Pilgrims Cake

Maddy and I have been obsessed with Cake Challenge and Cake Boss lately. I used to hate getting up on Monday mornings but now that the new Cake Challenge is on each Sunday night - we get up an hour earlier and watch it together on Tivo while we get ready for the day. I have to admit, Monday mornings are now one of my favorite times of the week (and watching 'Dallas' reruns as a family on Monday nights :)) Anyway we decided to give it a go for ourselves, did a bit of research online and were really thrilled with our first effort for Thanksgiving!

Some lessons we learned...

* Fondant cracks and dries really quickly - zap it in the microwave to make it easier to work with but for no longer than 5 seconds or so since it becomes really gooey and sticky if it's heated for any longer than that.
* Wax paper stops fondant from sticking to the table but makes it difficult to roll it out. Try flour, icing sugar or confectioner's sugar instead and you can wash it off with water afterwards.
* Keep your equipment on a separate counter so that you can grab whatever you need quickly and still have a large work surface. We were drowning in 'stuff' and really struggled to stay organized since we had no idea just how much space we would need!
* Making a fondant cake takes a lot longer than you may think (2-3 hours for this one but we were very slow). That said, the good news is that the cake itself is good for about 3 days if refrigerated and you can always freeze them too so you don't have to make the cake on the actual day.
* Enjoy - we thought it was a lot of fun!!

It's a small, small world!

I noticed some extra traffic to the crafts site lately from Italy and poked around a bit to try and figure out what was going on. Turns out an Italian lady with over 650 followers did a post on her crafts blog about diaper cakes and linked to my blog post (My Diaper Cake post) on here about the one I made for Liz! Isn't that funny? Two moms crafting and blogging just in different languages. It makes me appreciate just how similar we all really are :)

Give fleece a chance...

After I lost two hours of my life last night trying (and failing) to get the brand new (and hardly inexpensive) sewing machine to sew fleece, I woke up this morning and decided to call a pro. Mum had no idea and then I remembered the internet. Apparently this is a fairly common problem and if you don't want to waste time with an extra foot or a new wheel or something, you can just put tissue paper under the fleece fabric and simply tear it off afterwards. It worked like a treat and we made our first fleece toy today which Madison hasn't put down since :).
Good times x

And another a couple of days later...

Maddy's fashion designs

Maddy spent hours designing paper clothes. She loves buttons like I do :). Aren't they adorable?

Thriller pumpkin!

OK so here's the stencil if you fancy having a go...it actually wasn't half as difficult as it looked...shhhhh!!

MJ pumpkin stencil link