

Every single element on this cake was handmade, straight down to the cake and fondant. The only thing that wasn't made from scratch would be the chocolate cookie crumbs on top and the bit of gumpaste I mixed in with the marshmallow fondant to make it easier to mold into shapes.

The cake itself is a vanilla cake with chocolate buttercream and green buttercream grass.

The figures are hand sculpted using a mixture of 2:1 fondant and gumpaste. The base of the prism building is made of rice crispy treats.

Overall, this cake took me about 7-8 hours to make (excluding time for the cake to cool down after it's been baked). The whole process went over a span of 3 days, from baking the cake, making the fondant, sculpting the figures, and finally icing and finishing the cake. 

I had a lot of fun making this cake and I'm very satisfied with the final outcome! I think it turned out great!

Bird Nest Ring

This ring took me about a month an a half to make!  It gave me too many issues but I'm very satisfied with the finished product!

Comments

This was on Megan Sawyer's blog on the post, Grad Dress

 This next was on Kira's blog on the Six Word Memoir post about taking more pictures.

This last was on Megan Pelissier's blog on the post #disneyworldissoexpensive

Quick Write- Gender Swap

Quick Write- Perfect Playground

Quick Write- Teenager's Brain

Despicable Me, Minion Cake!

Found this cake on Pinterest! Is it not the cutest cake ever?! I need to find an excuse to make this. 

Orchids!

So, my mom had a dinner party with a few of her friends last Saturday and we only had wilted, ugly looking flowers around the house. I was off work at about 8pm so I decided to stop by the floral department and buy her some orchids! We have this empty frame siting around the house and these candles as well, so I thought that the 3 of these together would be a pretty scene. If you notice though, the gram is actually crooked, but I tilted the picture to make it seem straight. Because the flowers are an organic shape, against the geometric shape of the frame, the crookedness is less noticeable. A few tricks with the rule of thirds and you have a great picture.

I very much like the pop of colour!

Skype Reflection

1)      What topics did you present? How did you go about making it “stick” with your audience?

The topic we presented was the punctuation mini lesson.  We taught the kids how to properly use a comma, period, exclamation mark, and a question mark. To teach them how these work in a more familiar matter we decided to use the comparison of a traffic light.  The red light symbolizes the period because at the end of a sentence, we stop.  The yellow/amber light symbolizes a comma because at a yellow light you slow down.  Finally, at the green light, you would get excited, symbolizing an exclamation mark.  For a question mark, we got a little creative and decided that we’d use the example of a pothole in the ground and the shape the car would make as it swerved around it. I believe that by making these a relatable subject for the children, they were able to understand better and the idea “stuck” with them.

2)      How do you feel your mini lesson went?  Strengths? Weaknesses?

I felt that the mini lesson went quite well.  The kids were very interested in learning what we were teaching and it seemed as though they had some fun.  Some strengths to our presentation would probably be the use of a few visuals as well as a cute little story/narration.   The visuals were easy for the kids to understand, as they weren’t too complex, and with Ben narrating the script with an animated voice, the kids had fun and enjoyed the lesson.  Some weaknesses to our mini lesson would be the lack of space in front of the camera.  We had seven people in our group, but only four of us were able to appear on the camera.  Although everyone contributed with the idea and drawings, not everyone was able to speak to the children other than stating their name.

3)      What did you learn about the process of teaching and learning?

Honestly, I learned that these kids are very well behaved.  While teaching the mini lesson, we expected the kids to shout out their answer when asked what you do at a red light, etc. I was surprised to see the kids all raising their hands to answer. I also found that there is quite a bit of preparations and thoughts that have to go into making a lesson, even just a mini one!  You have to write everything out, make sure that it’s appropriate for what we are doing, plan what’ll happen, and much more.

4)      What should we do next?

I think that a cute idea to do next would be a little vocabulary game.  We could challenge the other class to a bingo match and find words that are somewhat complex, yet not too difficult and read out the definitions of the words while the bingo boards have the actual words.  Another things that would be fun to do is a back and forth storytelling game.  What we would do as a class is write a sentence or two to start off a story.  You would send those sentences to the kids and they’d add onto the story, writing another few sentences.  By the end of the game, we should have a nice book, compiled with all the ideas we and the kids and thought up.  It should, by the end, turn out to be a story that should make some sense.  To make it a bit of a challenge we could add themes as well.

See See My Playmate

So, there was always this one song that was stuck in my mind as a reminder of my childhood. It was a hand clapping game, you know, like kit kat bar, etc. See See My Playmate was my favourite hand clapping game. I always thought the lyrics went like this:

See see my playmate,

Come out and play with me.

