Finally, the Final Product

My apologies for how absent I've been. I used up all my brain cells tyring to pull the party together. It was a success, but at what cost? Well, we've finally made a full recovery. All the dishes are cleaned and returned to their rightful owners (I do a lot of borrowing for wide-range baking projects -- I'm still building my permanent collection), all the leftovers are long since eaten or thrown away, and pictures have been posted to their albums, for all to see.

Now, I still owe all of you ("all"--clearly, I am feeling optimistic) some photos and explanations of the rest of the project.

In order to not make this a monumental glut of text thrown at you in one piece, I'll just post some birthday pictures and the simple cakef in this one and make separate posts for the other steps of the project, the way they would have been if I had kept up with this. Enjoy!

The Birthday Girl!

The healthy cake for Iris to eat. This is a carrot cake, with only 1/2 cup of sugar in the whole thing, applesauce instead of oil. Pretty much the healthiest cake ever. I'll put the recipe at the end of the post.

Healthy Carrot Cake

2 cups all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

2 teaspoons baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1/2 cup white sugar

4 eggs

1/3 cups vegetable oil

3/4 cup applesauce

4 cups grated carrots

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease and flour a 9x13 inch pan. Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and cinnamon. Set aside.

In a large bowl, mix together the sugar and eggs until thick and pale. Stir in the oil and applesauce, then gradually mix in the sifted dry ingredients. Fold in the carrots (and 3/4 cup chopped nuts if you want them). Spread evenly into the prepared pan.

Bake for 40 to 45 minutes in the preheated oven, or until a toothpick inserted into the cake comes out clean.

For the party, I baked it in a 10 inch cake pan with rippled edges, and dropped the remaining batter like cookies on a tray (baked about 10 minutes; they were delicious). I topped it with steamed apple slices seasoned with cinnamon, nutmeg, and just a pinch of sugar.

Tired of Gumpaste Yet?

     Yesterday was hectic. And cold. Woke up, got my girl breakfast, took care of cat business, and got the hubby off to school. Then his mom called and reminded us that night was the concert her center was putting on as a fundraiser for the Make-A-Wish Foundation (which we were supposed to be helping with). So as soon as class got out, we headed down there and helped get things prepared. It was fun, but it took me a few hours to regain a normal core temperature; I'm not good at retaining body heat.

     Anyway, as soon as we got home, I put in an hour of paid work and headed to bed. Cue the neighborhood idiot, who I am inclined to call much meaner names. No sooner did I fall asleep than he and his pals decided to hop on their dirtbikes and do laps up and down the street in front of my house.    
     I get mad when people wake me up.
     I get mean when they wake my baby up, and I have to deal with all her crying and not wanting to go back to bed. So, by the time all was peaceful and sleep was an option again, it was 1:30 instead of 10:00. And we all had to be up at the crack of dawn this morning for commitments that had been made weeks in advance...


In other news, we have leaves!

I know, revolutionary, right?

The real news is, I made many, many copies of those two leaves, in gumpaste.

Those are just a few of them. There were dozens! They weren't difficult. I just rolled the gumpaste out pretty thin (a millimeter or two?), placed the leaves, rolled over them once more press the veins into the gumpaste, and traced around them with an X-acto knife. I poked in the wires (hold the leaf firmly with your fingers on the top and bottom so you're pushing the wire between your fingers), and dried them over spoons and whatnot to give them more lifelike shapes.

Then I got some of this:

It's pearl dust. I got green on Thursday, and today I'm getting Gold, so I can do some nice Autumn-ish leaves. The balance is a little heavy on sparkle and light on color for my taste, but it'll work.

I do like the way the pearl dust emphasizes the veins in the leaves, and I'm especially fond of that little curlicue.

I also made eight little acorns. They don't have caps yet, but I feel clever because I devised a way to make them hollow, to cut down on drying time and make them more stable. See?

I just rolled the gumpaste into little balls (same size chunks as the pinched flowers), started a hole most of the way through, just like the flowers, and then widened it with the handle of my X-acto knife.  I may use real acorn caps, I may try and make some. I haven't decided yet. Either way, I'll probably glue them together.

The lilacs are assembled now:

I've added some petals to the gardenias (I know they're not all that realistic, but they're easy and pretty):

And with that, you're all caught up on my doings from the last few days! I'm getting the itch to crochet, and I've been plotting what kinds of things would be most marketable right now (for my Etsy shop), so you may be getting photos of that next time. We shall see!

