Cricut Cake Premier!

Today I had a go with my Cricut Cake machine - I was expecting to have a lot of hassle since everything I'd read online had said how difficult it was to use but my first go at cutting letters out went well.
I made a two layer cake in the shape of a book and covered it with brown and gold icing for the cover and pages. I used the brown food colouring as a type of distress paint to make the book look older and added a red icing ribbon 'bookmark'.
 I cut the letters and rat out of black fondant icing. I just coloured the ready made white fondant icing from Tescos using gel food colouring. I rolled the icing out fairly thinly and then rolled it onto the cricut mat (which I had covered in vegetable oil as a substitute for shortening which is what was suggested). Once on the mat I rolled it again to make it even thinner and to give it a better grip to the mat. The letters cut first time though I found getting them off the mat and onto the cake the trickiest bit! I ended up using my Nick Nairn cook school scraper which is really thin.
I had to hand cut the rat since there was nothing like it on any of my cartridges.
I'm pleased with the result. In March I'm hoping to make a cake which is a stack of Harry Potter themed books with a sorting hat on top - this first attempt at a book bodes well.
I should say that I chose Pied Piper because I am producer for one of our school shows which is rehearsing tomorrow - the play? ...Pied Piper! I have made 80 cupcakes to go along side the book cake to feed the cast during their break tomorrow.

Tag Challenge

Here is my Layout for the tag layout challenge on the Scrapology blog. I wanted my tags to be functional so I decided to make my layout a puzzle. Roxy and Skye are so similar, both being brown spotted Bengals. One day, looking at photos of both of them I had to look really carefully to work out which was which.I mounted the photos on pockets and the tags at the top pull up to reveal the name of the cat in the photo. Can you tell who's who?

The background is Tim Holtz kraft resist paper with vintage photo distress ink swiped over. I cut the tags and clocks from Jillibean Soup Kraft patterned paper.

Scrapology blog candy!!

There's still time to enter the Scrapology Blog candy give away over on the Scrapology blog. They're giving away this....

I'm now off to my craft room to have a play and join in their tag LO challenge. Hopefully I'll have something to upload tomorrow!!

 

drawing everyday in 2013

So I haven't done that well with the drawing every day - though I have managed to finish one drawing by doing a little bit most days, here she is...

Hopefully you can recognise Madonna from her Vogue days.
For those who didn't see my earlier post, I was inspired by blogger Penny who decided to challenge herself to draw every day. You must check out her drawing - she is SO talented!!
My next drawing project is going to be something for one of my Pay-it-forward people on Facebook (I'm giving a gift to 5 friends on FB who in turn will give a gift to 5 friends and so on...)

100% Recycled

I love this sort of challenge - where you have to use recycled materials. This was the December 2012 card challenge on the Scrapology blog and I was delighted to find out that the deadline was not until 15th Jan - so I still had time to have a go.
My card is made from 100% recycled materials (not counting adhesives!!)
I used some packaging from inside a box to make the actual card which I cut out using a nestabilities die and my Big Shot. The rest of the card was made with pages from an old book (falling to bits!), the brown paper packing from inside a box of Amazon purchases (I embossed it using a Stampin Up! embossing folder) and the red gems on wires were rescued from the crackers on Christmas Day! I used my new Distress Markers (thank you, Jonathan!) to colour the ribbon and lettering (Cut using Sizzlits) and some walnut ink distress ink to distress the edges of everything (including the rosette made from the smallest Tim Holtz rosette die.)

Hmmm - makes me wonder why I spend so much money on patterned papers!!

Scrapology Challenge

I loved the layout by Pam Thorburn on the Scrapology blog and decided I had to have a go at lifting it. Here's my example - since I have no baby photos to scrap it had to be one of Claudia, since I thought her colouring would work well with the all white theme. Off to have a go at their recycled card and tag LO challenges. Still got to finish today's drawing too!

More Zentangling!

Yes - even more Zentangling - great thing to do while watching (or at least half watching) TV!! I wanted to be a little more 'freeform' with this one and started by drawing the large heart. I used ideas from my 'sampler' plus some other ideas from Google Images.

I also made my husband a 24inch square canvas for his London flat - just by enlarging one of the squares from the sampler. I got cheap canvases from Dunelm mill and then just used a Sharpie marker - makes really great, quick, cheap art!

In other news - I got my craft room tidied up and ready for action...!

WOYWW

Oh - where do I start - literally!! It's not that I haven't done any crafting - but as the craft room gets worse and worse through the rounds of house tidying which are accompanied by cries of "just shove it on the desk in my craft room~" - it gradually mounts up and the crafting has to be done elsewhere.
Ok - so today's job is to dig down through the layers and find my workspace - that way I can actually get round to the task of doing my January DT work.
I'm also dying to have a play with my Cricut Cake - but that's a whole other workspace.

Later...after a day of tidying...
I've also decided to try and join another blogger on her mission to draw every day - Penny has done some amazing drawings so far - check out her blog. Goodness knows where I'll find the time so I probably won't manage portrait style drawing every day. Good thing about drawing is that I don't need to do it in my craft room which is good since it isn't finished yet!
More tomorrow!

Zentangling

I decided to have a go at Zentangling  - though I'm not sure why it's not just called doodling - there's probably a really good reason! I had a look at some amazing examples on Google Images and YouTube - too many to start putting links to here, but thanks to everyone whose zentangles are online who inspired me.
For my first attempt I had a go at a zentangle sampler... I'll try to upload a better quality picture at some point...

 

I'll definitely do more 'zentangling' as it's something I can do when out and about (did some of this one in the waiting room when visiting my FIL in hospital). I used a piece of white mount board and a fairly ordinary black pen.