Cakes, cakes and yet more cakes!

Hello there!

I've been super busy for the last month or so and my little blog has been somewhat neglected. Sorry about that! Anyways things have settled down now so I'm back! I've got a ton of stuff to share with you all. It's waaaaaay to much to put into just one post but even so the posts over the next few days/weeks are still gonna be really long. I'll warn you now that this post in particular is gonna be super photo heavy, which will make it really long!

So.....Shall we get started?

As you can probably tell from the post title, I have been making a LOT of cakes recently. It was my Aunties 30th birthday and I decorated her big birthday cake and also made and decorated 36 cupcakes. Which was one hell of task especially as I've only just started cake decorating recently. But I managed it and everyone seemed really impressed with the cakes, which was nice. And seeing as there was none left at the end they must have tasted good too!

Here's a few pictures of the birthday cake.

The cake was one of those big 'face cake' cakes from Asda. They're just iced in plain white and then you can get an image iced on top if you want. We just bought it and then I decorated it at home. It turned out pretty well for a first attempt at cake decorating :)

I bought the flower, leaf and butterfly cutters from ebay (you can see them in my post here). They worked pretty well once I'd gotten the hang of them and had gotten my icing mix right. The happy birthday was cut out using little letter cutters that I got free with my My Cake Decorating magazine. I then glittered them using a pastel pink Rainbow Dust glitter. The letters are made using Renshaw's Flower and Modelling Paste and then everything else on the cake was made using Renshaw's Regal Ice mixed with a little Gum Tragacanth. This let me still have nice soft icing but it took away some of the stickiness so that it wouldn't stick to the cutters and rolling pin. The sparkly 30 is so pretty! I had to cut the wire a little bit because it was too tall for the cake

Right so that's the big cake done, now onto the cupcakes! I did warn you that this was going to be a long post!

So thats what they all looked like on the stand, which by the way was an absolute bargain! Only 99p from Home Bargains. I made 36 cupcakes in total. 18 were topped with rolled sugarpaste in 6 different designs, and the other 18 were topped with buttercream with 4 different designs.

I'll show you the iced ones first.



These were coloured a pale purple using Sugarflair paste colouring in Grape Violet. The cutters were gently pressed into the icing to create a stamped pattern.

For these cakes I left half the icing white and coloured the other half pink using Sugarflair paste colouring in Pink. I then used a textured plate and a rolling pin to emboss a square pattern onto the icing. I them pushed some small pink and white edible pearls into the icing where the square edges met.

Next up is the rose cakes. The rolled sugarpaste icing was coloured pink using Sugarflair Pink. The roses were made from Platinum Paste flower paste that was coloured pink using Sugarflair Red, and the calyx was coloured green with Sugarflair Holly Green.

The last iced cakes are the bow, daisy and cameo. I made the bow using a 50:50 mix of Platinum Paste flower paste and Renshaw's Regal Ice. I coloured it pale blue using Sugarflair Baby Blue. The Daisy was cut out of white icing using the same plunger cutters that I used on the main cake. The rolled sugarpaste behind it was coloured pastel yellow using Sugarflair Melon colouring. I cut off a small piece and added a little more colouring to make the centres of the daisies more vibrant.

The cameo cakes were difinitely my favourite out of all the iced cakes. The cameo was made using a mould (which was a free gift from My Cake Decorating magazine). You kind of have to push the white icing into the mould so that it only goes into what will become the head silhouette, and then you just push the blue icing into the mould ontop of the white, trim off the excess and then bend the mould a little bit until your little cameo falls out. I made my cameos using flower paste because the sugarpaste was to soft and sticky, but warn people before they try to bite into the cameo that it will be rock hard! After it had dried I stuck it onto the cake and added some edible white pearls around it. I was going to pipe around the cameo but the perals were easier and gave the same effect.

Right so thats all the iced cakes, now onto the buttercream topped cakes. I'll start with the simple ones first.

These are simply piped with an open star nozzle then gently rolled in coloured sprinkles so that it forms a stripe of colour around the edge of the cake.

These are again piped with an open star nozzle but this nozzle was slightly smaller than the previos one used. I made a ruffle/swirl design by piping up and down the cake instead of just round and round.

