Pam's - - th Birthday Cake

To protect the innocent, I did not include her age.

Pam at work has the same birthday as Art. I told her I wanted to make her a cake, and she got really excited. She said she liked strawberry cake, and I happened to have a box of it at home.

Cake Details:
Duncan Hines Strawberry Supreme cake mix
Frozen, unsweetened strawberries.
Vanilla Buttercream frosting.

I thawed the berries in water, then sliced them. I put a VERY thin layer of icing on the inside, and put all the berries on there. It was a thin layer, but just enough berry to get a pop of the flavor in your mouth.

I decorated it with violet-tinted thin-consistency icing, which wasn't my best work, but nobody would care because I made ROSES! I made 7 roses using a little bit of violet and lots of pink to make a nice deep pink color. I threw in a few light green leaves too.



:) She loved it. She said she had a cake that was almost exactly like it when she was 7 years old. The same color of purple and everything. That made it much more special, and I was glad I was able to make it for her because I knew it was appreciated. :)

Happy Birthday, Pame-lama-ding-dong!

Art's 33rd Birthday Cake

We all know that Art likes pirates and anything buccaneers-ey. So for his birthday this year, his parents and my mom came over to the house and we all wore Bucs jerseys and watched the game with him. Mom made iced tea which was gone before the sun went down. For dinner we had a huge salad bar with ALL the toppings you could imagine, and chicken wings (tequila-lime and buffalo). For dessert, I made him a cake. Well, I decorated it. Mom bought the cake mix, his mom made the cake, and I decorated it.

And so, we all know I'm kind of a control freak. His mom made the cake as if she were pouring it into a bundt pan or something, so she totally over-beat it. The taste was really good, but the shape wasn't really uniform like I would have for decorating. It actually looked a little like a mushroom. So I just leveled the top, and decorated it as-is.





As you can see (by the fake gang sign showing he's 33... and yes, there are that many candles on the cake!), he liked his cake. It was yellow, no filling, with vanilla buttercream frosting. There was only a little bit leftover, so I gave it to Phil who tore it up by himself. :)

Happy Birthday babe!!!

Color IQ Test

Randomly, I stumbled upon this color IQ test at: http://www.xrite.com/custom_page.aspx?PageID=77

I thought I wasn't doing so well at first. You have to re-arrange these color tiles for the color spectrum to be completed, four different times. The rating scale is from 0 (perfect) to some really high number (you suck). Check this out:

• Your score: 0
• Gender: Female
• Age range: 20-29
• Best score for your gender and age range: 0
• Highest score for your gender and age range: 1409

SO now we know, having an obsession with Crayola as a child can really be useful... because I have perfect color vision/IQ.

:) GO CHECK IT OUT! :)

Jesus Pitones' 67th Birthday Cake

The future father-in-law's birthday was on August 14th. We went to La Jolla Shores with most of Art's family and extended family for his annual birthday picnic, and the next day Art bbqed some kabobs and I made his birthday cake and card.

This is the card I made for him. I used a Jolee's Boutique embellishment set and some curly letters I found on clearance at Michael's a few months back. I used an upside-down I for the exclamation points.
I made this cake because Art's dad is always working on something and building stuff. So obviously my inspiration was a tape measure...

Vanilla cake mix w/vanilla buttercream frosting.

Used golden yellow coloring for the base color, black for the black and grey parts, and brown for the handle of the hammer. Where the 12 and 1 are near each other, the spacing isn't so great but everywhere else it happened to look pretty even. I just eyeballed the spacing. I put small stars around the bottom.

Art's mom was VERY impressed with the cake as were his tias. They watched me make it to see how I leveled, torted, and iced the cake. They watched how I decorated it as well and I told them about the Michael's classes. Since they just got a Michael's in the valley, I told them they should take the class.

ANYWHOO.... that's that cake. :) The more I decorate cakes, the more I love doing it. :)

Update soon

Sorry I'm lame and haven't posted anything in a while... I've been very busy lately with all kinds of things.

I will upload and post a picture or two of Art's dad's birthday cake (I was VERY proud of it, and his mom still talks about it to this day), the thank you cards I'm making for the wedding, and a couple other projects I'm working on.

I'm also just floating along here at work... some people are really frustrating me because I would rather not talk politics at work while the rest of them are all loud and annoying about it. It's hard for me to bite my tongue, because I, for some reason, don't feel the need to discuss politics at work or in friendly social situations because people always get hurt for some reason or another. I'll let them all rally together and do whatever they want to do.

I actually heard from a few people here at work that they think I'm an incredibly calm person. Weird how I act at work compared to at home or anywhere else! They said that I never seem stressed, always cool and collected. My bosses even said that in my evaluation! So I'm not going to prove otherwise, I'll just keep on keeping to myself here, because flying under the radar is actually giving me REALLY high praise. :)

OK so that's enough of that. I'll post the cake and whatnot later tonight.

"Marvelous Minis" by Country Quilts

Here are the ornaments I made last weekend.

All eight ornaments completed.

They had a fall-ish theme to them: cat, jack-o-lantern, glove, pineapple (???), sheep w/crow, pear w/crow, watermelon w/crow, and pig.

I used some really cute plaid fabric my mom gave me and cut 3 1/2" x 2 1/2" rectangles from it. There were only 7 different plaids, so for one I used tea-stained muslin.

I cut out each shape from plain old cheap felt based on the pattern, and used a little bit of basting glue to hold the different parts onto the fabric instead of pinning them (I hate pins). Then I hand stitched each piece using a running stitch in a matching color of DMC floss.

Once the design was stitched onto the fabric, I took the two pieces and with a running stitch around the edges, sealed 3 sides. I popped some stuffing in there (not too much, didn't want them to look TOO much like pillows), and closed it up.

So I'm pretty proud of these since I've never done anything like this before. I'm definitely going to do some for each season. I'm planning on putting them on my wreath I keep hung in the living room throughout the year. I haven't decorated it since last Christmas, so I think this is a cute way to keep it up-to-date. I'm planning on finding some Christmas ones (and maybe putting those on the tree!), and then make some (drawing out my own patterns instead of buying them!) for Valentines (hearts), St Patty's (shamrocks, pots of gold, and rainbows -- which would just be a cream colored arch with rainbow colored stitching, i'm thinking), Easter eggs, for summer I'll have up some red, white, and blue stars for all the many patriotic holidays that season.

That's it. I'm going to start on Art's dad's cake now (french vanilla!). I hope he likes it!

Quicky Update

So I'm updating because it's been a while since I "blogged".

I made my applique ornaments, and hopefully this weekend I'll have time to upload the pictures (it's so hard on our slow internet connection!).

Art was out of town for a week and a half, so I got busy with other things like cleaning and whatnot. Since he's been back I've been super busy at work so things have just been a mess.

After this weekend, things will be blogging back to normal with pictures of my craft project from last weekend (ornaments), Art's dad's birthday cake which I will be making this weekend, and the birthday card I will be making him as well.

Hope you all have a great weekend!

p.s. only 100 days until the wedding!