Baking, succulents, and parties

Hello! I realised recently that I have an awful lot of photos of little things I have made/ baked, but I haven't shared them with you! You may have seen some of these on Instagram, but here we can talk about them a little more without having to make those huuugggeeee comments that end up looking like a really dense wall of text ~___^

First up: ugly cake! Scott and I recently celebrated our sixth wedding anniversary for which the traditional gift is salt. I thought that sounded a little boring so instead I decided to make a salted caramel cake. I wanted to make a layered cake, but I also didn't want it to be huge so I made a rectangle shaped upside down cake, and cut it into smaller circles. The caramel part of the upside down cake means that I didn't have to put anything between the layers.

However, cutting nice looking circles from cake is actually a lot harder than I expected it to be! When I layered them up, I realised how wonky my cake was! >___<

I thought about covering the entire thing in buttercream icing to try and make it look nicer, but ultimately decided that salted caramel layers and a salted caramel sauce poured over the entire thing was probably enough forms of sugar for one small cake so I left it naked and ugly ~___^ We ate it anyway, and it tasted pretty good!

I also made a simple card for Scott. I used a black and white chevron paper to cover a blank card, glued on a square of gold heart patterned paper, and stuck a black and gold embellishment in the middle. I messily scribbled a border around the heart paper with my silver metallic pen and it was done!

Bunnings had a heap of tiny succulents for sale recently, so I brought, ummm, way too many of them. I put one in a tiny teacup to give to a friend for her housewarming, and put two more in two empty tins I kept because they're cute. I added dinosaurs because dinosaurs are awesome.

I put the rest in a bigger pot, and added more dinosaurs and some pretty little rocks. I'm not sure how well that one in the middle is going; I brought it because I thought it was a cool colour, but I'm now thinking that perhaps I brought a dying succulent. Hmm.

I designed a badge to give to some of my derby pals, and recently two of my buddies from skating star classes had their birthday so I used two of the leftover pins to decorate some hair bows. The fabric I used is the same design as the badges, which I got printed from my Spoonflower store.

For my birthday I had an Adventure Time themed party - I didn't take many photos but I did remember to photograph some of the food (the most important part, right! ~___^)

I made Lumpy Space Crackles with using this recipe ... except I didn't put in any cocoa and I used honey instead of maple syrup. I also added some blue and red food colouring which didn't mix in that well. I was hoping for it to make purple, but it mostly didn't. I also put on some star shaped sprinkles to make them more space like ^___^

I brought some Adventure Time cookies, but they didn't taste that great so I made them into chocolate bark, with the addition of salted pretzels and pop rocks. They were a big hit!

I also made a Tree Trunks apple pie; the fancy lattice top was trickier to make then I expected it to be! It tasted really great and even though it was huge, it got demolished really quickly.

These sunglasses were made for my friend Clare for Christmas. Clare has an adorable style and is a big fan of daisies, so I wanted to make her something to suit her look.

All I did to make these was glue little daisy cabochons around the frame of some round sunglasses. It was really easy, but they turned out really cute!

I also made these Wookiee cookies after seeing these super cute biscuits by Sugared Nerd.

I used a mini gingerbread person cutter, and melted chocolate for the details. I adore how they turned out!

I made this chocolate bark for my dad for Christmas - I added almonds, pepitas, pistachios, dried cranberries, and white chocolate chips to melted dark chocolate. I also made Dad some coconut ice using this recipe (except I used Stevia instead of rice malt syrup), a trail mix, and more gingerbread. I added twice the amount of ginger into Dad's batch than I used for the Wookiee cookies because both of us like our gingerbread really spicy (not that he wanted to share! ~___^)

Inspired by Messy Nessy Chic, I made this cheese platter Christmas Tree for after our family lunch. Honestly, we were all a bit too full for this, but we did our best anyway! ^___^

