Skirts Don't Scratch

After yesterday's fiasco with the jeans, I decided to wear a long floaty skirt since it was a nice sunny day.  This was a much better idea - it was even easier to move about.

I am really a closet bohême at heart and like to think that I would probably wear more of this sort of thing if the weather was better and if I didn't have to work.

I mixed more dollar store bracelets (the two beaded ones):

with my multi-colour beaded watch and some religious bracelets:

Also wore my Mary Jane style Docs:

All this to go for a dim-sum brunch:

It was actually quite yummy - not overly salty for once which is better for my blood pressure.

Restaurant Revisit

So we decided to go back to the restaurant from the Chinese New Year dinner. This time though, I did have a camera.  Here is a general pic of some of the dishes.  Chinese banquets are usually eaten at a round table with a lazy susan so that everyone is equi-distant from the food.  And, you can all face each other and chat.
   

This dish is originally done with beef, but we got it with fish.  It is a soupy dish, comes with noodles on the bottom and red chili peppers.  Quite yummy.

We also ordered crab which came cooked 2 ways: just plain and fried in batter (not shown but extremely healthy, LOL)

We also had lobster.  The chinese way to eat lobster is to steam and then cook it up in a sauce:

We had other stuff like a chicken and spinach dish, yang-chow fried rice and "meat cookie" which is a pork dish which the restaurant made with salt cod.  I love salt cod, but must admit that I prefer my grandmother's version of the meat cookie which she made with water chestnuts and ginger.

The highlight, since it was Big J's birthday, was a chocolate truffle cream puff cake.

Look's like the weight-loss goes out the door this week.

Dragon Shrimp

As you know, it's the first week of year of the Dragon in the Chinese Zodiac and today Big J, kids and I went out for dinner with family and friends.  The restaurant we went to had a new year's lobster dinner.

In Chinese, the word for lobster is literally "Dragon Shrimp".  Thus the special menu item.

Lobster: Traditional Spelling

Practically every table ordered it.

We ordered many of the traditional New Year's food items: lobster, squab, lamb with bamboo shoots and dried bean curd, spicy beef, clams, noodles, fish, fried rice and veggies and a sweet dessert soup.

The symbolism: Lobster for the dragon year and plus it's red when cooked, squab for peace, fish for abundance, noodles for long life, bamboo shoots for wealth, dried bean curd for happiness.  Even the foods which were not symbolic had symbolic items thrown in.  Our spicy beef also had peanuts which mean long life.

I meant to take pictures of the food, but forgot to charge the batteries and as always, the camera conked out when it was picture time.

The food was quite yummy.  Unfortunately, the restaurant was super-busy and the dishes were veeery slow in coming, so we ended up just eating half the meal.

I still managed to wear red though:

This is a hair scarf which was quite slippery so I used one of my trusty scarf pins to hold it together. 

 

What ? New Year Again?

Well its Chinese New Year today, the year is 4710, year of the Dragon.  I wanted to wear something red.  Red is supposed to ward off evil spirits.  I don't believe that myself, but do like to follow tradition, and it is Visible Monday, and I like red.

You can't really tell in the picture, but everything else is brown, not black. I actually had a sweater on most of the day (it's a refashion fail, more on that later), so I looked a lot darker but I did have the big scarf floating around the front so it was still bright.

It's hard to tell in the pic, but the shirt is made up of a basket-weavey bunch of squares. 

Every other square has a hole in the middle.  Its a French label "Montagut" and was actually made in France.  I am quite happy that it fit because I remember it being a bit tight when I last wore it several years ago.

I also changed up my hair: I'm experimenting with ways to put up my hair and am using one of those Butterfly style hair clips.

Don't quite have the hang of it yet, but it gets better each time.

Also wore my leopard coat again.

Didn't wear double tights, so my legs/feet were quite cold - those floor to ceiling windows are great for views, but not so good for keeping the heat in.

So, here is the refashion fail: 
My sweater has overly long sleeves and I had this idea to chop off some of the length and make some of those cute sweater cuffs.  I just measured for the cuff and chopped off the sleeves at that point, and stitched it up.  Big. Mistake.

Not sure what I did, but the sleeves ended up being about 1/2 an inch too short.  I tried wearing it like that but was constantly tugging at it.  So finally I sewed the sleeves back on.

I shortened it a bit by overlapping where it's sewn and then folded it back up.

It's shorter now, but a tad bulky, and you can sort of see a line where it is sewn together.  But I prefer that to the sleeves-too-short feeling.

Chinese New Year Wreath

Chinese New Year is almost upon us.  New Year's Eve will be on Sunday the 22nd so I thought it was time to start work on the 84 cent wreath.  The Lunar New Year heralds the coming of spring and in Asia is the most important holiday - similar to our Christmas.

There are a lot of traditions associated with the new year such as the colour red, firecrackers, money and fish.  Also, the new year would be the Year of the Dragon, so my plan was to incorporate all these things into the wreath.   Unfortunately, the stores are full of Valentine's Day items now - nothing to be had on the Lunar New Year front.

So, I decided to build on the "spring" theme, but include a few items which would make it Chinese.  I found some stemmed flowers at IKEA which were previously used in a display.

Can't Beat 10 Cents!

They also quite by chance also had Dragon finger puppets.  So I got a few.

Grrrrr !

Then it was just a matter of sticking the flowers onto the wreath.  The first few flowers I cut, not realizing that you could bend them into shape.  Newbie mistake. 

Working Away

I put all the flowers on first. Here is the wreath 1/2 done:

It took about 2 hours to do, I was also skyping with my mom at the same time.  She thought I should include something red. After the flowers, I added the dragons, but it still did not seem very New Years-y. 

Big J suggested that I put a big Chinese word in the middle.  I didn't have one so instead I made a little centre bit with a lucky money packet and a red Christmas bow.

Here's how it turned out:

There are actually 3 dragons, but one is hidden in the shadows.  Hmm, not bad, I quite like it.