Blue Ombre Cake

I’ve seen lots of people create variations of this ombre cake and I’d been super excited to try it out because it didn’t seem very hard but you end up with fantastic results! I created this cake in celebration of my supervisor’s birthday. I actually used this cake pan:

I filled the cake with a mixture of Cool Whip and chocolate pudding which tasted amazing and was a cost effective way to fill a cake.

The outside is smeared bubbles was created using swiss meringue buttercream with vanilla flavouring. I have to say that swiss meringue buttercream is simply the best kind of buttercream for most birthday/wedding style cakes.

There are plenty of youtube videos online that demonstrate how to do this but I used the tutorial by The Boy Who Bakes.

3D Star Wars Darth Vader bear cake

As the year is drawing to a close, it’s time to update all the projects I’ve been working on this year.

This post has been waiting to be uploaded for a long time but I finally remembered to make it. I made this 3D darth vader bear cake for my boyfriend earlier this year for his birthday and surprised him with it at the mall of all places. I was deathly ill while making this cake but I really really wanted to surprise him with it so I spent the day making this cake and covering it american buttercream, then black fondant. It’s my first time covering an oddly shaped cake with fondant and my shapes/patterns.

In some areas the buttercream softened the fondant so much that the fondant broke which gave me a couple of heart attacks…but I somehow managed to either cover it up or just push it back together. I still have a lot to learn about working with fondant and 3D cakes. I probably should have used a stiffer consistency of icing…

But this is certainly one of my favorite cake pans and a go to for many different shapes. I’ve seen online people who use this cake pan to make rabbits, owls and other animal shapes so I’m excited to try those out!

Graphic Tees using my Silhouette Cameo!

A few weeks ago, my boyfriend and I celebrated our anniversary and being the nerdy scientist I am, I decided to make us some couple T shirts with a video game theme.

So I hopped over to Michaels to pick up a box of white heat transfer material and picked a few simple cotton tees from Joe Fresh at superstore.

I found this really fabulous idea from Matt Allison’s blog for couples tees where one wears pacman and the other wears ghost! I couldn’t use the template that’s on his site but I did find some similar images which I imported into silhouette studio. There are lots of tutorials on youtube which show how to do this. Here’s one from Kristina Werner from KWerner designs.

After cutting out the heat transfer material, I eyeballed where the designs should go and ironed these babies on! Initially I had a really tough time trying to iron the cut outs. The box says to use a piece of cotton over top but scrapbook bloggers online suggest using a thin heat proof material like the liners that you use to cover the bottom of your oven. Alternatively you can also use the Ranger nonstick mat.

A neat trick if you want to save a few bucks is just go to a hardware/department store and pick up a sheet of oven liner. It’s essentially the same thing as a the much more expensive Ranger non stick mat.

Here are the T-shirts I made:

I just love how these Tshirts turned out! They’re so vintage and simple! I loved the white on black because that’s how the video games used to be, just white characters on a black screen and this totally embraces that era.

Soon after, a few of my friends were having birthdays and I thought it would be totally fun and personal to gift them a graphic tee. These were my friends from highschool, then university and everyone’s moved onto bigger and better things. But being science majors we all still have a bit of nerdy inside of us.

So I made them these:

This T shirt features the elements oxygen and magnesium off the periodic table.

And my other friend loves playing video games, we used to play our Nintendo DS together during breaks from class and her favourite game was super mario world!

So I thought this 1 up mushroom tee was super suitable for her:

 

I loved it so much I couldn’t help but try it on hahahahaha

Ignore the weird light spot on my nose…THIS IS NOT A NOSESTRIP hahaha

I’m so excited about exploring the possibilities and combining different colours and more elaborate patterns! So look forward to my next creations!

 

Calendar Style Birthday Card

I made this card for my BFF a few months back for her birthday but just got around to uploading it. Sorry for being MIA for a while, my studies have been so super busy! I went away to present my research at a conference and although it was probably one of the best experiences of my life, it also left me very little free time for a while.

But I’m back in the game and super excited to share with you all my most recent creations, starting with the least recent haha!

I really wanted to showcase when my BFF’s birthday was which is the 29th of December so I printed out, stained and distressed a calendar that I found online.

I used some glimmer mist in Rouge and Cork using my technique on how to prevent paper from wrinkling after soaking it in wet media and letting it dry. You can find that tutorial here.

Once it dried, I stamped some swirls using Versamark and transparent embossing powder. You can see the glimmer mist underneath of it that way.

Then I just finished up the card by adding a gemstone over the top of the 29th of December because that’s the date of her birthday. And then I just embellished with a flower (I don’t remember what it’s called, an accordion flower? Somebody help!) I cut out with my Silhouette Cameo, but you can also use a Tim Holtz die to do that.

I mounted the calendar onto another piece of cardstock which I punched with a Martha Stewart doily punch just on one edge and then distressed the edges with Vintage Photo. 

Finally I mounted everything onto a card with a pretty pink background I dug out from my scraps stash from DCWV Garden Tea Party Stack.

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