Fly on by sweet angel

Weekend project number 1. Or actually it's number 12 or so, but this is the first one I'm blogging about. I'm trying to renew some of our old t-shirts to get more life out of them, while at the same time saving money on new ones for these ideas in my head. Using old T's also takes off the pressure of getting it right first time...

So I wanted wings on my back. I've been thinking a lot about this two-tshirt thing, with cuts in the top layer to show the colour of the bottom layer. I'll post my first experiment in this department soon, but I want to get this one out now. I rummaged through our cupboards and found a brown T neither of us has worn more than twice, and a white T that was always too small. Perfect for the bottom layer, in other words.

I start by sewing key points of the two T's together. This is essential with two different brands or cuts of shirt, to ensure they sit properly on one another. With two T's from the same range I only sew the line from the neck to the shoulders. It is important to sew only on the seams to avoid the material pulling funny or showing the sewing. That rhymes.

Next I drape the shirt over a chair to keep the shape while i trace the wings on the back. I looked for the perfect pair of wings on Google, and photoShopped all the inside detail out, so that i had only the outlines. I chose wings with an expressive outline, because the material doesn't allow for much detail once cut. It's more important to get the overall shape right.

Then I print them out on A4, and cut out the inside to create a stencil.

This gets pinned onto the back of the T, and using a laundry marker i trace the outline onto the shirt. From previous experience I now know to trace it a little smaller than i need it to be, because the idea is for the material to pull back and curl over a little.

Now i simply hand-stitch all along the marked lines with small, close zig-zag stitches that show only very minimally on the front of the shirt. This stitch has a name, but I don't know it in English... The stitching catches both layers of T-shirt.

Then comes the fun part - cutting out the inside of the wings from the top T-shirt layer. I cut about 2mm away from the stitched line, to give the material room to curve over.

And that's it - I have wings on my back... :)

Prego rolls, veggie style

How to follow  a recipe without following a recipe at all. Which turns out, at first, pretty much as bad as one can imagine it would! But I'm not abandoning the recipe because i think i know better (tried that) - i just didn't have the right ingredients, so i improvised...

Here is the recipe I used: http://www.recipezaar.com/recipe/Portuguese-Garlic-Steak-Sandwiches-prego-No-Pao-95392. We don't eat meat, so I used Quorn's Seasoned Beef Style Strips. My first mistake was to disregard the fact that they were already flavoured (and spicy at that). For some reason, we also don't have onion in the house, so I used dried chives... dried garlic too - but those would not have made so much of a difference.

My second mistake was to try and 'incorporate' another recipe altogether (I don't get it! my gran does it! My mom does it!) so i added some oregano (and accidentally spilt some, so there was WAY too much). This is also where I added chilli flakes.

Anyway - it all smelled awesome while i was making it. I heated some butter, added the steak and garlic to it and fried it just enough to seal in the moisture and taste). Then I added the red wine to some more butter and the chives and it smelled even better. At the same time i was baking some rolls (Possibly my third mistake - I used long hot dog rolls instead of round sandwich rolls) but they were smelling beautiful too. My girlfriend said it smelled like a restaurant.

All good! Then i burnt the rolls. So i had to make more, which meant the beef strips were standing in the pan too long, with most of the moisture cooking away (i was trying to keep it warm, you see). Then the one place i did stick to the recipe let me down: it didn't say to butter the rolls.

So the end product was a little dry, because there was no sauce and no butter, although it tasted ok because Quorn's stuff is actually quite hard to dry out when you're using liquid like wine etc. It was also way too hot and, yes, i could taste the oregano all over it... I will make it again though. improvements on the way.