Dehydrated bananas

I love food. And I always want to eat. But always eating candy or chocolate is not good so I decided I want to dry some fruit that I can have as a snack throughout the day. Why not regular fruit? Because I also love coffee and drink it throughout the day and coffee and I don't like the combination of juicy fruit and coffee.

First I had to buy a dehydrator. But no, it wasn't as easy as it may seem. :)
Just like with buying a printer, I immediately saw that there are sooo many different dehydrators to choose from. After a couple weeks of research and trying to understand what the hell is the difference between 5 similar dehydrators I finally made up my mind and bought the CONCEPT SO-1060.
So far I'm very happy with it. It cost me 55€, it has a temperature regulator, plenty of room for fruit (9 plates) and most importantly a timer! I can't imagine not having a timer on this thing. It works like that: you put in fruit, set the time (for example 10 hours) and it shuts off when the time is up.

The first thing I tried dehydrating is bananas!

I have bought the dried banana chips from a store before that look like this:

but mine came out nothing like that - in my opinion they taste a lot better! In addition to that the banana chips I have bought for some reason contained oil and sugar? I suspect maybe those were deep fried instead of dried... 

Later I calculated the cost and mine came out a little more expensive (7€/kg) than the ones in the store (6€/kg), but at least I know they don't have any additives!

At first I tried storing my bananas in these pretty little fabric bags that my mother made, but although they really are nice to look at, they didn't work that well - the bananas started getting moist again.

So now I just store them in plastic containers, that works pretty well (if only the bananas weren't so good that I want to eat the whole container right away)

I've also tried drying apples and pears and both came out good! :)

Felted cat

I have 3 long haired cats which means... their hair is EVERYWHERE! And the only thing I can do is (okay besides shaving them down completely) brush them with a special brush. And this results in a big amount of cat hair, which I usually just throw away.
This time I wanted to try and make a little felted cat out of the hair.

To do this I needed:

● at least one cat who is trained to not kill you while you brush it (this is possibly the hardest part of all)
● brush the said cat and collect the hair
● a felting needle (mine cost under 2€)
● a cushion

First I laid the hair down on a cushion in the form of a cat and started kind of stabbing the hair to make it tighter.

Then I took it off carefully and proceeded to add pieces of hair to make it round. This is also done by stabbing the hair with the needle (carefully! if not, the fingers are going to be stabbed and this quite unpleasant).

And now I have a (completely useless) felted little cat!

PS, keep it out of reach of cats because they tend to think it's part of them and that it definitely needs to be licked.