HKD50million home?

Was taking the lift down from my place today and took this same lift with two other asian person - one older man, one younger girl.. both who knew each other and were conversing in english about buying a property in hong kong. i gather that the older man shd be the dad or someone of that seniority /rank la and that they are not mainland chinese. i tried as much as i can to eavesdrop .. trying to catch that distinctive singaporean slang but i cant seem to .. anyway.. here's the conversation...

OM: " you better look for the perfect property first before spending 50million on it"
YG: ... silence.. *keeps preening at the mirror in the lift*
OM: "you and xx look for the perfect one before deciding. take time. no hurry to find one"
YG:... silence still..
The lift came to the first floor and they walked out.

two things that came to my mind that i wanted to say out...

1) Hey man, my frens said that there's no such thing as perfect place la.

2) Hey man, if you have 50million cash to splurge, why stay here???! Sure its quite accessible to town, nice sea facing units but but but... if you have that much money, go stay like hyatt serviced apartment or something instead la. HKD 50million, i assume, would be equivalent to a cool S$8.3million!!! i could can my dream bungalow at that price with loads to spare for holidays! But then it set me wondering what can HKD50million get in HK? So i googled.. and did a bit of research at squarefoot.com.hk. Here's what i found.

Apparently there were more HKD50million properties listed for sale on Hong Kong Island instead of Kowloon or New Territories and typically those are all over 2000sqft - an amazing amount of space for hong kong apartments. I just copied a few for comparison.

Some businesses will never make that much money in a lifetime... its horrendous amount of money to spend on properties! i wonder if that man was just 'talking big' or really meant it. Anyway, if it was true, good luck at finding your Perfect Place! It shouldnt be difficult with that much budget!! :D

Clothespin Ribbon

I was spring cleaning my room over the weekend and found a bagful of ribbons and simply chucked them all into a big plastic bag. It was so unsightly, untidy that i dont even wanna use any of it and even forgotten about it. Since i was in the mood for tidying, i decided to roll them up but i didnt have enough spools. Used these clothespin instead..so much neater now.

the twins get crafty

my hk cousin, west brother, came to singapore for a short holiday with his family, including his very cute twin daughters. they've got pretty fair, porcelain and rosy cheeks - wished i had complexion like theirs - darn chio.

they came by for dinner and i kept them entertained the night. they are fun to hang with -yakking away about their school, lame jokes, little boys they like and crafts they wanna do. they were so amazed with my collection of cloths and crafts that they wanted to sew something too. but they were pretty young and 'clumsy' for needles and sewing machine so i had to distract them into doing something else.

we crafted charm necklaces, fabric covered fridge magnets and scrapbooking. i think they enjoied the scrapbooking part the best. good thing i bought that useless polariod camera months back - cuz i could then take instant photos on the spot for them to do scrapbooking.

Composition Companion

Lately, i feel that i am 'selling' more on my blog rather than updating on my crafts it seems.

Anyway, here's another 'advertorial' - for my dear sis-in-law.. she didnt ask for it but i am just being a busybody as usual and told her i will do it :D

She has a tuition centre, Smartz Kidz, at Bedok North. And one of her tutors wrote a book aimed at helping primary school kids write better compositions. When I saw it, it brought back memories of my primary school days - my tutor back then, Mrs Yee, who taught me little composition tricks similar to what this book now offers. It helped me alot back then with my compositions - made it more flowery.

The book, Composition Companion, is written by Helena Paterson. She is also one of the tutors at Smartz Kidz. She's an amazing ang moh tutor from Scotland ( i think ) who has great passion in teaching and kids.

A peek into the book. It basically gives you nice flowery sentences for writing compositions. It not only adds "flavor" to the writing, but also contributes to the word count.

It also gives gives list of words u can use instead of the same old words. Example: instead of using [he said], you could replace with [he exclaimed] [he argued] [ he rebuked] - gives more emotion to the writing.

I feel its a very useful book. Alternatively, you could create a similar concept one for your kids to flip but for the lazy ones, this is good. :D Only $10 - cheap cheap!