And bring your dollies sweet,

Climb up my apple tree.

Slide down my rainbow,

Into my pot of gold.

We'll be the best of friends,

Forever more, more, double X more,

I don't like you anymore.

Basically there was this little clapping rhythem you would do and at the very end during the "I don't like you anymore" part you would cross your arms over your chest and try to push the other person down. It was always a fun game, but I realized that the lyrics I sang aren't the actual ones.

The actual lyrics start off with a kid asking their friend to play with them, but the friend couldn't. They went from being "jolly friends" to "jolly enemies". Then the song got a little violent and talked about scratching the other person's eyes out until they bled to death!  I honestly can say that I'm not surprised though. All those songs and tales from our childhood have actual violent twist in them. Take Cinderella for example.  The inspiration, I guess you could say, of the story was somewhat based off of women cutting and twisting their feet to make them smaller, because small feet were considered beautiful. That's why Cinderella has tiny feet and can fit into the glass slipper whereas her step sisters could not.

Here are the original lyrics to See See My Playmate. I think I like my version of the song better though 😉

http://www.musicanet.org/robokopp/usa/seeseemy.htm

Little Things, Morning Glow

I was at the dentist this morning and saw this.

I thought it was quite the beautiful scene. The way the morning sun shone on the bright red against the complementary green put me in awe. There are some things that are just good for you to stay back and admire them. I find that it's the little things in life that'll make moments pause. I had walked by this plant a bunch of times when going for my dentist appointments, yet seeing the warm glow of the morning light just made it a completely different scene.  I sat, waiting for my mom to come get me, for about 10 minutes just watching the scene infront of me. All was quiet, still, and perfect. 

Me, Alysha Cho

Photo Credit by Alysha Cho

I love building and crafting things, I find it facinating and amusing all at once. I believe this photo best describes me as a person because I love food and I love transforming things. As the text says, "I'm always full of little creations." It's true. Take this strawberry rose for example, what was once a simple strawberry, is now a beautiful rose!  As long as you can see the beauty that's within, anything is possible. With the use of an exclamation mark I am able to portray my thoughts of creating things. It shows that I am excited and wonderstruck by it all without needing anything else. If there were any other punctuation added to this, the feeling of awe would slowly dissipate. I also added a focus effect on the flower so that way it gives the picture an overall airy feeling to it. With cursive text, it brings an element of elegance to the mood. I'm always full of little creations, whether they work out or not is besides the point.

Growing Up

Photo Credit by LifeTouch

It's hard to believe that one day I was graduating kindergarten and the next I'm graduating high school!  Life honestly can change within a blink. I find that this picture best represents the text above. Growing up is a part of life that many people fear and yet, it's an amazing process. I feel as though it was just yesterday when my mom was yelling at me to walk properly as I walked to the bus stop, or how I was outside in the snow building all sorts of things, and now here I am, baking, writing blogs, and graduating high school!  I decided to leave the punctuation just with a period. Nothing more, nothing less, just simple because life is simple. It's just a straightforward quote; direct, yet sincere. Growing up is something that everyone seems to forget about. They want to either be older or stay younger, but life really can change within a blink. Staying true to yourself, being kind to others, and growing up at your own pace is all that's neccesary. 

Hate

Photo Credit by Alysha Cho

Hate.  Although in this photo I don’t seem very hateful at all, I wanted to express how an expression of hate could look.  In the picture I have a pose implying “get that camera out of my face” and “I don’t really want to see you right now.” I think this relates to the text because sometimes, I just don’t like you; sometimes, I just don’t want to see you; sometimes, I just don’t want to deal with you.  With the use of a comma after sometimes, it lets you emphasis that it's not all the time.  Hate isn't always an all around, all the time feeling, many times it'll come and go depending on moods and actions, etc.  A period at the end, rather than an exclamation mark allows for a less serious effect on the reader.

Family

Photo Credit by Sun Rae Cho, Kyu Taek Cho, and Micheal Codilan

In this photo I combined 3 photos into one.  The top two are pictures from when I was much younger, probably around 5 or 6, and the bottom photo is from January 25, 2014, when I was 17. I find that the text and the picture relate to each other because, even after all these years, we’ve stuck with each other through thick and thin.  Everyone’s heard the saying that you can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family and I find this to be true.  Friends come and go, but family is forever.  With the use of the comma after “Love them,” lets you take in that message before moving onto the next phrase “because you can’t choose!” Using the exclamation mark, it gives the quote a force behind it, almost forcing you to do so, yet in a friendly manner.

