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.

This year's Christmas cake - 2011

I have just finished decorating my Christmas cake and overall I am quite pleased with the finished look.

I bought a ready made un-iced fruit cake from M&S and then had to remind myself what I had been taught on my cake decorating course last year about covering with marzipan and icing. I think I got it right: I filled the imperfections/dents in the cake with small balls of marzipan then made apricot glaze which I spread onto the cake before covering with a thin layer of marzipan; I then rubbed some vodka over the marzipan before topping with white fondant icing. I left it for a week for the fondant to harden slightly and the cake was then ready to decorate.

I had decided some time ago that I wanted to do something with gingerbread men. When it came down to it I just couldn't get inspired but I trawled the net and pinned them all to a board on Pinterest and ultimately found a greetings card that I liked the look of.

The next thing to sort was the gingham. There is a group on Facebook (Fans of Cake Baker) which contains the most helpful cakey people and I asked them for advice. Within about five minutes of posting my question, I had a selection of helpful responses, of which one was buying a cake topper sheet of fondant with red gingham printed on in edible inks. This arrived within two days of ordering and I then set to putting the design together.

I cut a square of the gingham and attached it to the cake with water. My gingerbread man cutter turned out to be too small so I printed out an image I liked, cut out the template and cut around that onto the gingerbread coloured fondant (made from chestnut brown and yellow colouring). I then made some red buttons with my button mould and cut some stars out in the gingerbread coloured fondant and attached these around the cake alternating with some gingham stars. I created the gingham ones by sticking the gingham topper to a thin roll of white fondant and cutting the stars from this. I was using a plastic cutter so the shape was not as clean as I would have liked but I think it would work better with a metal cutter.

I had to stop at this point and although I was pleased with how it was coming together, I really felt that it wasn't looking very Christmassy.

Thankfully, my lovely sister-in-law suggested that I put a santa hat on the gingerbread man and that finally gave me the inspiration I was looking for. I added some ric-rac on the legs and arms and a holly decoration (not edible) on the hat. 

I finished off with some pearl lustre spray. It was my first time using this in an aerosol form and I went a bit mad and also held it a bit close in some places so it pooled and left tide marks. It also gave the white fondant an antique feel which sort of works for this design. 

The sad thing now is that I promised my sister that she could have half the cake for her Christmas celebrations - but where do I cut it? Think she can have the legs!

Merry Christmas everyone - I hope that you all have a fun holiday period full of yummy food.

© 2011 Nicola Noble