DIY: My Neighbour Totoro Shoes

Hello hello so this was my Sunday Arvo / Rainy Day project yesterday – TOTORO SHOES!

I’d seen a few pictures on Pinterest on grey shoes decorated with the Totoro theme. Being an anime & totoro fan myself, I decided to give it a go on these AUD$3.50 K-Mart shoes. Really you can’t go wrong with a $3.50 pair of shoes. Worst case, it looks ugly and you throw away $3.50 with some experience on DIY-ing a shoe.

Here’s how I did it:

Face Inspiration From Pinterest

Materials:

1. A pair of grey shoes,
2. White paint (I used acrylic paint since that’s what I have at home)
3. Black Sharpie
4. Black ballpoint
5. Toothpick
6. Paper

Spirits Inspiration From Pinterest

Method:

TOTORO:

1. Prepare the picture of Totoro you want to add to the shoe i.e. I used this image. You can either print or do what I did: trace this straight from my screen on to paper. It turned out to be the perfect size for where I want to put the drawing.
2. Cut out the totoro outline
3. Trace the outline onto your shoe. You can be as detailed or as simplistic as you want.
4. Mark dots on the shoe of where the eye, nose, mouth are supposed to be. I did this by placing the template on to the shoe and then folding where I have to mark. I marked the top of the eyes, a dash for the nose, and a dot at the top, bottom, left and right of the mouth.
5. Finish the outlines with ballpoint – this means draw 2 circles for the eyes and connect the dots on the mouth and I added the teeth lines here
6. Paint the whites and wait to dry (time of drying depends on paint type) – eyes & mouth
7. Outline everything with sharpie!

SPIRITS:

1. Draw hairy black blobs – I drew them like how I would draw daisies since the sharpie bleeds a little.
2. Draw eyes on the blobs using a toothpick (or you can use anything with a point) dipped in a little bit of your white paint.
3. Wait for it to dry and you’re done!

Here’s the results:

Front of the shoes (Totoro Face!)

Back of the shoes (Spirits!)

This probably took me half an hour to do not including the wait time. Outlining the drawing takes literally 1 minute.

This was a very easy, quick & cheap DIY. You can also use this method not only to do Totoro shoes but for any design!

What do you guys think?

Lots of Smiles,

Sita

My Easter Bunny Buns

Honey Bunny Buns pinned on Pinterest http://pinterest.com/pin/282812051572476079

First of all, I would like to wish you all a HAPPY EASTER!

It was Good Friday and I decided to make these bunnies from a Honey Bunny Bun recipe I saw on Pinterest. With a little help from both mum and little sis, this is what I achieved.

I like to bake because I feel like my efforts are being rewarded greater than cooking normal meals. For example, you might spend an hour on a main meal and then it gets eaten in 15 mins. However, if I bake, the produce will last for at least a few days. Somehow this makes me feel better. Am I weird?

I don’t bake that often nor am I awesome at it. I have never baked bread before other than a few pizza bases. I didn’t do a lot of things differently to the recipe though I did find a few things weird. First, I didn’t expect the amount of yeast required – 2 table spoons. In the end, I decided to put in the whole 2 table spoons. My mum also thought that it was weird to mix in the oil, sugar, water AND yeast in one go. Though I already did that before she saw and it turned out okay.

I found out only after all the ingredients were mixed that we don’t have a bread dough mixer (the spiral kind, not the cupcake kind). Luckily, mum owns a Thermomix – a neat little kitchen gadget, practically good for anything from making juices, mixing stuff, making soup to even cooking rice, pretty cool huh. So that’s one thing I did differently.

Second thing, mum couldn’t remember where she’d put the honey so we ended up glazing it with golden syrup instead.

Thirdly, I am not very artistic – I tried poking it with chopsticks to create eyes but they ended up looking a little creepy and thought that it would look better without the eyes. So in the end we ended up with 24 faceless bunny buns.

Fourth, I used a fan forced oven so I lowered the heat by 20 degrees Celsius from the recommended temperature and the bread were cooked in less than 10 minutes (a few minutes less than the recommended 11-13 minutes). The recipe is American so it uses Fahrenheit instead. I simply used the Google converter to convert to Celsius- easy peasy.

A Tip: You know bread is ready when it sounds hollow as you tap the bottom of the bread with your nail. Be careful though! It’s HOT!

THE FINISHED PRODUCT:

Sita’s Easter Bunny Buns

FRESH – fresh out of the oven, they taste like heaven. Slightly crunchy on the outside, but still very fluffy on the inside. The taste is similar to that white table bread at fancy restaurants. I was worried that the golden syrup might taste a little weird and yeah honey would have tasted better but this was fine too. A light brush at the top of the bunnies gave them a slight sweet taste but nothing overpowering. Needless to say, I was quite proud of it (being my first bread and all).

NEXT DAY – I was a little disappointed when I picked a bunny up. All the golden syrup have been absorbed and the outside was not crunchy anymore. The inside was less fluffy too. But I guess this was to be expected from a day-old bread. I wonder if I put it in the oven again for a few minutes it would be a little crispy again on the outside? Maybe I should try.

VERDICT – So I like to categorise recipes into 2 piles – worth doing again and not doing again. I also like to put some notes on them so I remember what went wrong last time or what could be improved. This recipe is definitely going into the worth doing again. Not only is it cute, but it’s also very Though next time I’d probably bake this in the morning and maybe just make half the recipe or something (my family doesn’t eat a lot of bread). Also maybe I will get mum to make some soup to go with it. Hmmmm….

So that was my experience with this recipe. Do let me know if you like these kinds of posts where I try out recipes. Of course the taste comments will only be based on my opinion and whoever is around me at the time. Thank you for taking the time to visit my blog and read this post!

Lots of Smiles,

Sita