My Past

Photo Credit by Alysha Cho

I chose to have a collage of me that I had made about 4 or so years ago of me throughout the ages.  I believe that this relates with the topic of my past because it shows me in all different stages of life when I was younger.  The text works with the picture because it makes you realize just how quickly life is changing.  Those pictures in the collage consisted of me from ages 0 – 13. The only editing I had done to the photo would be enhancing the colours and the sharpness so it still keeps its natural look.  By using an exclamation mark I am able to express my amazement towards how much life is changing and how much I’ve grown.  It amazes me how different my past is from my present. I found that the colour blue against the white background allowed the words to pop out against the darker, older pictures.

Jewelry!

So about a month or so ago I was asked to create a piece to be donated to for the Manitoba Board of Trustees, and they're going to auction it off for a children's charity.

This is what I created. (I apologize for the horrible lighting and camera work on these pictures! I guess you can tell I'm not a photographer.)

This is the original design of the neckpiece.

And here's the finished piece! It is made all from sterling silver and contains one 5mm CZ and two 2.5mm amethysts!

The chain is also from sterling silver.

I really hope that this piece will sell well so we can raise quite a bit to whatever children's charity the money goes towards!

Scavenger Hunt

Top Left: Friendship, Top Middle: Talent, Top Right: Passion, Bottom: Reflection

When I was Little, Metaphoto, Past

Left: Love, Top Right: Outline/Silhouette, Words/Letters, Middle Right: Confession, Hate, Bottom Right: Alone

Left: Family, Metaphoto, Right: Future, Metaphoto (Original photo from http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/somewhere-in-my-surreal-dreams )

Top: Close-up, Bottom Left: Symbolism, Bottom Right: Black and White

Reading Tweets #4

Pride and Prejudice (20)

Elizabeth Bennet logged on:

Tweet: Mama and Papa are talking about a new, young neighbour moving in.  Perhaps one of us may have the chance of a hand in marriage! #excited

Tweet: The new neighbour's name is Mr. Bingley, we are to meet him at the assemblies.

Tweet: Mama is scolding Kitty for coughing so much.  She is quite stressed #poorgirls

Tweet: Mr. Bingley has returned Papa's visit and I daresay, he is quite the handsome fellow #goodlooking

Tweet: @JaneBennet How terribly upsetting! RT-Mr. Bingley is said to bring 12 ladies to the assembly! Oh my!

Tweet: Today is the day of the ball! It is heard that Mr. Bingley has only brought 6 women with him, not 12!

Tweet: What a handsome bunch Mr. Bingley has brought with him.

Tweet: I daresay, although he has devine looks, Mr. Darcy is quite the proud and disagreeable fellow #unimpressed

Tweet: How two such different men can be so close, I do not understand #confused

Tweet: Overheard Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley speaking. I am more than just tolerable! #rude

Tweet: It pleases me that all my sisters have thrived at this ball, particularly Jane.

Tweet: Mr. Bingley has asked Jane to dance a second time! #proudmoments

Tweet: I still cannot believe Mr. Darcy would call me "tolerable" and Jane the most beautiful! We share the same blood! #insensitive

Tweet: How can Jane see through Miss Bingley and the others? Yes, they are handsome, but their manners!

Tweet: I am happy for Charlotte, she was Mr. Bingley's first choice of the night!

Giraffe Ring, Skills Manitoba

So I was asked by my jewelry teacher to compete in the Skills Manitoba Competition under the category job skill demonstration. I agreed and we decided that we would show a demonstration of how to make a lost wax casted ring. We decided to make a simple band ring showing the different steps, but I also wanted to show a more complex design that can easily be made. I decided to make a giraffe ring. I had made this ring once before and gave it to a friend, but she had lost it and I had been asked by a few people to remake it, so I decided to do so.

Here's the step by step instructions of what I had done.

I began with sizing the ring to 7 1/2, then I began carving the facial structure of the ring.

Once I acheived a face that I was comfortable with, I began to carve down the neck and form a thinner band.

Next, I detached the ring, separating the head and tail.

I carved the tail some more to make the desired shape I wanted, and smoothed it out.

Next, the arms were added.

Then the...Antennas?

 Then the ears were attached.

Finally I attached the mane. Note, the mane, antennas, and ears are made from green wire wax, while the rest of the giraffe is made from blue wax. The end result will all be the same metal colour though. 

And there we have the giraffe wax ring! All I have left to do is drill out the eye sockets, spruce up the piece, invest and cast, then all the finishing work in metal. I'll be posting another post for the end results of the ring.