Christmas craft fair - decorations for the tree

Last year one of the school mums and I discovered that we both like crafting. Melinda has an amazing stash of crafting goodies and we decided that once Justin was at school full time we would try to get together every Thursday morning for a bit of crafting for the soul time.

Coming out of that was the idea that we would take a table at the school Christmas craft fair and so we started in September making lots of different things that we could sell. A huge number of the items have been inspired by Pinterest and we have had great fun making them all.

We started with some decorations for the Christmas tree.

I had seen the simplest wire angels, made from butterfly paperclips, that I was desperate to make. Unfortunately the wire paperclips for these are not generally available to buy in the UK (even on eBay!) but fortunately Melinda is from the US and often goes back on holiday so managed to track them down and came home with a large supply of them. 

So we set to and made large and small angels, with a mixture of ribbon colours and a mixture of bead heads. The final touch was to add a label and the finished angels have gone down a storm with all who have seen them - creating orders way beyond the Christmas Craft Fair. So glad other people liked them too ...

Another decoration I made for the tree was a simple wooden star. I bought the stars from our local craft shop and drilled little holes in the top of each one. I then cut a square of hessian (from my stash of things I keep that will come in useful some day!) which I attached to the star by threading some bakers twine through the hole in the star and through the hessian. The finishing touch was a simple button with some bakers twine threaded and knotted through and glued into the middle of the star.

I also made a snowflake decoration, but didn't have time to make lots of these and ended up keeping the prototype for myself. It was made by cutting a snowflake out of sticky back glitter foam using one of the dies from my Sizzlits snowflakes set, sticking the remaining square onto white felt and attaching a button to the middle with a knotted piece of bakers twine in the middle.

© 2013 Nicola Noble: Please observe the rules of copyright and blog etiquette. If you use my ideas or images, please link back to my blog. And do let me know - I'd love to take a look.

Moshi Monster party - the cake

Sophie decided she wanted a Moshi Monster birthday cake with individual moshlings on top rather than a cake in the shape of a moshling (which I was hoping for, as it would have been much easier!). I contacted the ever helpful Fans of Cake Baker on Facebook for ideas and some lovely ladies kindly supplied photos of cakes they had done. I had an idea of what I wanted to do and thankfully one of the photos matched the vague visions in my head and helped solidify the final design.

I started making the moshlings in fondant about three weeks ago, as I knew that they would need some time to harden up. I found some images online and then shrunk the images to the size I wanted the actual moshlings to be. Sophie and I chose six (as she was six): her favourite, Oddie the doughnut; Justin's favourite, Hansel the gingerbread man; and four others that she liked and I thought might be possible to make. I was very pleased with the finished moshlings, all except for the cupcake Cutie Pie which was the only one that I felt wasn't quite right.

I chose to make chocolate sponge (like soil under the green hill) and baked four layers to give me the height; I really need to invest in a set of matching cake tins as I only have one 9" tin which meant I had to mix and bake, mix and bake x 4. This was time consuming but did mean that each layer cooked perfectly.  I added a bit of fun by colouring the buttercream between each layer a different vibrant colour: blue, pink and yellow.

I also mastered a new skill by covering the cake and board in one go (rather than covering the board first and then the cake separately). I thought this might be tricky but it actually worked much better than I had hoped. 

I then decorated the cake with a few simple things (after all the moshlings were the main decoration): a fence, gate and some flowers. I embossed the strips of "fence" with a curly embosser (I don't have a wood effect one but will invest in one at some point) which added a bit of texture to the fence. The gate required a bit of thought to get it looking right but I was pleased with the end result. 

I added flowers growing up the fence and used Sophie's Buster's Lost Moshlings book for inspiration. These included an orange mushroom tree and some star blossoms in pink and blue. I added royal icing stems and leaves to these and glued some shimmery nonpareil around the bottom of the cake and in pools around the flowers.

I finished by adding Sophie's name and six tall candles and voila, one Moshi Monster cake all finished.

In addition to the main cake, I also made some faux ice-creams. I baked cupcakes in flat bottomed ice cream cones and then piped bright buttercream swirls and added some glitter. Advice on how to do this again from Fans of Cake Baker on Facebook: fill the cones two thirds full with cake batter and bake as normal, then once cool, prick the bottom of the cones to stop them going soggy. Perfect! 

I am pleased to say that the Moshi Monster cake falls into the same category as Justin's monster birthday cakes as one that "just makes me smile". I hope it does for you too ...

© 2012 Nicola Noble: Please observe the rules of copyright and blog etiquette. If you use my ideas or images, please link back to my blog. And do let me know - I'd love to take a look.