50th Birthday

Not a lot of text today as I've been either in bed or on the sofa since Sunday with the dreaded lurgy and today I'm channelling Phyllis from Corrie with my growly voice!

However, last week was a busy week from a crafting point of view as it was a friends 50th and I made her a jewellery gift and a tower of cupcakes for her party.  The cupcakes were somewhat of a marathon, especially in my tiny kitchen, so I had to put up my culinary paste table to hold all 120 of them....

I made 3 flavours - coconut and raspberry with malibu american frosting, chocolate with chocolate ganache and my personal favourite, caramel mud cakes with baileys toffee cream frosting.  I topped the whole tower off with the birthday girls favourite flavour in cake form - lemon with lemon curd cream cheese frosting.

As these were special cakes, for a special birthday, I wanted to decorate them in a style to suit the party girl, so I  made sparkly pink glittered stars, black glittered 50's and disco glittered cocktail glasses.  All made out of fondant, painted with edible glitter and some extra glitter on top for added birthday sparkle!

Unfortunately, the birthday girl herself didn't make it to her party as she was unwell, but the cakes went down well with the guests and family took some home for my friend.

She's a bit of a jewellery fiend, and liked the last necklace we made at jewellery class, so I adapted the design and made it in pink and silver, along with a matching charm style bracelet.  Hopefully she'll be well enough to party soon and give them an outing.  Happy 50th and get well soon xxx

September's Jewellery Class Designs

In the class at Craft Den on Saturday 4th September, we will be making two bracelets:

A simple daisy chain, where the first daisy becomes the fastener for the bracelet.

 
A double-linked chain with Thai-silver melons and rainbow seed-beads.

If you want to join us and learn a new skill - call the Craft Den on 0114 2340732 to book a place.  The class costs just £8 for 2 hours hands-on tuition and this includes all the materials you need to make both bracelets which are yours to keep after the class.

Bank Holiday Weekend Beading Project

As I sat to watch our usual slaughtering on the annual Eurovision "we're an island with no friends" contest, I thought I had better have something to distract me from my frustrations at our numerous 'nil points' scores so I decided to have a go at a rather complicated beading project that I've had for a while.

It is a bead weave bracelet, in pretty shades of green, blue and purple made up of 4mm bicones and seed beads.  The pattern looked pretty incomprehensible to begin with, but once I got into the rhythm of the count I only made 3 mistakes.  I wished I'd done it on fireline rather than nymo as I split the thread unpicking one such mistake half way through but I managed to knot in a new piece where the knot shouldn't be noticeable - you need arms about 3ft long with these projects to stop the long lengths of thread from kinking :-)

Anyway, mishaps aside, I think the finished piece turned out pretty well....  (you may need to click the photo to enlarge it to see it properly as it hasn't come out that well once blogger has resized it to fit the page)