I recently tried my hand at soap-making and decided to make some as gifts for my co-workers this year. I used a blend of glycerin-based soap (the kind you can find at Michaels or JoAnns) and added oats, honey, ground cinnamon, and honey-almond scent. Yum! Love how natural they look IRL.
I picked up the wood/bamboo soap dishes at Ikea, and I hand-crocheted cotton dishcloths to accompany the soaps (tucked underneath each dish). I found an easy crochet pattern you can use HERE. TFL!
Here’s a happy birthday card I threw together with my Silhouette die-cut machine. I LOVE that thing (totally worth every penny I spent!). The possibilities are really endless with what you can create. In this example… the frame, dotted line, and sentiment were cut out with it and I added Prima flower accents, a rub-on, and some Hero Arts pearls to embellish. The embossed background texture is Swiss dots (Cuttlebug). TFL!
Can’t wait to share some of the wonderful new catalog goodness with you! Hop on by Dec 18th for some sample projects. You’re going to love these images!
In the meantime, I’ll be posting some fun new cards over the coming days. (Have saved up dozens of cards to share with you from the last couple of months.)
Last weekend, I baked and decorated holiday “stained glass” cookies with two friends. The stained glass comes from crushed & melted lifesavers in each cookie window. (Thanks to William-Sonoma for the recipe!)
Of course half the fun of making cookies is eating all the broken ones. I wasn’t too careful at my decorating station. *lol*
It was hard to believe we made so many in such a short amount of time! Here are even more…Man – just looking at these gets my tummy rumbling. heehee
After our adventures in buttercream, my friend Mimi & I decided to give fondant & royal icing a try.
Believe it or not, this cake is only 3.5″ around!
We baked chocolate sheet cakes and then used large biscuit cutters to cut out the tiers. We torted them and then added the fondant along with some piped royal icing. The small flowers were made with fondant cutters, and the rose petals were individually shaped & put together like you’d do with polymer clay. We added a little bit of edible shimmer with Wilton pearlescent dust. I gave this one to my new neighbor as a “welcome to the neighborhood” gift!
Am loving the mini-desserts right now…all the fun without all the calorie guilt. (well maybe a lil’ calorie guilt – but that’s what elliptical machines are for!) *lol*
you can change the world for the better. I had to share this video that I saw on Shari’s blog. Being a pianist myself, I just LOVE this concept! Every metro station should have one. Just think of all the extra calories you’d burn in a day + all the extra giggles!
Think you have a cool idea on how to infuse fun into activities that help the environment & world around you? Check out this webpage for info on The Fun Theory & their contest.
My friend, Mimi, and I recently took a Wilton 101 cake decorating class at our local craft store. We learned basic piping skills, how to make buttercream icing and how to turn it into a festive celebration of sugar…or so we thought.
I decided to test out my skills on my co-workers, and learned a few important things:
Lesson #1: When the package says the icing colors are highly concentrated…you should believe it. Otherwise, you just might end up with alien green & florescent pink. *lol*
Lesson #2: Cake decorating is just like papercrafting…when you have an accident, you cover it up with an embellishment or decide it was a “design decision” and turn it into something else entirely.
After baking my first 8″ cake, I was attempting to frost it with thick icing & it quickly began to crumble away. Left with a divet the size of a baseball, I decided it was time to get creative. So I lopped off a fourth of the cake and turned it into this…
Any guess as to what it is? One of my co-workers said…”oh, it’s the Eiffel tower, right?”. Hmmm…not exactly what I was going for, unless you consider it in a Picasso-esque modern art kinda way. *lol*
So what was it supposed to be? Did you guess?
Yes – a purse. See the buckle & knobs on bottom? Though you can’t see it in this pic, there was a handle on top too. The HB2U is a happy birthday sentiment tag message. I mean you see purses like this in bright green & pink on the street, right?
Lesson #3: Tiered cakes are really hard to transport already assembled. I made a second mini-tiered cake in addition to the purse one using 6″, 4″ & 3″ rounds. The good news is – it didn’t crash & burn in the car…but I had it carefully perched in a cardboard box with several wood dowels supporting the insides. I used up the rest of my nuclear icing and added my co-workers’ name to the front (professional, eh?) *lol* Though it may look a little frightful, they were both pretty tasty in the end!
Just thought I’d share a card that is featured on the Hero Arts blog this week. I absolutely adore these new Halloween images. How cute is that Frankenstein?!?! You can get tips & tricks for making this card and several others over on the Hero Arts blog HERE.
There were also several other fabulous color schemes to inspire on the blog this week. Be sure to check them out & thanks for dropping by!
Thought I’d share a couple of abstract encaustic paintings that I recently made. I tend to create with a lot of structure in my cardmaking & polymer clay work, so it’s been interesting to try my hand at abstract art.
I started off with this small painting (5″x7″) using cream, teal, & orange hues with a hint of sap green. The surface texture was created using a scrap of burlap which was painted & then fused onto the piece using a heat gun. Underneath the wax paint is a map of a French city. You can see it show through in a couple of places… but I ended up covering up most of it with opaque color.
After finishing this one – I decided to mimic it on a larger scale on a 10×10″ cradled wood panel.
Here is the result which is fairly close to the original considering encaustic is an unpredictable medium. No two pieces are ever identical no matter how hard you try! That makes for a lot of fun surprises, though.
