Crafting With Friends

This past Saturday myself and Donna put on another crop, we call ourselves "Creative Cuts".  Donna came up with the catchy name last year.  One of my biggest dilemmas when attending a crop is what to bring.  I never have gotten this down to a science, I always bring too much.  Some stuff I end up never opening the bag, you would think I would learn.

I aim to have a plan, this time around I knew I would be working on a banner for Donna's daughters first birthday.  She had picked out some great pink and orange paper she wanted to use.  Between the set up and just greeting everyone I don't think I actually sat down at my seat until 11:30, meanwhile I was there since 8:30 to get ready but that is a whole other story.

I asked Donna lots of questions about what her expectations were because well after all this was for a special occasion.  She wanted the borders to be scalloped, I love that too.  I had a little panic at first though because I couldn't find the scalloped square on the Cricut, shout-out to Heidi for locating it and making me feel better.  Phew.

Once everything was cut out, assembly began.  One of the final decisions was to bling or not to bling.  Bling it was and I am so happy with how it came out.

Happy 4th of July Cake

I originally saw this cake over at Crafty Mama, I love the look of it but did not love the recipe.  I am all for baking from scratch, but I really felt a cake mix would do in this case.  This cake was more about the look for me at least.

I used two cake mixes for all the layers.  In each of the two 8 inch cake pans I would pour 1 cup of cake batter in, and bake them two at a time as all I own is two 8 inch pans.  The layers still came out a little thicker than I had planned.

The blue layer was made with 2 cups of batter as it had to be the thickness of 2 red layers.  If you follow the directions from Crafty Mama, you will cut a circle out of a piece of parchment or wax paper for the top layer.  Well I guess you can say I cheated, or made this step a little easier.  I used a large biscuit cutter to cut the center out of the blue layer, and then cut the center of a red layer to fill in the blue layer.  Okay did I confuse you yet?

Well the cake was a really tall layer cake and I really didn't think it would survive the icing part, it tilted from side to side and I did panic a little bit.  The cake at least made it to the table and I was able to cut a few slices before it took a mysterious nose dive off the plate when I turned my back.