Cake Catch Up

It was my fiftieth birthday last year and Jen helped me celebrate in style with, what I think, is her best cake to date. I requested red roses, which are my favourite flower and that's exactly what I got. Jen has spent a lot of time practising get clean sharp edges with her icing and this cake really showed it off.

We treated ourselves to a Kitchenaid cake mixer at the start of last year and it came with a free pasta attachment, which is a great help to achieving a consistent fine thickness with sugarpaste petals and leaves. I was keen to have a go with the pasta attachment myself, so when Jen's birthday came round later in the year, I decided to try the  striped tier from "Wedding Day Dots and Stripes" by Trudy Mitchell in the October/November 2017 issue of  Cakes and Sugarcraft.

I picked a couple of different flowers and made them over a couple of weekends. I was busy at work during this time and although I managed to bake the cake, I wasn't able to finish it before Jen arrived on her weekend visit home from university. From this point it became a family effort. Graeme helped get things moving by "plastering" the buttercream and I managed to get the base layer of sugarpaste on the cake. Jen applied the stripes herself. Then together with Christina, she made the leaves and small blossoms. 

The flowers were arranged on the cake using posy pickers. It was the first time we had tried them and they worked really well. I like the way every angle looked different on this cake. 

Finally there is the Christmas cake. Jen was busy with project work at Christmas so she chose a simpler cake design this year. She found this super cute  Snow Foxes design on Pinterest. The snowball idea  was from the Red Nosed Reindeer cake she made a couple of years ago. The end result was an elegant ands understated cake. 

Cedric the Dragon Bauble

It has been a very long time since my last post and I'm stretching it a bit doing a Christmas round up this late in January but here we go. Work has been super busy for the last 6 months and in the run up to Christmas, I wanted a fun project to maintain my sanity. I am fan of Spellbound Bead kits and their "Cedric the Dragon bauble" kept calling to me, until I finally gave in and placed an order at the beginning of December. 

Of course I couldn't just limit myself to 1 kit, so I ordered a couple more kits, Festive Beading Three and a selection of baubles for some other decorations I have in mind.

I finished Cedric just in time for Christmas. Cedric's position isn't quite right in my version. He should be sitting higher on the bauble but the way he's hanging on probably reflects my state of mind while I was making him!

Despite having a week's holiday from work, I didn't get as much time for stitching and beading as I hoped but I did manage to finish one of the beaded candy cane decorations. It's photographed here on a tree I bought in the sales a year ago. 

For a couple of years I have been thinking about having a tree specifically for my handmade beaded decorations, as  well as my collection of Swarovski decorations, many of which I've been given as presents over the years. I specifically picked a sparse tree, so that there was space for the baubles, which often have fringes or tassels. The tinsel was kept neutral, so that I can mix up the decoration colours as much as I want. It's very much a tree in progress at the moment and one of my goals before next Christmas is to make a tree skirt. 

This year, the colour scheme on our main tree was blue, silver and white. Even though I cropped this photo you can still see a pile of stuff hiding behind the tree. This is pertinent to my mantra/intention for 2018, which is to "Create a sacred space". As an introvert my personal space is important to me and having a cluttered environment gives me a sense of being out of control. My goal for this year is to do 1 thing every day to deal with the clutter. I can't say I've done a very good job of it so far but I'm not giving up just yet.