Becca's Baby Shower - Wright On

We had a baby shower for one of my co-workers in the Creative department and I forgot to take any photos of her final cake!  Here's a snapshot from my phone which I took to share with another colleague before I brought the cake in because I was nervous doing a cake for the Artsy side of the building.  The final cake had a gerbera daisy centered on the top, but you can't see that because...well, the whole forgetting to take photos thing.

 (Oh - and just an fyi - I spent an hour this morning figuring out how to get a photo off my phone camera.  Still don't know how to do it at a decent resolution, but I did find the nifty 'cartoon' filter I used for the small pic.

When I couldn't figure out exactly where I wanted to go with this cake...I ended up trying for a Frank Lloyd Wright vibe.  And the colors were inspired by the fact that it's an apricot filled white cake, and Becca hasn't found out what sex the baby will be yet.

Charity Quilts

I've been working on this quilt for years. I actually started it at the beginning of the Iraq war when our first soldiers were coming home injured in droves to send to a charity that sent quilts to the VA hospitals. Unfortunately, I got derailed and it didn't get completed. So once I got access to the long-arm I pulled it back together and kept it as my 'extra-time' project. It's finally finished and I'll take it to the quilt guild to give to the local VA as soon as I get a chance. It's not very exciting...just stripes in subdued patriotic colors.

Another charity quilt came out of the excess of flannel fabrics after I finished Paula and Cary's quilt and the quilt I did for Sharon. I pulled together a couple baby quilts with leftover blocks and scraps. This I machine quilted at home...still can't get the tension right with free-motion on my home machine, so I did this with the feeddogs up. Then I went ahead and washed it to shrink the batting a bit for the 'old-fashioned' look. I should have quilted the center octagon (snowball block) more.

Harry's Baby Quilt

I don't usually like character quilts...but Barbara and I made a trip to Galena a month or so ago, and did a little roundabout in Dubuque where we stumbled on a street of cute cute shops. One of which was a quilt shop and there I found the most adorable baby fabric I've ever seen. Sheep! Cartoon sheep for the four seasons. It was cute, but not too cutesy and I just couldn't resist. I bought panels...and Harry got the first quilt.

Here's a close-up of one of the adorable sheep:

And yes, this was one I quilted myself on the rented longarm. It's going into my record of mistakes made...I must have pinned the backing to the zippers 90 degrees off from what it was supposed to be. The backing was about one inch too short! I had to quilt as far as I could go, then come home, add a strip to the back, and simulate the final edge of quiliting on my home machine. How frustrating!

Eric's Graduation

The youngest nephling is out of high school now. Eric will be off to college this fall, and he's turned into a great young adult. I'm really looking forward to seeing where he goes next.

His gift from me was a graduation quilt, of course. This one was designed, sewn and machine quilted by me. I'm still loving having access to drive the big quilting machine, and it's making me wish I had a room where I could install one of my own.

Here's the front:

And here's a shot of the backing fabric.

I also made the cakes for Eric's graduation. I have a problem with stuff for guys, I just wasn't sure what to put on the cakes to take up space, so they're pretty simple. And apparently my attempt at an interlocking '09 didn't quite work out - both Eric and Mom asked 'what is C9?' Doh! And yes, fondant does still scare me.

Barbara's Birthday

This post is pretty late - it should have been up in April. But here's the cake I made for Barbara's birthday. I hadn't done leaves in a while...so they could have been better, but it was fun and bright. I also got to use one of the antique plates I picked up when shopping with Jen and Lynn to showcase her cake.

I seem to be fixated on monograms on cakes these days - maybe because it's easier than making sure the full name is spaced out correctly and in a perfect line, but I think I'll go with it. It looks classy, right?

Grace's Birthday Cake - a saga

For Grace's birthday this year she wanted an Eiffel Tower theme. Jen found this great example of a tower made out of sugar wafers and I thought it was a fabulous idea and we could recreate it no problem and I would document the cake process in photos because I've not done so before. Well...the cake went fine, it was the tower that was the problem. Here's the original, and here's the photo documentary:

Everything started out just fine. The usual cake build - I thought I should capture a picture of the crumb coat stage because it used to make me sooooo nervous how awful the cake looked at this stage:

And while that dried and sealed in all the crumbs. I got to work constructing the eiffel tower components. At this stage, everything appears to be going great even though I massacred a number of hot pink sugar wafers before I got the angles right.

So now the frosting for the tower is drying, and I can switch back to decorating the cake. I got a coat of white frosting all over the cake, then added the black design work. On the top I was thinking the loops had an overall french feel, and then on the sides I started an alternating spiral and dot pattern design. After about half of the cake I decided the simple spirals weren't quite enough, so I added more frills and 'legs' to the spirals so they had more of a filigree/ironwork look.

I also left space for a medallion on the front with a big 'G' for Gracie. Everything was piped with a pencil tip except the border along the edge of the plate, that was done with a star tip.

The next step was the hot pink accents. This is what would take the cake from kind of grown-up in black and white back to a kid level with some playful accents. I left plenty of room on the top of the cake to highlight the tower...darn it. The flowers were all made with the 5 petal drop flower tip.