I mixed up some Mexican Paste using the recipe on the Patchwork Cutters website and coloured it pink, blue and purple using Sugarflair colourings in Pink, Baby Blue and Grape Violet. Then using a small butterfly cookie cutter I cut out the butterflies and laid them onto a piece of card that I'd mountain and vally folded so that they dried with the wings sticking up. When they were dry I dusted half of them with glitter (Pastel Pink and White Hologram Rainbow Dust glitter) and dusted the other half with pearl powders (Irridescent Lilac and Pearl Blush Pink Rainbow Dust and Glacier Blue Sugarflair edible dust). The cupcakes were piped using a large open star nozzle and the butterflies pushed gently into the buttercream.

These are my favourites of the buttercream cakes. I just love them! The whole idea behind them was for them to look like a daisy meadow. I cut the daisies out of white Mexican Paste using the daisy plunger cutter. I mixed a little yellow lustre dust (Sunglow Rainbow dust) with water and painted the centre of the daisies. Then I mixed a tiny bit of Sugarflair Holly Green colouring in with the buttercream and piped it onto the cake using a large open star nozzle. Then I placed the daisies on in a random pattern, between 4 and 6 per cake.

So thats all the cakes Ive made this weekend! Phew that was a long post wasn't it?

Here is a quick list of the products/items I used on this cake. I bought the majority of it from either eBay or Cameo Cakecraft.

Renshaw's Regal Ice in White
Renshaw's Flower and Modelling Paste in White
Homemade Mexican paste (recipe can be found here)
Plunger cutters in Blossom, Daisy, Gerbera, Butterfly & Ivy Leaf
Sugarflair paste colourings in Pink, Red, Baby Blue, Melon, Holly Green & Grape Violet

Rainbow Dust in White Hologram, Pastel Pink, Sunglow, Irridescent Lilac & Pearl Blush Pink
Sugarflair Lustre Dust in Glacier Blue
White cupcake cases from Lakeland
Wilton disposable piping bags
Open star nozzles
Edible pearls from Asda
Pink and Blue sprinkles from Asda

That's all for today. Bye for now!

Checking in

Hi everyone

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. I've been super busy moving out, getting ready for my graduation next week and starting my new job among other things. I do have some projects to show you all just as soon as everything has settled down! And an update on my quilt too, which is finally starting to get somewhere! Hopefully in the next week or two I'll be back to posting a couple of times a week.

Bye for now!

A Batman Birthday

Hi everyone!

Can't believe it's been a week since my last post. Where has the time gone?

It was my boyfriends birthday this week so I been baked him some fab little cakes for his birthday, and then we went off galavanting to Alton Towers and Drayton Manor for a little birthday treat. We didn't really think Drayton Manor was that great. It seemed more family/kiddie orientated than Alton Towers. Even the 'big' rides weren't really that big at Drayton. But we still had a nice day. Alton Towers was really busy. Considering we only went a month ago and it was dead it was a bit of a shock! It was still a ice day though and luckily the weather stayed nice :)

Right, enough of my ramblings! I'll show you all the birthday card first and then I'll get onto the batman part of the post in a bit. So here's the birthday card.

And here's a close up of the bear so you can see his little suit properly.

My camera didn't really pick it up very well but the collar of the tux is shiny, as is the olive in the Martini glass and the straw and strawberry in the other glass.

This little guy may look a bit familiar if you saw my Father's day card I made earlier in the month. It's the same stamp set, but I had to do a little bit of DIY to make him wear a suit. The tux jacket started out as the t-shirt stamp stamped onto black card. I then cut a Y-shape out of the top so there was two seperate parts. Then I made the collars out of some scrap black card and stuck them on. It was very fiddly but I think it looks really good. The shirt and bow tie are stamps from Kanban set (you can see the full stamp set here.) The drinks were made using a stamp by Stampin Up.

Next up we have my handmade birthday cupcakes. My boyfriends loooooves Batman. Seriously, he's kinda obsessed. So I thought I'd make him some little Batman themed cupcakes for his birthday. Here's a picture of them packed up in the box.

At the top is the Batman symbol, the second row is Gotham city and the bottom row are the 'Pow!' symbols that were always used in the comics and the old Adam West Batman series.