Happy New Year!!!

Happy New 2011 Year to us all!!!! Time flies and another year has gone by!. This year will be just as good as last year, if not, better :D

Looking back at 2010, its been a great year. Did quite a bit of travelling with family and friends, started to sell my crafts at Belle_Maison_zakka, renewed friendship with some old friends through common crafting interests, made new friends, bought our first apartment, brother finally got married and this year, it be my turn :D

1.1.11 - its my dad's birthday. Did the usual on his birthday, nothing fanciful - had dinner outside, blow birthday cake and home sweet home.

busy bug

Its been more than a month since my last post. Been busy with some serious data entry work to meet some deadlines, did some travelling to bangkok and korea, then preparing for bro's wedding end of Nov. And right after wedding, been busy clearing up backlog @ work and then crafting goodies for Ms G's upcoming fair again in Dec. Since i will be away from tomorrow onwards till end of the year, i had better craft more in case there are orders for my goodies, which are great as xmas gifts (yeah... i am 'advertising' my own products here). Handmade gifts will be a good change from those store bought ones - tho I will be giving store bought ones to my friends (i just finished wrapping the gifts! And realised i left out some... hope to find some time to buy before flying off tomorrow)

First to London, then to Paris with usual travel girl mates and then to Ipoh/Pangkor/KL with family. A bit sad cuz I wun be spending xmas eve in Singapore with the usual gang with the gift exchanges. Its has been a yearly ritual for as long as i can remember and i cant join in this time :(.

I really enjoied last year's gift exchange and was looking forward to it again this year but guess its not possible.

Anyway, if you are having a party with no idea for organising gift exchanges party - try this for a change. We call it the "Booby Gift Exchange". Its just like recycling - Bring a gift which you have recieved before but didnt like it and havent used it before. The idea was - what u dont like may be what the other like. Few of the memorable booby gifts last year were the glass trinket box (which i got in the end :( ) , the mouse pad, the comp speaker and an umbrella. The umbrella was actually one of the most useful booby gift.

On a seperate topic, Do look out for some of my new handmade goodies at the shoppe. Had wanted to take pictures of those but no time to do it today and i have already passed it to Ms G to post online. There are bendy pouches, large metal clasp pouches, small metal clasp purses and iphone pouches.

So, here's MERRY X'MAS in advance!!!

cooking workshop by 8days

the hazy weather in singapore's really bad, reaching over 100 pts yesterday evening. that explains the fogginess. its really gloomy in the normally bright and sunny island. despite the gloom, the weather's still hot hot hot. and its so easy to fall sick in this lousy weather.

it started my bro, then audrey, and me. i was down with fever early this week and am still plague by the intense headache cum giddiness for the past 3 days. normally 1 pandaol will do the trick but this time round, it doesnt :*(. kk said the weather's giving her bad headache too. @ least i feel better after hearing that knowing that i am not alone.

my head's giving out the 'wong wong wong' feeling as i type. i shld head home to rest well before my bangkok trip tomorrow. hoping that all the headaches & giddiness will go away by tonite - i dun wan it to follow me to bangkok! :(

back to the main topic of this post :

last weekend, we went to a cooking workshop organised by 8days, held @ marriott hotel where they will show us how to prepare easy desserts for parties @ home. cukoo haw signed up for it expecting a hands-on session only to be dissappointed for it is a sit down and watch from afar. hot mama hui-ee joined us too. She's looking really pretty for a mama-to-be with a pretty glow - pregannt and pretty ! - that's what i will be too when its my time :P

the 2-3 hour session would have been very boring if not for the entertaining host - michelle cheong and my excellent companions haw & huiee. and we were photographed by the event photographer! and many others were too. its pretend pretend cuz the photographer had to ask us to put up the 'twist' sign, smile and then put some advertisers products in front of us casually and look like we enjoied ourselves.

ask me if i would go for another such events again? hmm.. with the right company, why not , even tho its pretty lame :P

Ten.Ten.Ten - Part 2

Here are un-professional pictures which i took for the day. It takes too long for the professional wedding photographers & videographers to do their editing, plus taking pictures helped to keep me occupied - so here's mine! :D

here's the happily married couple! pretty audrey & my brother (who lost quite a bit of weight for the wedding) :D

Sights spotted ard the venue

Food food food. Catered food for the day - not that bad.