Lastly, I've been working on the Death Star blanket. If you've been a long time reader of this blog, you may remember that I started this project in, oh, 2011. It's been in the WIP box for a long time, but the new movie inspired me to get it back out. I've started joining the squares, which makes the whole project a little more inspiring - I've almost finished the rows with the laser! (Baby steps!) ^___^

- Lisa xx

Pretzel Pillows Crafternoon

Hello! So, usually at my crafternoons everyone just brings whatever they're currently working on and we just sit and chat and eat cake and even occasionally craft ~____^ But when the last one was still in the organisation stages, one of my new-to-crafternoon friends asked, "what are we making?" And so we decided that it might be fun to all focus on making a specific project! We did a little vote on crafts and the winner was the Pretzel Pillow by Studio DIY!

We used brown polar fleece to make our pretzels, and stick on felt for the salt. The backing on the felt is not super sticky, but so far mine has held up ok! I know Bec has been adding some little stitches to her salt pieces to ensure they don't fall off, but the sticky backing actually helps a bit with that, since they don't move while you sew!
 

Bec and Miriam cut our strips of fabric to be 30cm x 200cm, which is little bit bigger than Kelly's instructions recommend, but it worked out fitting better to our fabric ^____^ Boulder and Fran cut up felt salt flakes and I used my sewing machine to turn the fabric strips into tubes.Then we turned them right way out. This part was surprisingly tricky! We left the holes large enough to fit a hand in, but then the tubes were so long, we had polar fleece bunched up around our elbows! We were thinking that a piece of string sewn into the end of the tube might help with the turning, but we didn't try it out (since all the tubes were sewn by the time we started coming up with ideas!).

 

A long dowel is super, super helpful for stuffing and I think we probably used about 1.5kg of polyfill between five of us (which doesn't sound like much, until you remember how light that stuff is!). Then all we had to do was twist and tack and then stick on the salt!

All of our pillows turned out super cute, and we took a group photo to celebrate! Trying to get us and our pretzels in the photo was a bit tricky since my yard is very small - we're thinking that for the next crafternoon I need to set up a photobooth, with a background and all! ~____^

We've got a few more projects planned for our next couple of crafternoons, so it'll be fun to see how they come out! 

- Lisa xx

Glittery antler flower crown

It's the middle of summer here in Australia, so I'm dreaming of cool spring evenings and lush woodland groves. Recently some friends and I were planning a crafternoon and trying to decide which project we would make. I'll show you what we decided on next week, but I couldn't resist recreating one of the other suggested projects - an adorable antlered flower crown by Georgina Doull, featured here on Mollie Makes.

Creating the antlers was definitely the trickiest part of this project; Georgina makes it look so easy, but I made and remade mine several times! I also wasn't sure if I was going to glitter them or not, so I didn't follow her instructions to press the glitter into the clay before baking. Getting the glitter onto the antlers after baking was quite difficult, so if I was to do this again, I would listen to Georgina ^____^

My headband was already covered with white ribbon, so I left it as is. I did use some baby blue ribbon that was originally from a bouquet of flowers to help attach the antlers, but it's barely visible from the front.

The flowers I used are all foam roses. I was originally planning to use some of the larger size roses, that you can see in the top corner in the photo above, but then decided they were too big and instead stuck to the medium and small sizes instead.

 

I cut off the wire stems with scissors and then attached all of the flowers with hot glue. There is a patch were a bit of glue leaked onto the front of the band, but when I'm wearing it the glue isn't visible.

 

The back of the band isn't as pretty as the front; I'm considering making some felt leaves to cover up the backs of the roses.

 

 

I feel like I should be waiting for some fairies to drop by for a tea party while I'm wearing this! ^____^ Despite the clay antlers, it's quite light and very comfortable to wear. I'm thinking it would also be lovely for a Christmas outfit or a casual party costume.

Considering that 2016 starts in two days (whhhaaaatttt??), this will be my last project for the year. Thanks so much for spending time with me; I hope you've had some fun and maybe even found a little crafty inspiration. As always, I love to hear from you; what you enjoyed, what you'd like to see more of, what you created this year, and what you plan to create next.