Here's a close up of the three designs.

The Batman symbol and Gotham city cakes were decorated using fondant icing and the Pow cakes were decorated using Mexican paste and buttercream. I'm so happy with the way they turned out. I made everything by hand, the cakes, the decorations and the Mexican paste (that's what the Pow's are made of). I bought the sugarpaste but I made the Mexican paste myself using this recipe by Patchwork Cutters. If anyone does try this recipe, I found that I needed to add more water than the recipe states in order to get the paste to bind together. The buttercream recipe was kind of a mash up of two different recipes that I had. But I have to say it tasted divine! The Pow symbols and the batman symbols were all cut out by hand, and the Gotham city skyline's were cut out using this cutter from Patchwork Cutters.

As a first go at cupcake decorating by myself I think they turned out really well. And now I know what works and what doesn't, what equipment I need to buy to make life easier, and the quantites of buttercream, paste and cake mix I need for next time I make cupcakes like this.

As usual here is my list of products used.

Products used on the card -

Woolly Bears Hamish stamp set by Kanban

Happy Moments & Queue Up stamp sets by Stampin Up

Cardstock in Whisper White & Cherry Cobbler by Stampin Up

Cardstock in red & black by the Paper Mill

Silver mirror card by Create and Craft

Promarkers in Satin, Tan, Poppy, Pear, Honeycomb & Vanilla

Memento Ink in Tuxedo Black

Glossy Accents by Ranger

Word Window punch by Stampin Up

Products used on the cakes -

White Regal Ice (suagrpaste) by Renshaws

Sugarflair paste colours in Navy, Liqourice, Melon & Ruby

Mexican Paste (see recipe here)

Cupcake cases by Lakeland

Disposable piping bags from eBay

9mm open star piping nozzle

New York Skyline cutter by Patchwork Cutters

Edible glue from eBay

I really hope you all like creations today.

Bye for now

Beautiful Butterflies

Hi everyone, hope you're all doing well?

I haven't got a card for you today...I've got some wall art! A butterfly frame piece of wall art to be precise. I've seen a few of these floating around out there on google, pinterest, ILWS, etc and here is my version.

A close up of the butterflies -

And finally a side view so you can see the dimension of the wings -

I took the glass out of the frame so the wings could stick up and the butterflies look like they're flying. I put some vanilla cardstock behind the photo board...frame...thing. (What is it even called!?) Basically I put vanilla cardstock in so that I had something to glue the butterflies onto. It blends pretty well with the white frame.

Products used -
Frame from Wilkinsons
Various scraps of card (mostly Stampin Up and the Paper Mill)
Rhinestones from Rennies Arts & Carfts
Sizzix Embosslits Beautiful Wings die


Bye for now!

A box of cards

Hi everyone!

While I was sorting out my craft boxes a little while ago I found a project that I made ages ago. It got made nd looked all pretty but then got shoved into a box and forgotten about. After stumbling upon it I was baffled why I'd shoved it in a box in the first place! It's really pretty. Here it is for you all to have a look at -

This was made using a tutorial by the lovely Jenny Moors who creates absolutley gorgeous tutorials which are for sale on her website. It is a little folder which holds 4 small cards inside. In Jenny's tutorial she uses a stamp set called 'A Flower for all Seasons'. However, although I do own this set I used 'A Tree for all Seasons' instead. Here's a picture of the folder opened out -

The cards are 4 inch squares and the folder slightly larger at about 4.5 inches, so that the cards and the envelopes fit into the folder. All the cards are identical except for the image stamped in the middle. Each stamp is themed around one of the seasons. Here's a close up of the cards. Top to bottom, left to right is Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter.

I have actually made another one of these, but a different size so that it fits standard C6 sized envelopes and A6 cards.

Products used, all are Stampin Up unless otherwise stated -

'A Tree for all Seasons' stamp set

Cardstock in Whisper White, Chocolate Chip & Old Olive

Chocolate Chip patterned paper (part of the Neutrals Paper Stack)

Old Olive satin ribbon

Scalloped Circle Punch

Corner Rounder Punch by Creative Memories

Stampin Write Markers (various colours)

Bye for now!

Scottish daddy bear

Hi everyone!

