Lily Pang Art
Lily Pang Art and Design, Gardening, Painting
Mother's Day is near. Why not get a set of placemats as a gift?
Order the Placemat
The placemats are made of cork and good for your table. They are easy to maintain and use than other types of placemats such as cloth.
Another year of anniversary celebration in my younger daughter's kindergarten is near. Parents are encouraged to contribute prices for games in the celebration. This is one of the prices I contribute "
Humming Bird Laptop Skin". It is all packed in a plastic sheet and backing.
This weekend is a long weekend with Good Friday public holiday. I will go away for a short sweet break. Have a nice holiday everyone!
I walk and drive passing the trees along the road side near my home everyday. The trees have small white blossom during late March and middle of April. They don't look very splendid like cherries. But it is very freshing and calming. I like the white, green and a light fragrance coming from the tree.
I want to paint the trees with green, white and a bit yellow. Although I don't see the yellow in the tree, I feel the yellow is the color of the gentle scent. The above is the sketch. I am constantly visualizing in my head how the tree should turn out to be. I will work on it as soon as I got some time.
More magnets are added into the gallery. These are round magnet set made of my prints and paintings, Please browse the
gallery for more information.
I have temporary stop producing the square and round magnet set of 2. I run out of supplies of these type of magnets.
I am introducing new types of magnets. They are beautiful cute magnet set of 4. Each set of magnet consists of 4 round magnets. Each magnet is in size of 1.2"/3 cm in diameter and 1/3"/ 7mm thick.
You can choose them to decorate your iron wall or fridge or as a special gift for many occasions.
The Back of the Magnets
They are made of strong earth magnet. The image surface is protected with lamination so that you can clean or wipe it using wet towel.
I only made few set now and will expand the gallery gradually.
There is a Spring Sale in Dawanda currently. Everything in my shop is on 12% discount. If you like to purchase anything from my shop or find out some interesting items in other shops, you can check out my
Dawanda Shop.
I have a very beautiful solid teak dining table set. I love solid wood and feel so close to it than other types of material such as glass or metal. To protect the dining table, all along I am using a set of cork placemat that I bought from Australia. I cannot use cloth or other type of placemat because they are very difficult to maintain. You need to be very careful when you are eating your food i.e. try not to drop food on the placemat. They are also not good enough to protect your table. I don't dare to place a hot pot or plate on them. The table will be left with marks if you do so.
My dining table with Owl Cherry Blossom Placemats
from @Lily Pang Art & Design
But my set of cork placement is getting spoil recently. I need to find a replacement. Why not using my art and cork material to make my own placemats?
The cork backing of the placemat
That's how I made a set of Owl Cherry Blossom Green placemat set with cork sheet. The owl print is coated with protection layer and sealed to the cork sheet with water resistant sealant.
Currently the placemants are on size of 9 x 12"/22 x 31cm and thickness of 3mm/ 1/8". In future I will look into larger ones.
If you are tired of using cloth placemat that needs to be washed after every use and not good for hot pot, you can try this placemat.
The cork backing of the placemat is good for heat isolation. You don't need to worry about damaging your precious table when placing a hot plate on the placemat. It protects your table from hot pot and also easy to clean. You can wipe it using wet towel if it is just a little bit dirty. If it gets very dirty, you can wash it in water as well. It is ready to use for every meal.
You need not to worry about dropping food or dripping soup to your placemat during your meal time. It is such a breeze to use the placemat.
This is my pretty dining table.
This is an rectangle glass pendant that in a big wider shape. Summer is near, dragonfly is going to fly in the pond and everywhere is full of life. This is a very relaxing and pretty glass pendant.
The Detail
This is the new laptop that I just bought yesterday. It is Toshiba L735.
Actually I was planning to buy Acer Aspire 5820TG and bought it at the local mall Clementi Mall. But the moment I saw it I felt there is something wrong with the display. The text is very blurry and flicking. I thought it maybe due to the system setup. I brought it home and try to fix it, but failed. My eyes felt so dizzy after reading Internet for a while. It is also very slow when I try to open big photoshop files. I expected something much faster than my current travel laptop which is very old with only 512MB memory. But it is not.
I try to return it or exchange for something else, but the salesman told me that there is no returning in the shop and I need to pay 10% to 20% packaging fee to exchange because they need to repack the laptop. Wow, it's too much I think and I better stick with the laptop. But after a day of using it, I felt very dizzy. I don't think I am able to use it everyday. I just have to change to something else.
