Cakes, cookies, and pie! Oh, my!

A modified version of this post was featured on Scrap Our Stash Show n Tell Sunday on November 22, 2010!

Thanksgiving is right around the corner and Christmas is lurking in the shadows! I can't believe the holidays are already here! The season is filled with pies, cookies, candies, and all types of cinnamon-y goodness. This year though, I'm saying move over to my traditional pumpkin and apple pies and I'm making room for CAKE! I just started taking a cake decorating class which I'm hoping will lead to more cross-crafting goodness (I envision matching cakes, invitations, and birthday cards...not to mention the memory-laden scrapbook pages! The first victim of all of this matching will be my mother-in-law who will be here on Wednesday!) It's really good timing too, everyone at work has already given up on their diets and I have a super easy method for pawning off my many decorated cakes! Here's a shot of my first at-home practice cake.

It's a strawberry cake (semi-homemade) with (homemade) dark chocolate frosting. To add to my repertoire of cake skills I also torted it (meaning it's filled with delicious strawberry jam)! It's kind of a little guy because I wanted to get some extra practice out of my extra layers, but I think it turned out pretty good anyway. The sides were deliciously smooth and then I made the grand mistake of pulling the wax paper out from under the edges of my cake. *Sigh* Should have put them closer to the edge of the cake. I guess it was a good thing though because I got to try a part of the cake (the chunk that stuck to the paper) before anyone else! Woo hoo!

I took it to work to welcome a new member to our team and the cake quickly disappeared! My boss made one recommendation for the next cake "bigger or nastier...you can't bring in tiny delicious cakes, that's just not right!" I guess if I never get the hang of writing, I've certainly got the flavor aspect covered! (Ugly cakes have fewer calories, right?) One of the guys on my team also teaches a cake decorating class so, it's pretty nice to be getting tips from him on my at home practice cakes as well as my normal cakes.

I'll be posting my cakes weekly on my blog as I go through all of the decorating courses. Wish me luck! Tomorrow we are doing a gel transfer on our cakes! Eeeep!

November Challenge at Scrap Our Stash

First and foremost - make sure you check out the Scrap Our Stash blog to see my original post!

I have been super busy figuring out how to make friends out here in Ohio. I think I've found the answer...stalk anyone at work who even mentions any kind of craft until they finally agree to hang out with you! It's this kind of resolve that has resulted in a couple of good opportunities to hang out with some new people and impersonate a socially functional person!

Most of the time though, I hang out at home with the hubby and spend a lot of time baking. Why baking? 1) I love to bake! 2) My craft area has been a disaster ever since we moved to Ohio! It was clean once, then I started going through our remaining boxes from the move and giving things away on FreeCycle. It turns out that my craft desk is the dumping ground for the few items we're keeping. Well, it's finally clean now, errr, was clean! I got it all prettied up just in time to catch a glimpse of Sketch 3 over at SOS! It all went downhill from there!

Here's the lo (It's a Disney one! Woo hoo!) and all the deets from the original post:

When I saw the sketches, I knew that I had the perfect moment to scrapbook! These three photos are from our trip to Disneyworld in February and I fell in love with the castle. (Unfortunately, I don't think the hubby would like a book filled with castle layouts!) I knew I needed to make it into an 8x8 which is why I modified the number of images, but there was something else that struck me.

While creating this layout I just knew that I was going to need the perfect "Thickers" to give my title the right emphasis...so, I made my own! I Used a previous Frugal Friday tip that drew me to the SOS Blog! I chose my favorite magical feeling font (It's a Sizzix font called Sunset) and some fun, silver, glittery, self-adhesive foam and created a custom title for my page. The remaining elements are cut from self-adhesive metal that I colored using my Copic markers. In the end, I ended up with a truly homemade, cost effective, memory capturing page! Perfect for someone who just received their first student loan bill in the mail, no?


If you haven't had a chance yet, pull out those crafty supplies and play! There's plenty of time to get in on the November challenge!

A long, long time ago...

I can still remember... when I used to craft all the time! Hahahaha!

I made this tag way back when Claire first announced the tag challenge and I'm just now posting it. Things have been quiet on the blog front for a while now because I've been working on Christmas cards and presents. While that means my blog suffers, I think it's a hit I'm willing to take right now. For the sake of meeting new people though, I may just have to go to another crop...and post more! :D
So here's my WMS inspired elegant tag.

Can you pick out the WMS stamp sets I used? There are two and I'm betting Laurie can pick them out. I was thinking that this tag would be excellent for a secret santa gift at work but I'm not sure how that will work since (a) my coworkers all have this blog address and (2) I don't think this particular group of people are going to be game for doing a gift exchange. Maybe I'll have to be a little more sneaky!

Thanks again for the challenge Claire!