Snapshots of the guests for the day , made up mostly of my bro & audrey's frens.

Kids galore! All girls and only 1 boy.

sold sold sold!

Sold Sold Sold! All these sold (and many others not pictured here, including 9 clutch purses) during Ms G's fair @ Thomson Plaza last week. Thanks to all those who have bought my crafts! Thank you thank you!

So how did i get to know Ms G and how did my crafts end up @ her fair? Briefly - earlier this year, i chanced upon her fair @ thomson plaza. It was hard to ignore her shop as its really prettily displayed with lots of goodies (very japanese zakka), I remembered spending a long time at her shop looking from top to bottom to look for good bargains and I remembered spending quite a lot of $$$. And it was not enuff to just buy @ her fair, i even bought some from her online store - which was delivered personally to my place. When she came by to drop off my purchases, i gave her one of my craft items, the bendy pouch. On that same day ( i think...), she dropped me an sms asking if i wanted to sell my craft items at her fair and the rest is history...

Yay! :D Happy to sell my crafts, Happy to know that pple are buying & using them. Happy that the money i get from my crafts goes to buying more pretty fabrics for more crafts.. and the cycle goes on and on.

Ten.Ten.Ten - Part 1

10.10.10 - a once in a century date. In singapore, a total of 830 couples exchanged marriage vows, out of which, my brother's one of them! :D He had his solemnization @ One-degree Fifteen Marina Club @ Sentosa Cove. A pretty place to get married in front of the sea, yatches and sun with a party of about 40pax.

Yeah, my brother of 34yrs finally got married to audrey after more than 7 years ( i think it 7 years). Its the first xi shi of the family. Dad must have beeen the most excited of the lot.

Helped to do up wedding favors for the day. Audrey came up with the contents while i helped with the cutting and packing. She chose a "Poker" theme with poker cards & chips in a black/red/white color scheme.

The wedding favor is includes a bottle of hard candy with "hearts" and "thank you", a stick of blowingi bubbles and ice cube thingy which lights up. All packed into a pretty white satin drawstring pouch.

Audrey ordered these handmade candies from a shop @ United Square. It comes in a pretty sized glass bottle and costs only $3.50. Pretty good priced, i think. We had to stick on our own thematic labels.

And we did up matching gift tags to match.

Will post pictures of the solemnization day itself later...

Shiro comes to play

Shiro came over to my place for the night, together with her owner, cheryl of course. Such a sweet doggy who sticks to cheryl the whole night and rolls over @ a bang. Pity yuki & snowy wouldnt mix/play with shiro. Must be the territorial instincts kicking in - my doggies prob dun like shiro to intrude /vie for our attention.

Got shiro to pose the round pouch , 'fresh out of the oven'.

A funny trumatic incident happened to Shiro the next morning - Mum brought Shiro down to the garden in the morning to 'play'/shit/pee. Since Shiro had no lease, she couldnt bring her out together with my doggies for their daily walk and so left Shiro in the garden. Dad came down shortly and saw this strange unfamiliar dog in the garden. He tot shiro was an intruder and tried to chase her out of the house. Poor shiro - she must have been traumatised and refused to leave the house despite all the chasing. Lucky mummy came back in time to 'save' shiro and it all ends well. Shiro went back and stayed by cheryl side for the rest of the time she was @ my place. Must have been scared silly. :P

Making disposable chopsticks

Ms G told me during our taipei trip that disposable chopsticks arent that hygenic and clean after all. I didnt really understand it till i seen this clip. Its a pretty long clip but rather interesting. Take some time to finish watching it if you are interested.

Why daughters are better?

2 person having a chat on a talkshow about kids. Person A has 2 sons and Person B has 3 daughters. So Person A was very proud and arrogant and boosted about how good it is to have sons. But Person B quickly reacted ...