So the design of the cake itself went very smoothly. I was happy with how it turned out and ready to finish the top. This is the point where the documentation stopped and the swearing began. Either my frosting glue needed to set up overnight or my wafer construction was too heavy, but when I flipped the base piece over the legs immediately collapsed. I swore.

Then I tried to put it together again. And swore again when it failed a second time.

I didn't have much time before the birthday party so I started looking for a plan b- I didn't have any candy melts in the house, which would have made a good, strong glue (and just recently I *had* pink ones but I used them up.) So chocolate was the next best I option. I melted some chocolate and used it to reinforce the legs.

This appeared to work... I set the top piece on it and started piping some black dots to cover the chocolate and liven up the tower - compared the rest of the cake it looked a little bland just pink.... until everything collapsed again - this time not only the legs, but the mitred corner for the bottom edge fell apart too.

I dissected all the bits and realized that residual frosting might have been what kept the chocolate, which had appeared very solid, from holding the piece together. So I scraped off every bit of frosting I could find, re-cut a few pieces, and slathered the whole base in chocolate and tried to get the legs back on. Then I threw the whole thing in the freezer to set as more swearing ensued and I called Jen to let her know there might not be a tower on the cake.


She said, ok - if not, just bring the rest of the wafers back and Grace can try to build one. Ha ha - I'd killed all the wafers. There was only one, crumble-edged wafer left.


When I was dressed in clothes that didn't have powdered sugar and frosting all over them, and had everything gathered for the party I took the tower out of the freezer, tossed it into an empty cake pan and took the whole lot over to the party to see if I could pull it together. Amazingly, perhaps with birthday girl magic, it did hold once I got to the party:

I attempted to pull the heavy chocolate layer into the design with more black piping, and hopefully for a group of kids I pulled it off.

Back to Quilting

♠I haven't been quilting much. At all. But, as a birthday gift to myself I took a class on driving a long-arm quilting machine at Common Threads Quilt Shop. It's amazing! Leaves all my attempts to machine quilt on my home machine in the dust.

This weekend was my first rental time with the machine. And aside from pinning up the backing to the zipper system incorrectly (I did it at Midnight the night before, at home...then redid it at 1pm at the Quilt Shop.) And forgetting to turn the feed off and making alarm bells ring once, it went pretty well.

I managed to quilt two small quilts in my three hour block. Both were 'experiments' that I'd thrown together while I was fidgety with the flu the weekend before. This is the 'baby blanket' I did.



I also pulled together a lap quilt for Mom for Mother's day since she said she wanted something bright. It is completely quilted and bound, which is what has me on cloud nine - a finished project. I love finished projects! The quilting has been my hold up, so now that I have a way to get to the finish line I have a renewed interest in my quilting.

I need to plow through the pile of fabric in my sewing room. I see lots of charity quilts coming up soon because I need considerable practice in thinking ahead with my continuous quilting so I don't back myself into a corner. While these two quilts turned out really well (I was surprised even) there are several places where I had to stop, or cross back over quilted lines because I wasn't thinking about where I'd end up.

I had a close-up shot of the quilting pattern too, but it came out blurry for some reason. The camera and I have been having arguments about focus recently.

Special Valentines

This is a bit of a sad story...I saw these cute little candy-coated pretzel hearts at the store and was dying to try something out with them.  So I thought I'd get all creative and make Valentine's gift bags for the little girls in my life...and just have an excuse to play.  Unfortunately I got ridiculously sick as the actual day approached and couldn't deliver the goods...and once I was well, the sugar wafers had soaked up too much humidity and they no longer had a crunch to them.

Catch Up

I'm going to call this a new year's post...but really it was a July 3 post and I found a whole bunch of photos that never got turned into blog posts. I really was bad about posting for a while. And to be honest, I can't match dates to all of these - I'll just try to remember what they were for.

Woah, that's PINK

That one's pretty darned PINK now isn't it? An Anna birthday cake - for her...4th birthday, I think? And I used a bunch of candy melts for accents, and heck, why not just make a child's birthday cake that much sweeter? I didn't have to corral the children who ate it.

Paid for Cake

I don't usually decorate cakes on commission...but since Sharon asked for a significant birthday event for her mom, I caved. What are friends for, right? Topped with flowers, of course, this one was an adaptation of Marsha and Kirk's handfasting cake.

And look at this...set on a platform AS IF I thought I might want pictures for a portfolio. I must have actually been considering selling cakes.  Silly Girl!

Bookish Baby

These pictures really feel like ancient history. This is Tracy's baby shower - we held it in the library, well before the flood, and the shower theme was all about books. The 'T' monogram is actually because the baby's last name would begin with a 'T', not for Tracy (thought it obviously covered both bases.)

And one of the tablescape

Purple Strands

One more piece that I worked on - this one did find a home. I was experimenting with multiple strands and seeing what beads I could mix together. When I was looking through beading magazines I saw a number of people who were more adventurous with mixing sizes and textures of beads. I think I have the same problem with mixing beads that I have with true scrap quilts.

Random Jewelry Creation

This piece was one that didn't end up getting gifted out - it was an experiment with chain and re-purposing an earring dangle as a center medallion.