Monday blues baking

Hello!!!!!

I hope you all had a better weekend than we did!
Seriously it has just been crazy in our house!! We have two cars, a Toyota Hilux ute and a Mitsubishi Lancer and they both decided to die! BAM  just like that! The clutch burn out on the lancer and the timing chain snapped on the Hilux!! Why?!!?!!? So neither of us had a way to get to work today so we both stayed home with Josh working on the ute to get it up and running but its not looking to good so far but fingers crossed! And I have spent the day running around like a chook in a flap catching up on washing and cleaning and when I get stressed I like to bake so that's exactly what I did which is what brings me here with another little post for you beautiful people!!

We have been on a bit of a health food buzz for awhile and being vegetarian I am on a constant hunt for yummy protein packed recipes. Along the way I have discovered many amazing super foods I am wondering how I ever survived without such as quinoa, chia seeds, coconut oil, coconut flour and kale just to name a few. But today I really felt like baking some sweet goodness so I jumped on board the Google train to see what it had to offer and I wasn't successful so I decided to pull apart an old recipe and give it a little make over. We are pretty big on protein powder in our house because of the lack of meat so we always have a huge container on hand so I decided why not make protein cupcakes???! These are so yummy and filling they make for a perfect afternoon snack to tide you over until dinner with their sweet vanilla coconut body and a yum marshmallow texture icing you will be drooling for more!And here is the result:

Little handful of yum.

VANILLA COCONUT PROTEIN CUPCAKES

Prep time: 10 mins             Cook time:15              Servings: 15 cupcakes

Ingredients:

3/4 cups flour (I just used plain flour but you could use coconut or almond if you like)
1/2 cup vanilla whey protein powder
1 1/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 large eggs
3/4 sugar (or your preferred sweetener)
2tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup coconut oil
1/2 cup buttermilk (if you don't have any you can make it with 1/2 cup milk and 1tsp apple cider vinegar set aside in a bowl for 5 minutes to curdle)

Method:

1.  Preheat oven to 180c and put muffin cases in a muffin tin.
2. In a medium bowl sift together flour, protein powder, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Set aside.
3. In a large bowl beat the eggs until fluffy then add sugar and beat until smooth and creamy.
4. Add vanilla and coconut oil and beat for another minute.
5. Add to egg mixture half of the buttermilk and half of the flour mix, beat slowly adding the remaining milk and flour. Continue mixing until it is a smooth constancy you may need to scrape the side to combine anything left on the sides of the bowl.
6. spoon batter into the cases so they are half full.
7. Bake for 15 minutes or until they bounce back in place when touched with a clean knife. Remove from oven and allow to cool before icing.

Protein icing
 So you can ice with whatever icing you like but if you would like a little more of a protein kick try this out for size! It will set into a yummy marshmallow consistency.

1/2 cup plain or greek yogurt
1cup vanilla protein powder
1/2 cup icing sugar (you could go without this and just add more protein powder if you like)

beat all ingredients together until you have a thick fluffy mixture if you find it isn't thick enough add more protein powder until you have a butter cream type consistency. Pipe onto cupcakes and allow to set. Enjoy!!!

 

I hope you enjoy the recipe guys! 
   And I have to admit the weekend wasn't all bad we did have some special guest come on Saturday to help us try move the car and I made a very special tutu for a very special two year old ;)

The pretty princess and the devil ute in the backround!

I will put up a tutorial for the tutu at a later date but for now I am going to cook some dinner for my very deserving and hard working partner! 

Talk soon my pretties!

xx

Man Made Mannequins

Hello my pretties!!

Welcome back!!
I hope life is treating you well wherever you are! Life has been a bit crazy over in our cozy little corner of the world! We are getting ready to go over to the beautiful Rarotonga for a week to celebrate the marriage two of our very best friends! Very exciting!! So it is going to be a week of sunshine, smiles, scooters, snorkels and I do's! So stay tuned and I am sure I will have so exciting pictures to share when we come back home!

So I have been attempting to make some of my own clothes and I decided that it was a good idea to make my own dress form because the store brought ones are so expensive!! So I jumped on Google and decided to try and see if it was possible to make my own! Turns out it wasn't going to be as complicated as I thought! All you need to do is a few easily accessible items and a trusted person!
The things that you need are:

• A few rolls of duct tape (depending on your body size will depend on how much tape you will need we brought three rolls but only ended up using two rolls. I am a size 6-8)
• Scissors
• old clothes you don't mind cutting and never using again (make sure these clothes fit well so there is no bunching) I used a pair of old bike shorts that I had managed to somehow melt a candle on! grr! and a long sleeve T-shirt. You can wear a bra if you want but I didn't as I figured I could always but a bra on the dress form if I needed to :)
• something to stuff your form with! I used plastic bags because we had millions of them! They worked really well but you could use news paper of even poly-fill.

• coat hanger.

I would also encourage you to go to the toilet before hand!! you are going to be taped up and unable to do anything until you get cut out of it!

So to get started put on your old clothes! excuse the pose it wasn't really a warm night...
Josh (my better half) pointed out that the neckline on the shirt was quite scooped so I ended up putting an old polo on to of the T-shirt and tucking it in as well I would recommend against this because as you can see in the pictures below it bunches and adds quite a bit of bulk so your form will end up being a bit bigger than what you really are! But I was cold and not so keen to take away the extra warmth haha!
Now the fun part begins! The taping!!