你知道吗?

儿子是路人
媳妇是敌人

女儿是亲人
女婿是佣人

我家有三个亲人, 三个佣人
你家有两个路人, 两个敌人!

哈哈哈哈哈

Senseless Fun

Was @ the office yesterday feeling bored. Saw a spool of strings and stack of colorful post-stick. What to do with it? Hmm..

Yay! Make it into a string of those triangular hanging thingy (dunno wat to call them).

Then, hang it up and hold a get together for Ms Labbit & Ms Red :D

(duh!)

Spotted

Spotted Mr Star Tortise in my garden. He has been living there for many many years already - wandering around the garden, feeing on plants and vegetables which we feed him with from time to time. He used to have another tortise fren but he disappeared somehow and now he's left alone. Once, we even 'caught' him at the far corner in our study room - it baffles us - how he could get there without being spotted.

Lately, dad did a little 're-landscaping' of the garden and planted new greens. If i am not wrong, these new greens are suppose to repel mosquitos, according to the description i saw at the nursery. Looks like Mr Star Tortise found them and finds it delicious. Yummz.

So yummy that he continues to chew on the the last piece of greens even after we picked him up.

Boosting readership!

This post will boost readership @ my blog! I think WE believe so. We being me, kay and lak. Hahaha. A couple of weeks back, we were invited to kay's place for dinner - sort of a pre-kay's birthday celebration dinner where she cooked for us again :D

As usual, after dinner, we got around to doing our own stuffs - me preparing template for sewing my own dress, lak surfing the net and kay hanging ard. Lak was surfing for those blogshops featuring pretty girls modelling their own clothes. Anyway, then somehow then we talked about my blog and how to boost readership @ my blog... and we concluded cuz there's no interesting pictures and i am quite reluctant to post my face... dun wanna scare readers away la. but very often, THE blogger's face shd be in it in order for readers to relate to her...

Anyway, we got excited when lak showed us some of her frequently visited blogs featuring pretty girls with exciting life of shopping, drinks, cool crowd etc. And we decided to do the same! We then started taking pictures of ourselves in 'cool' poses, using whatever props we can equip ourselves with.The fun lasted about 2 hours and the other halves all thought we were mad with all the posing and weird props - lucky they were keeping themselves occupied with games while tyre was sleeping in his blue room as usual :D

Here goes! Pictures to boost readership! Enjoy!

This is the first set of pictures which kay & lak took ... sort of like a warming up thing.

Then we started getting excited . I edited this picture a bit and our skins turned out yellowish. Dunno how to re-do the edits so here's it

we saw this pose on one of the blogs and decided to recreate it. one of us deliberately created a puffy hair look just so its not so normal.

Then we decided to play around with ribbons and flowers. We have seen pple used ribbons as hair accesories so we tried it out too. Not bad i think.

I think this is cute with us labelling ourselves. Tho, i do think its meant more to mock ourselves :P .. kay = elegant? me = pretty? lak = sassy? errrr.... *awkard silence*.. well lak can be quite sassy at times tho.

That about concludes our photosession. We tried to relived it again for the next two weeks but somehow, good things happen when its unplanned. When u try to plan for it, it never seemed to happen.

Hope to see a huge spike in readership! :PPP

mini broke down again

my mini suffered from punctured tyre again. this time, its another mini, on a wet rainy gloomy friday morning. wat a bummer :(

was on my way zipping around quickly through the traffic when i heard a beep sound and then saw this sign huge (!) on my dashboard. sigh.. this cant be a good thing but optimistic me tried to ignore it. hoping optimistically for it to go away by itself! i am a fool. it doesnt work that way ! ahhahaahah i am just deluding myself, as usual.

after 5 minutes of driving and hoping that the sign will miraculously go away, i gave up. i stopped by the roadside and went down to inspect the tyres in the rain. cant seem to spot any problem. nevertheless, bro told me to bring to the nearest tyre shop for a checkup. the technician took one look and spotted the slightly deflated tyre and went ahead to repair it.