Until then, behave yourselves. Don't do things that are foolish and rude. It's not nice.

Progress...?

The more I do with these sugar flowers, the bigger the task seems! I think I am making actual progress though. I've constructed wire skeletons for the Lily of the Valley and the Lilac. All those individual flowers are going to take a while, though:

Wires are ready. Curved for Lily of the Valley; Y's for the Lilacs. And gumpaste bits, ready to form cones.

Poke a little hole most of the way through the cone, and slice it into petals. Most of mine had 5 petals.

Pinch the petals (both ways) to shape them, and voila! Tiny flowers!

I let them stiffen for a few minutes before threading in the wires.

My tiny garden.                                                                 Close-ups

Cute bird:

That's all for now, folks!

P.S. Finished the dress! Ta-da!!: 

Brown County

This weekend we went to Brown County with the family for a little sightseeing. Mostly, it was to get pictures of our gorgeous princess. The bottom line is, I didn't get any crafting done, but I have some darn cute excuses. Want to see?

First off, I was just blown away by these photos. She's not even a year old, what's she doing making poses like this??

Gorgeous! Anyway, here are a few more cute photos from the day:

First photo of the day, she was still sleepy from the drive there. She snagged the flowers from someone's garden on the way by. It didn't take her long to wake up and start exploring, though:

Of course, she found a cat, and had to snuggle. This is Harriet; she is also very patient, as you can see. She's used to kids, I imagine.
Anyhow, the crafting will reconvene sometime this afternoon; I have a lot of sugar flowers to finish!

Deadlines

So, here I am, with a dozen unfinished projects, and instead of working on them, I am blogging about working on them. Doesn't that make sense? This is my thought: stating my intentions helps me follow through. Ergo, blogging about the things I want to do, will hopefully help me follow through on them. And who knows, maybe someone will stumble across this and be inspired, or at least entertained.

First up, we have sugar flowers and a princess dress.

First the flowers, because this is the only photo I have of them. These flowers are my destiny, because I got all inspired, bought the stuff, got this far, and gave up because they kept breaking. I had not completely given up, I just stopped looking at them, in hopes that the gumpaste fairy would come along and finish them for me. Then, the whole kit and caboodle got knocked on the floor by this handsome fellow:

The flowers are my fate because, miraculously, nothing broke when it fell. That's right: the pieces were breaking as I attempted to assemble them, but survived a five-foot fall without incident. Not only that, but my husband, in a rather uncharacteristic move, noticed and picked them all up for me. So I'm going to have to work on those this weekend. They're supposed to be for my daughter's birthday cake, one month from now. I've come up with ideas for a cake way beyond my level of experience & "expertise" but still want to attempt it, so I'll have my work cut out for me. I'll give more details as I have photos to accompany them.

On to the dress! Here is what I have finished so far:

For about a month and a half, I've had all the pieces cut out, and the bodice basted, but got frustrated with trying to figure out how to get it to turn properly and, like the flowers, stopped looking at it in hopes it might turn itself. It didn't, and with Halloween rapidly approaching, I decided I had to get my act together or it wouldn't be finished in time for my little princess to wear it. So yesterday I finished everything except the hem at the bottom, and tacking down those little black flappy bits at the shoulders (it's actually sleeveless).

I'm pretty proud of the princess neckline. It's hard to see, but you can kind of make it out, right? I know it's not much of an accomplishment in and of itself, but I didn't have a pattern to help me, just measured my girl and started sketching. I also made it solely from scraps of fabric I had left over from other projects, which was a bit of an ordeal. On at least two occasions, I thought I had ruined it because I had to cut each piece perfectly, no room for spare pieces. But I managed to make it work. See how the back hem comes down to a point? This is because I cut two left sides, so I sewed the outsides together and let it be a little pseudo-train.  That seam near the bottom of the gold center panel is where I didn't have a long enough piece of fabric, so I'm covering it with a decoration of those little fuzzy flowers and leaves on the black fabric. I cut several out to attach to the gold and cover the seam. Probably with glue... Necessity is indeed the mother of invention, or at least, ingenuity.

This is the pattern that will cover the seam. Here are all the pieces separately:

I seem to always end up making things complicated, but I just can't help myself.

In order to make this blog a little more useful to whoever might come upon it, I'll go ahead and put up a pattern & instructions for the dress, as soon as I can get them set up. Don't hold your breath, but I will try to be expedient.