 SEE WHAT I MEAN ABOUT THE WEIRD BUNCHING?? I have some odd pot belly thing going on ahahahaha!! Anyway so the best way to go about it is to make a cross between your breasts and then wrap around your hips. Start wrapping around your waist and move towards your legs and crotch (this is why you are going to need a trusted person it is a fairly intimate place to be working around haha. Josh thought it was pretty funny)

 So now you are starting to look like some weird dominatrix character or some very horrid fetish...
You will now be moving on to the arms and movement becomes very restricted I tried walking around and moving and for the first time in my life I had the robot down pact! ;) make sure who ever is doing the wrapping doesn't go to tight on your chest!

 Next step is the breasts! Josh started by making an "X" over each breast and then taping over very lightly as to not distort the shape of your breasts. By this point you will be looking ridiculous but that's perfectly OK because you are so close to being finished!!

Now you will very carefully need to be cut out of this! We started at the neck and cut down to the opposite sides leg, once you have cut all the way open you will need to very carefully wiggle out of the old clothes being careful not to squish or distort anything!
Once your are out you will put the coat hanger into the shoulders and have the top coming out of the neck.
You will now tape up the places you had cut open! Again being careful not to alter the shape to much!

So as you can see I squished the torso and legs a bit but I managed to fix it by putting extra stuffing in those parts.
To stuff I taped up the opening of the arms and legs and stuffed through the neck but you can do it however works for you. You may find to help you stuff it tightly you will need a stick of some sort to back down your filling (I used a wooden spoon) I found I had a hard time stuffing the bottom of it so I cut a small hole in the lower back and stuffed through the hole until it was nice and firm and simply taped closed the hole. once your form is nice and stuffed and resembling your body and you are happy with the result tape up the neck and you are done!! Sorry for not getting any photos of this part of the process but if you have any questions or a bit unsure of this process feel free to comment below :)

It looks pretty creep actually but it works a treat! after a few days I decide the black taped form was just a bit to creepy so I actually paper mache'd it and spray painted it. I also found that by doing that the form was a lot more solid and also more visually appealing sort of except i accidentally squished one of the breasts woops ...

 So it is pretty ugly really but it does the job! and that is that!!

Another wee little project I did one sunny afternoon was revamping an old desk I brought for $5 off gumtree!
I needed a project desk because the dining table doesn't always cut it!
So I sanded back the desk and gave it a lick of paint nailed an old measuring tape to the top and now its a thing of beauty!

 Loki gave his seal of approval ;)

Speaking of Loki it is actually his 9month birthday today!! time goes so fast!! look at that handsome face!!

He has gotten a wee bit bigger than when we firts got him at 8 1/2 weeks old!

 Well that's all from me today folks!
See you soon crafty foxes! ;)
xxx

Cushions and quick introductions

Hello lovelies and welcome along to Teacosy Crafts!!!!!

Yay!! I am super excited!
I have been planning to start up this blog for awhile now and finally after plenty of procrastination and staring at a blank screen here I am!!

I'm just going to thrown you right in the deep end and show you what I have been working on!
So I recently just brought a second hand sewing machine after having to get rid of my old one due to moving over here to Australia! I got it off gumtree which is sort of like trade me for you kiwi kids and Ebay for the rest of the world ;) for the bargain price of $40!! weeeeew!!
So of course I HAD to rush off to spotlight and buy some pretty fabric and sew until my heart was humming along with the machine. 
I decide to make some envelope cushion covers with this really cute stag polar fleece and honestly these are super simple to make which is a bonus if you are a novice sewer like me ;)

 So all you need for these cushions are a sturdy fabric (i got the polar fleece because of the pattern and the softness great for cuddling while watching scary movies hehe) I only got 1meter of this fabric which made two small covers.
You are going to need cushions obviously I already had two laying around that I had picked up from Ikea for $2 each! crazy bargains! these are 35x35cm so pretty little.

You will also need a sewing maching and matching thread.
Pins
Scissors
Tape measure or ruler
Iron.

To begin you will need to lay your fabric out on a flat hard surface such as the floor or a table and rule out your cushion cover peice. you will be cutting out three different lengths of fabric and depending the size of your cushion will determine the sizes of the peices.
So for my covers I cut out the pieces as pictured below:

The big piece will be your cushion front and the dimensions for it were 38cmx38cm to include seam allowance.
The two smaller pieces will be the back and are two different sizes to create the overlapping envelope(the parts that overlap will be your opening) . So the first piece is 38cm wide by 25cm high. and the second piece is 38cm by 28cm. so for your own covers if you have bigger or smaller covers than mine use the same formula as mine just adding two centimeters to the size of your cushion for seam allowance :)

The next thing you will need to do is iron out all your pieces so they are nice and flat with no wrinkles.

So once they have been ironed out you will need to fold down 1cm of the top edge (width ways) of the two smaller pieces and iron the seam down and then repeat so you have folded it twice and rep:

  You can pin down this seam if you need to and repeat the process on the second smaller piece. You will take these two pieces to the machine and sew down this seam (I sewed two seams for a cleaner finish)

So that is what your pieces should look like :) Now you will need to attach these to your large front piece. To do so have the right sides facing each other so that the wrong sides are facing out. match up the edging, your two smaller backing pieces will over lap each other and pin all around all four edges:

Yay! almost there so the final thing left to do is sew all around all four sides and from there you can zigzag stitch close to the edge if you wish to prevent fraying :) turn your cover inside out well right side out I suppose haha! and there you have it! One gorgeous new cover that you made all by yourself you clever cookie!!! Now go on and stuff your cushion in the cover and step back and admire your handy work!

So there you have it! So easy and so cute when completed! I made two of these covers in a hour so its a quick little project and a super simple way to update your decor. If you end up making some of these I would love to see them!! Post a picture of your handy work on instagram with the hashtag #teacosycrafts.
 

Thanks so much for swinging by! I am off to go and cuddle my puppy Loki now! So until next time stay crafty!! xx