Tinkerbell Cake

Today's cake... Tinkerbell!

Pretty cupcake experiments

I'm coming to Handmade Monday a bit late this week for various reasons, but I thought I'd show you some pretty cupcake experiments I made a few days ago. I have a big fair coming up on Sunday and although I'll make much more basic cupcakes for that, I need to be able to show what I can do. Hopefully I'll get a chance to do some more this week and next Monday I hope to have a decent report on the Taunton Fair and Motor Show!

Anyway, here are the posh cupcakes!

Triceratops cake!

This week's Handmade Monday theme for me yet again is cakes! I was asked to make a dinosaur cake for a friend's son's birthday. I didn't know it was a triceratops until the day before though, otherwise his collar would have stood up properly! Anyway, I'll keep my post short. Suffice to say I had a lot of fun making this and I really hope they liked it!

Postman Pat, Postman Pat, Postman Pat and his black and white cat!

My sons were two yesterday, so for this week's Handmade Monday, I thought I'd share their birthday cake with you. They are more than a little obsessed with everyone's favourite postman at the moment, so the subject matter wasn't even up for discussion. I made it as easy for myself as I could and did Pat and Jess on a break, not because I couldn't be bothered, but because for various reasons I didn't start it until gone 10.00 on Saturday night! Feeling rather pleased with my efforts, I crawled into bed well after midnight, only to wake in the night in a panic because I hadn't made any glasses for Pat! Luckily that was easily remedied yesterday morning.

My hard work was rewarded when the usual cries of 'CACK' (why they call cake cack I've no idea, but it's kind of caught on!) were joined by even more excited cries of 'PAT, MUMMY! JESS!' Hooray, success, they recognised them! Do you?!

My other cake project this week was a simple 40th birthday cake. Pink and glittery, fabulous!

Papercut card tutorial

Well, I promised that I would do a post about how to design a paper cut card, so here it is! I'll do it really simply, with lots of pictures and try to explain in English- I'm not making any promises though!

You really don't need much- a card blank, some paper to line the card, a pen/pencil, a sheet of scrap paper and a craft knife (and ideally a cutting mat, but I can't find mine so am currently blunting knives at a rate of knots using a piece of card to protect the desk!)

The first step and probably the hardest, is to think of a design. I need to make a new home card for my brother, so I'm going for a house with 'New Home' inside it. Draw the outline of your design onto scrap paper, but make sure it'll fit on the front of your card first.

Sketch in the wording/interior of your shape. When you realise you can't fit all of the letters in, adapt your outline!

When you are happy with the design, start to block in the bits you are going to cut out. Remember that the paper surrounding your shape is the card and therefore, your interior bits need to join to it or they will fall out. If you have done this correctly, it should become obvious when you block it in- just don't draw lines anywhere you're not going to cut like I've done in the photo below.

Place your template over your card on your cutting mat and start to cut away the shaded areas.

When you lift away your template, you may find that you need to go over the design with the knife again in some places.

That's it! Add your lining paper, and voila, a super-impressive paper cut card!