Outfit Snap: Dinner @ Iketeru

I've been a little tense and irritable lately, so I felt like I really needed to relax over the weekend. Since my sister had recently found out about the new spring menu at Iketeru in KL Hilton and my parents were away for the weekend, the three of us (me, Pig and Pot) decided to try it out on Saturday night. My sister had also wanted to test out her new camera and lens on good food pics :P

I saw an opportunity to dress up in kimono and snatched it up right away! Here are some pictures of my outfit. These were taken after dinner.

(Sorry the yukata is so rumpled... ^^;;;)

Near the pool-bar-area thing. (So articulate)


Again, near the pool.


Back shot. Yeah, it's a walking-pose, but just standing there was so boring, and the pics are really blurry if I actually walk ^^;;


Outside the lift. I really like this shot! The colours are more accurate here, and you can see my musubi more clearly. I think it kind of looks like it's pre-tied LOL!


It took us forever to take this shot of me pouring the dobinmushi (a type of soup) into the serving cup! By the time we were satisfied by the pics, the pot was nearly empty XD Funny how the best-looking one ended up being one of the earlier pics!

We had fun setting a time limit for my sister. "Take the pic, take the pic, take the pic! Oh... The cup is full... So who wants some soup?"

My ensemble on Saturday was a second-hand UNIQLO yukata that I got on YJA. It actually came with a maroon obi, but I wanted something different this time. Green and purple is one of my favourite colour combinations, especially for kimono, so I thought I'd go with it. I think it kind of brings out the colour of the wisteria. The bag and earrings are from my mum's closet, and the fan is a cheap buy from Daisou, with a pattern of bunnies.

I uhhh really meant to wear proper kimono, but my sister's boyfriend and I were playing Prince of Persia on the PS3 and we got carried away ^^; I didn't start getting ready till too late, and (shockingly) I hadn't even decided on an outfit to wear! So I just threw on the simplest thing I could find and put together in a few minutes ^^; Then again, given the recent heatwave, it was probably for the best.

I was really pleased with how neatly my kitsuke turned out, given that I haven't dressed up in two months. It took me about half an hour to dress, which is shockingly long - I must be getting out of practice!

I didn't really realise that just wearing kimono would make me feel so relaxed. It's like any stress just melted off me. And to think that I haven't worn kimono just to go out and have fun in 4 months! Therapeutic, it is.

Of course, the moment I stepped into the office yesterday, whatever stress relief I had was all zapped up immediately haha :P Hmmm, another excuse to dress up and go out again? XD

Anyway, just wanted to share some random food pics:

My sister's starter course.


Her sashimi course.


Her garlic fried rice.


The ice cream looked better than it tastes haha.


Rommel's dessert course from his hanami bento.


My choices were kind of boring for photos, and other photos didn't turn out so well, so just these pics.

I'm really sorry you can't see how nice the pics really are, coz they go rather wonky once we shrink them, but we have to shrink them - our house internet can't take the stress of uploading very large photos ^^;; So, we're stuck with small not-so-nice pics *sigh*

Ta, people! I'm off to eat dinner.

Event Aftermath: Yukata Picnic April 2009: Part 2!

I'm back from the Jakarta trip! It was... hectic. And I felt so tired even though I didn't do all that much hahaha. But it was a good trip :) We saw 22 companies in 3 days.

Anyway! I promised I'd post additional pics of my yukata picnic with Mel and Mich back in April 2009 in this post, and here they are! These are the fun pics. My earlier post had the boring ones hahahaha.

I stuffed Mel into something with PINK!


Of course, I had to give her a matching pink bag to use :P

Eh, ignore me in my kimono undies in the background :P

While we're getting ready.






Random Darcy photo XD


Me at the picnic..


I love this pic!

If there wasn't a background of buildings, I could almost pretend I'm in a forest somewhere ehehehe.

As we were packing up to go back in:


Shoe shot! I rather like this pic, actually~


The three of us~ X3


Showing off cupcakes from Hummingbird Bakery :D






*sighs happily* That was a nice walk down memory lane. I could almost feel the cold air of London while I was looking through those pics. It could've been the air conditioning, though :P

I hope you liked the pics! ^^ And I really really hope it makes up for part of the lack of updates ^^; Toodles~

*tired*

I was kind of hoping I'd be able to put together a kimono outfit sometime this week, as I'll be busy this weekend, but it's been hectic...

Anyway, a while ago, my mum had volunteered my sister and I to bake cupcakes for an event at church. The event was for senior citizens, and its theme was a Hawaiian Luau. My sister and I agreed, thinking we wouldn't need to bake more than 200 or so.

Well, we were wrong. We ended up having to bake 400 cupcakes, and decorate 300 of those. For the remaining 100, we were supposed to make frosting and bring it to church for the participants to decorate themselves. Talk about organisational nightmare.

