Birthday Board

When I first joined Pinterest a few months ago, my first pin was a Birthday Board made by Christiney. I LOVED it so much that I knew I wanted to make one and so it's the first project I've made during my summer holidays.

Here is my version:

When we moved into our house last year, there was a pile of extra floorboard, from when the previous owners had put down the hardwood floor in our downstairs. I used one of the longer boards (76cmm x 13cm) and painted it white with normal white emulsion paint. It required 2 coats.

The lettering was bought on ebay - this company do various different sizes and colours and you can choose your font- I went with pink and silver- size 75mm for my 'Fi's Birthdays' lettering and size 25mm for the month letters. The font for both is harrington. It was very reasonably priced and super easy to apply.

The circles are wooden and I bought them from WoodCraftShapes. Possibly not the cheapest, but they will drill the holes for free which seemed a good deal to me :-) I bought 3 packs of the 38mm x 38mm x 3mm size. I painted the circles using some little pots I had in my stash (not sure where they came from) and then used a black promarker to write the names and date on each circle.  I have written the year of birth on the back too to keep me right with when big birthdays come up.  They are then attached to the board with little hooks and 8mm silver jump rings from Beads Unlimited.

I've seen a few other examples of boards with hearts for anniversaries and my plan is to buy some of these to add in too, as well as some more Birthdays that I still need to attach.

Lastly I attached two small 'D ring' hooks to the back so that I can hang it up!

Fi

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Rainbow Cake

One of my pupils had a bake-off recently, to raise money for a voluntary project she's undertaking next year. This is my entry- dead simple, but looks very effective!

I made a normal Victoria Sponge recipe ad doubled it- 400g butter, 400g sugar, 400g self-raising flour, 8 eggs, 2 tablespoons of milk, 1 teaspoon of Baking Powder. I then divided this into 6 bowls and added lots of food colouring paste- they need to be vibrant colours so that when baked they still look like this-

Once  baked and cooled, I stacked the cakes together using lots of buttercream icing, which I then also used to cover the whole thing. As you can see it's a pretty tall cake-

I then decorated it with coloured sugar-covered chocolate balls and used my lettering tiles to emboss the message "Great TGA Bake Off", which i then iced over with blue writing icing-

Here's the finished cake, being sliced up and ready for sale at £2 a slice :-)

AND here's my certificate and wooden spoon for coming 2nd in the Staff section. Some raspberry and buttercream cupcakes won.

Handbag Cake

I made this cake for my 30th Birthday last week- it's not totally perfect, but I am very impressed and happy with how it came out!

I used a white chocolate mud cake recipe (from planet cake) for the base, having previously tried to use a normal victoria sponge and it sinking under the weight when I tried to carve it. I bake a square cake, which I sliced in half, before stacking together with vanilla buttercream icing.  I then wrapped the cake in clingfilm and stuck it in the freezer overnight.

The following day I let it thaw for an hour or so and then started to shape it using a really sharp knife. When I was happy with the shape, I covered it with more vanilla buttercream, then left it in fridge to harden overnight.

The next step was to cover it in sugarpaste- before doing this I used a hot knife to get the buttercream as smooth as possible. I used 2 x 250g blocks of amethyst purple regalice (purchased from www.cakecraftstore.co.uk). I rolled it out and cut a rectangular strip the width of the cake to begin with, with two semi circles cut out of each side, and I then placed this over the cake from front to back. The next job was to cut rectangles for the sides, which i then curved the edges of. I made these slightly bigger than the space left so that they would overlap the section already on the cake. I also covered a cake board with white regalice.

The next steps involved cutting square pockets for the front of the bag, which have slightly smaller squares on top as little flaps. A small ball squashed flat then forms the button/buckle. These are 'painted' with antique silver sugarflair edible lustre. I also cut a long thing strip for the zip and made a little zip pull using a small ball and a small rectangle- all again painted with lustre. These were all added with a little bit of water brushed on to the back. You will see that the regalice is a bit wet here- it soon dries up though. I used a 'stitching' tool to create the look at stitches on the pocket and and the edges were the front and side sections meet.

After this, I faffed about with decorating the base with numbers and little balls of white icing to put my candles into. I also used a lettering set to create an 'embossed' message, which I then iced pink sparkly writing icing .

The last thing to do is the handles- I left the whole cake in the fridge overnight and did the handles on the morning of my party.  They are made with 8mm flexible tubing that I found on ebay. The purple icing is simply wrapped around the tube and then I used dowels pushed inside the tube to attach these to the top of the cake. This is definitely the hardest part of the making the cake- it's hard to get them smooth enough and you might need to use something to prop them up while you wait for them to solidify (I had to do this with the back handle- you can see it's trying to fall backwards in the 1st photo below!)

The last of the Christmas Cards

All this snow has allowed me to get on with finishing off making my cards, writing them all, getting my Christmas shopping (including purchasing my CB SS gift) done online and even getting what has arrived already wrapped up and under the tree.

Here are the last of my cards for Christmas 2010!

Thanks for looking
Fi
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Bird Calendars

I’ve been a busy bee this morning, making these two 2011 calendar easel cards!

One is for my mum and the other is for Martin’s mum. They follow the same theme of the birthday card I made last week for Martin’s dad’s birthday.

I really enjoyed making these and they were so simple- a couple of bird cut outs (from a marianne die) and lots of patterned paper, gems and flowers- easy

Thanks for looking!
Fi
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Quick Peel Off Cards

I love these tree and christams wreath peel off and gem cards! So simple to do

Sorry, the picture quality isn’t great- the camera was focussing on the glitter and the mirri card

Fi
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Christmas Gifts- Pails of sweeties

Last night and earlier this week, I have been working on these two pails to fill with sweeties for Martin’s mum and sister for Christmas.

They are super hard to photograph and look way better in real life, but here is a flavour of what they look like!

Fi
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