Hope you all had a nice weekend/Jubilee bank holiday despite the not so great weather at times.

You may have seen my little shopping spree here. I decided to use the Kanban Woolly Bear stamps I bought to do my Dad's fathers day card. My Dad is Scottish so these stamps are perfect for him and I also found some tartan papers in my stash (although I'll probably get told that it's the wrong tartan for his family, but oh well). I really love this card! I'm so happy with the way it's turned out :)

The bear is made up of quite a few layers, which looks good but it does make the card quite heavy. Originally I was going to mask and stamp so that it ended up being a single stamped image on just on layer of card. But I've ran out of sticky notes so I couldn't do that. I had to stamp each image out individually, colour it, cut it out and then layer it up and stick it onto the rest of the images. I'm actually glad I did it this way because it adds a little bit of dimension.

As much as I like the card and (I adore the images!), I did have  lot of problems with the stamps because of the way they react to the ink. Normally when I'm using Promarkers I like to stamp my images in black Memento ink because it doesn't bleed when it comes into contact with the alcohol in the Promarker ink. But these stamps really do not like the Memento ink at all! The black ink kind of seperated on the stamp so I couldn't get a crisp outline no matter what I did. Anoying is not the word! In the end I just gave up and used Staz On. It does give a lovely, crisp, dark outline but it does have problems with bleeding when you use Promarkers. It's not so bad if you leave it for 10-15 minutes before you start colouring. But you still have to be careful with paler colours where bleeding is more noticable.

You can see the difference in the inks on the card. The 'Dad' is a clear stamp inked with Memento, whereas the bear, clothes etc is inked with Staz On. I think you'll agree that the Staz On looks better!

I've also entered this into the Cardmaking and Papercraft father's day challenge which you can find here and a challenge on a blog called Out of a Hat Creations which can be found here.

I absolutley adore this little bear! And I've already got a few more projects planned with this little guy so keep an eye out for them in the coming weeks.

Hope you all like the card!

Products used -
Woolly Bears Hamish clear stamp set by Kanban
Happy Moments stamp set by Stampin Up
Tartan paper by Daisy & Dandelion (part of a set called 'A Winter's Tale')
Stampin Up cardstock in Whisper White, Crumb Cake, Certainly Celery & Garden Green
Seam binding ribbon in Crumb Cake by Stampin Up
Promakers in Satin, Ivory, Tan, Cocoa, Henna, Grass, Pine & Amethyst
Memento ink in Tuxedo Black
Staz On in Jet Black

Bye for now!

Quilting fabrics

Hi everyone!

I've got some utterly gorgeous fabric to show you all today. In yesterdays post I showed you a cushion I made using the Stampin Up Twitterpated fabric and I mentioned that I'd bought some new fabric to do my patchwork quilt with (you can read about my quilt idea here).

I just had to show you this fabric and tell you about this amazing site I bought it from. I stumbled upon Eclectic Maker while looking for Tilda fabric. This site sells some beautiful fabrics and really reasonable prices. And just look at how lovely its packaged! I didn't want to  unfold the fabric because of how lovely it looked!

I am one of those people who love nice packaging so I was so happy with the way they the people at Eclectic Maker take the time to fold all the cloth nicely, pop a business card in and wrap every thing up rather than just chucking it in a bag. Its the little things that matter :) Anyways these are the fabrics that I'm going to be using on my patchwork quilt. I also have some plain white cotton fabric but I bought that it town because I forgot to add it to my basket when I was buying all  of these.

The fabrics are by Tanya Whelan, Moda, Patty Young and Patty Sloniger. I also got some batting for the inside of the quilt. Now I thought wadding and batting were the same thing but apparently not. Or this is what  I've told anyways, please correct me if I'm wrong! I was recently told that wadding is synthetic and usually thicker and batting is usually thin and made of natural fibres. Anyways I bought Hobbs Heirloom cotton batting. It looks quite thin, but I've not actually had it out of the packet to have a proper look yet. I'm hoping it works ok. If not I supose I'll just have to buy some more.

I'll keep you all updated on how the whole quilting experience turns out. I've never done anything like this before so it could end up being a total disaster. Finger crossed it won't though!

Bye for now !