So yeah. Yesterday, I left work early at 5pm to get ingredients and start baking. I started baking at about 6pm, and it took us 6 hours to finish baking 417 cupcakes! Yes, that's a long time because we only have one oven and that oven only has one rack. It was about 1.30am before I got to go to sleep.

Check out all them cupcakes!


My sister and I went a little crazy from all the cupcake-making and ended up christening our KitchenAid mixer "Betty", after Betty Yew, Betty Crocker, the Betty from the comic series "The Archies", and the tongue twister Betty, coz they're all amazing cooks. Say hi to Betty! She's hard at work here.


Luckily, I had taken the day off today to decorate the cupcakes. I started at about 10.45am, having had a bit of a lie-in in the morning. It took the three of us (my sister, my maid and I) 8 hours to make the icing, and finish decorating the cupcakes.


There's a reason why ppl cater for so many cupcakes - domestic kitchen and appliances just aren't made to handle this much!

But we were lucky and managed to finish everything, thank God. I was a little late, but I was happy enough that I finished everything. We sent it to church, had the event, distributed cupcakes, helped decorate cupcakes, etc etc, I'm exhausted now.

Anyway, pics of the cupcakes! I was really lazy to decorate them nicely, so I just made some brightly coloured icing, bought some edible sugar flowers and voila! Cupcakes.

The colours seem a little pale in this pic..


A close-up of some of them..


Cupcakes on display, ready for distribution!


We got some pretty good reviews about the cupcakes. Alot of people said they were very cute. Some said they were a little too sweet, but the cake was very good. Quite a few people asked where we catered them from ^^; I was happy with all the positive reviews!

What think you of them? ^_^

Okies, gonna go sleep now. G'night! :)

Outfit Snap: Dinner @ Sagano

This month of October is Malaysia's International Gourmet Fest. My sister's boyfriend had seen something interesting at Sagano, so on Saturday night, we went to check it out! :) Of course, since it was a nice fancy Japanese restaurant in a nice fancy hotel, my sister and I decided to wear kimono there.

At first, I had really wanted to be seasonally appropriate, but after a long frustrating search of something that was in-season, not silk, and not too warm, I gave up and just took two of my spring-themed kofurisode out for us. So yes, we are not seasonally appropriate, but I don't think anyone in the restaurant noticed! And not like we have seasons here anyway.. Maybe I can just say I'm following the Australian calendar instead :D Then it'd be perfect!

Here is me dressing up my sister in my room. Please ignore the tourist kimono on display... =^_^=''


Our outfits...



I had quite a few problems with my kitsuke again yesterday :( I really hated my obi and ohashori! What's happened to my fingers?!?!?!?! Oh right. My self-imposed 3 month kitsuke deprivation. Damn myself.

We got to the restaurant a little late for our booking. We actually had to pass by a wedding dinner along the way and lots of people stared. I felt so shy =^^=;; And I was just saying in the car that I really hoped there wasn't any wedding dinners at all!

Anyway, at the restaurant, we were very pleasantly surprised (and super excited) when we were shown to a very nice and cosy private room, with tatami mats and a small indoor garden! I was quite relieved - we didn't have to pass through crowds of staring people, or worry about getting something spilt on the kimono, and we had lots of privacy to take great pics and act as undignified as we wanted XD


We ran around taking pics for a while before settling down enough to eat the first of our seven-course meal ^_^

Here's my sister "presenting" the ikebana display


"Hello? What is this?"


*gasp* "I see something!"


Me at my seat..


Then we discovered that the sliding door to the room next door actually opens! Since there wasn't anyone in there, we of course decided to take advantage and use it for pics XD


"Konbanwa!" :P


My sister was showing off that her nails matched her fan! (BIMBO!)


Along the way, we were eating our delicious dinner. Just before dessert, we took loads of fun photos since it seemed to be taking a while. Of course, I just had to take a few poser photos! XD

This one is my favourite:








We were taking apart the room to see what was in it :P


Then we decided to take some poser photos outside :P


"Irasshaimase! :D"


Still taking apart the room... ^^;


My sister and her boyfriend


We were having lots of fun!


Maneki-neko pose!!! XD


And our obligatory photos with the restaurant's signboard :)




As a treat, I've included a couple of photos of the food we had!

This was our appetizer course. From left to right: foie gras sushi, egg tofu with sea urchin sauce, and live oyster with yuzu koshou.


This was our third main course, and the fifth course overall. It was deep-fried king prawn with butter cream sauce. Yum!!


That was a really fun Saturday night out! ^_^ Great food, great company, great ambience and best of all: KIMONO!!! :D :D :D

I hope you guys enjoyed this post as much as I enjoyed experiencing and sharing it!