Enjoy the rest of December, and I'll see you in the new year!

- Lisa xx

Harry Potter book quote ornaments

I'm usually on the fence about book art; I love the look, but the thought of destroying books makes me slightly anxious. However, recently Scott and I were weeding our book collection and we discovered his old copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Teenage Scott was obviously pretty hard on his books, because it was falling apart. Like, literally; the back cover was gone, the binding was shot, and pages were coming out. (Don't worry - mine is still in perfect condition! ~____^)

This was apparently all the encouragement I needed to start destroying it more - and creating some new ornaments out of the leftovers!
 

These are honestly so easy to make. All you have to do is cut up the book pages into thin strips (I cut out single lines of text), push them into clear ornaments (I got mine from the craft store, and the tops come off!), and add some glitter ^____^

I still don't have my big tree up (!!!) so I did a little photo shoot with my baby tree.
 

I really like how they turned out! I chose lines that I thought were interesting, or funny, or just mentioned favourite characters (Fred! ; ______ ;) so it's fun to look at the ornaments and try to read the little sentences.

To all those who celebrate around this time of year, I hope you have a merry, joyous, and/or happy one! To everyone else, I hope you still get a day or two off work! ~____^

- Lisa xx

Harry Potter art canvas

Hello! This year Rebecca and I decided to give each other Halloween gifts ... and then we both promptly didn't finish them in time for actual Halloween. BUT, I have finally finished Rebecca's gift and she has received it and now I can show it to you!

Bec has always said very kind things about my art canvases (which, to be honest, seems like a term which is a bit too fancy for what I actually create, but you can see them here, here, here, and here), so I decided that she better have one of her very own. I decided on a Harry Potter theme since Bec and I are Potterheads from way back, and making this type of canvas is easier if you know lots of random little things about a fandom.

In this picture you can see a library card for Hogwarts: A History with (nerd alert!) names and approximate appropriate dates for confirmed canon Hogwarts students, a laminex heart that I made from a sample card from the hardware store, a stag cutout to represent Harry's patronus, and a whole lot of stamping done with my mini alphabet set. I really love this stamp set, and I use it so much; I didn't really try to get the letters straight on this project though because I felt like it gave a more Daily Prophet style feel.

I made a winged key simply by cutting out two vaguely wing looking shapes from scrapbooking paper and sticking them underneath a wooden key embellishment. I inked the edges of the wings and curled them up a bit to give a bit more texture.

 

Since woodland themes are just going out of fashion in scrapbooking now, I found a huge kit of embellishments and cutouts at the discount shop for super cheap - huzzah! The wings, blue stag card, and the stag cutout from before are all from the same kit. I stuck the wings on with double-sided sticky foam which kinda makes them look like they're floating - perfect for the wingardium leviosa spell! ^___^ I wish I had brought up on supplies a few years ago when owls were in though, because no owls were included in this particular woodland kit ; ___ ;

Other things that you can spot on this canvas include a vintage suitcases sticker from a Amy Tangerine remarks set, a silver crown and Union Jack from a Ruby Rock-It Vintedge (yup, that's how it's spelt!) Imprints sheet, two clocks and a pointing hand also from Ruby Rock-It, two chipboard letters that I coloured gold with a paint pen, kraft paper tags that I wrote and stamped on to make the Hogwarts Express luggage tags and the tag under the HP, and a random gold embellished circle gift tag that I drew a lightning bolt on. Oh, and washi tape. Always washi tape.

 

The most important step of making an art canvas is to mod podge everything down afterwards. Seriously, I tried to skip this step because I thought double-sided tape and glue would be enough. Spoiler alert: it's not. 

I brought a few more canvases while I was at the discount store (seriously the best place to get canvases in this city) so I may have to spread out all my supplies (again) and make a couple more! What fandom would you choose? 

- Lisa xx