I examine every sample notebooks displayed and check for the text sharpness. The Toshiba is one of the notebooks that I found much more comfortable with when reading at it. The configuration is also good enough to me except the screen is not big enough.
I like the look and feel of the Toshiba. The cover is shinny and clean. The display is very sharp. I wouldn't say it is very fast to use Photoshop, it is quite slow to save large files with image. But it doesn't have the problem that Photoshop is freezed when working on large files. Acer Aspire 5820TG sometime causes Photoshop not responding. After opening a large file, I cannot save it to another file because the file dialog doesn't show. During editing, I cannot open some of the image editing dialog such as brightness and contrast after opening a large file.
I found that that in the shop, no matter how large or small the screen is, the screen resolution can only be adjusted to 1378 x 768 pixels. I wonder if this the reason that the large screen laptop has very blurry text.
I also wonder if the 64bit vs 32bit Window 7 is also the reason for Acer to be slow for Photoshop. I choose to install 32bit Window 7 in Toshiba, while Acer is 64bit. I read somewhere that some 32bit software is slower to be run in 64bit Window 7. My photoshop is a quite old 32bit version. Thus I think I better stick with 32bit Window 7 in Toshiba for the moment.
I never consider text sharpness is one of the important criteria to choose a notebook. All along, my PC and notebooks have no problem with displaying. The extra 15% I spent on exchanging Acer to Toshiba is the tuition fee I paid for it.
Waterlily pond always makes me excited. I took many photos of waterlily pond for references. As the weather becomes very hot recently, the strong summer scent makes me feel to paint this waterlily pond.
I even cooked a dessert with waterlily or lotus: Lotus Root and Sticky Rice.
Summer Dessert: Lotus Root and Sticky Rice
My younger daughter recently suddenly eats very little. She complaints that she feels pain here and there during meal time. To increase her appetite, I spent a lot of time in kitchen these days. I feel very guilty because all along, our family meals are prepared by my Philippine domestic helper. I didn't do anything except grocery shopping. Since I don't cook, I always buy the same type of vegetables, meat and fish and never dare to try some unusual and healthy food such as purple cabbage.Thus we pretty much have the same type of dishes in our dining table.
After spent some time and I found a very good way to cook meals. It is such a breeze to prepare meals now. What I do is that I look for those recipes that are not so difficult to follow in the Internet and copy them down in my notes. I write down all the dishes that I need for the week and their ingredients. I go shopping according to the list. The list consists nicely of soup, dishes and desserts. Sometime, when I see some nice healthy food in the market, I look at the Internet to find a good recipe for it. I'll make it into my week's list and buy all the necessary ingredients for the dish.
Before I always very scared to follow recipes because I always found that some ingredients were missing from my fridge during cooking. But now, I follow very closely to the prepared list during shopping and that prevents missing ingredients.
Everyday, I pick up the dishes that I want to cook and their recipes from my notes and just follow them during cooking. Now I have so many varieties in our meal table. I even cooked the above dessert that I cannot image that I am able to cook before.
It is cooked with lotus root and sticky rice. I stuffed the sticky rice into the hole of lotus root and steam it. After that I cut it and put some syrup to serve. It looks so pretty and tastes yummy too. It is also very healthy if you don't put too much syrup because according to Chinese Medicine, the lotus root and sticky rice enhance your body blood function.
While processing orders in the middle, my laptop broke down. I called technician and he told me it is due to motherboard problem. It will cost about SGD$400 to repair it.
I think it is better off to buy a new one since my current laptop is more than 3 years old. But it takes a long time for me find out which laptop to buy. I haven't pay any attention to the new development of laptop technology and don't even know what are the current processors in the market.
After much readings, I settled with Acer Aspire Timelinex 5820TG. I need to buy a laptop that can allow me to work on large graphic and image files. I use the following criterion to choose the laptop:
- Must be dual-core processors for better multi-tasking work
- Large system memory at least 4GB with 64-bit OS
- Quadro Nvidia or Radeon graphics
- Big screen
- Better function and Price ration
- Screen should be sharp under day light
Basically I am buying a laptop that more towards Destop PC because I am not concerning too much on battery life and weight because I use it mostly at home.
Acer 5820TG uses i5 processor. The i7 processor is the more advanced one currently. I was thinking of buying Lenovo Thinkpad w510 that uses i7. But comparing the cost and function, I choose Acer. The Lenovo is double the cost of Acer. However, I read from some articles and they claim that i7 may not necessary much better than i5 considering the price you have to pay. Looking back at all the laptops that I have used, they all broke down after 2 to 3 years. I think it is better to choose one that is cheaper and with good functions.
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