the whole procedure was very fast. took less than 10 minutes. in a nutshell, he merely located the 'tear', poked in a mushroom shaped rubber tubing, pulled it out to stopper the tear, sprayed some magic liquid (i say magic cuz i dunno wat's it) then its good to go. he said my tyre's a run flat tyre type,and there's no need to change new tyres. After his healing touch, it shd be able to last a long time without changing new tyres.

and the best part!??! its free! he's not charging me for the repair!! wah.. i must be looking really pretty this morning *puke puke* but as a rough guide (in case anyone out there reading this post runs into similar situations), such quick repair solutions usually costs about $10 only.

and so all ends well. i just need to reset the digital display on my dashboard so that the (!) dont appear anymore. :DD

cedarian goodies

they say - once a cedarian, always a cedarian. hmm..saying tat gives me goosepimples actually. cant say i've got strong loyalty to my alma mater (is tat how u use it in context?) but when kk asked me if i wanna to buy cedar-related goodies, i jumped at it. despite the fact that i dun like or keep soft toys and it will likely end up in some corner of the store room collecting dust.

anyway, i bought a towel, a bear with uniform and a bear in pe kit.

and for decency sake, the bear wore undies! cute they way they pay attention to this detail,

peek into my bag today!

My bag's usually in a mess despite all the pouches/compartments i have. I never seem to be able to keep stuffs in the respective pouches properly. Haw used to look thru my bag and helped me pack my stuffs and it irked her that its so messy. She's a 'compartmentalization freak'.

Anyway, today in office, as i was rummaging thru my bag looking for some stuffs, i realised - hey.. i actually do segregate my stuffs into pouches, just not in the neat & conscious way. So i neaten up my stuffs and took a picture of it. It will probably remain this neat for today only. and i also realised - i am the greatest fan of "handmade by yiwan" goodies cuz all my pouches are handmade! *roll eyes* i have to be cuz i crafted them myself :P here's what is in my bag ...

out of those pouches above, 3 of them are new crafts items for this week! picture below shows 2 different version of pouches i was trying to create - both are of commercially common shape & size. i normally dont craft such items cuz its i feel there's nothing special about these and some of those commercially produced ones are even better. anyway, i have custom order from brother's girlfriend fren and she gave me specific measurements and so i am trying it out. love the kawaii look & cheerful colors but maybe i have to accesorize it for a more complete and unique touch. The first pouch has a rectangle base and its stiff enough to stand on its own. As for the second one, its a flat pouch with rounded edges.

The round metal clasp pouch below is a craft gone wrong! :( the entire feel & look came out way below expectations. its not symmentrical, the shape's not pretty and it looks like a wreck. the only thing pretty about this is the fabrics used but what a waste of good fabric :*(

anyway, weekend's here! happy weekend to whoever's reading this! :D

Pretty Patchwork Ironing Board Cover

Had been busy crafting the large metal clasp purses the whole of last week and finally finished all 10 of them on Sunday. Now that those have been completed, that leaves me free this week to do some housekeeping crafting.

Been thinking of doing a patchwork ironing board for quite some time but never got around to doing it. So here goes - first i need to sort thru the fabric scraps to take out the colors & suitable sizes. Have been saving up/accumulating these fabric scraps for my patchworking mood to catch on.

After choosingthe fabrics, I drew out squares measuring 8cm by 8cm and cutting them out. Luckily younger bro was around to help do the cutting, and that helped saved alot of time :D

Then laying them out randomly.

And when the arrangement's ok, I started sewing them together. The old boring ironing board cover's in the background and the new wip cover is in foreground. I had added fusible interfacing too in order to make the patchwork fabric more sturdy.

In order to make the cover fit the ironing board, i could either use an elastic band or string to tie up the ends. In my case, I used string cuz i have no elastic band. So, first, i had to sew bias tape round the raw edges to neaten it, then draw a string thru.

And here's the back view with neaten edges, fitted snugly.

And here's the final product! My very own pretty & colorful patchwork ironing board cover, just the way i like it :D OOO.. and not forgetting the very pretty pink vintage-like iron! :D