globe cake

here's the cake i made for eva's third birthday. she loves her earth ball (an inflatable globe ball) and likes to talk about where different places are on the map -- where we live, places she's traveled, where family members live or have traveled. so, why not make an "earth ball cake"? sure it's round and complicated, and sure i just had a baby, but why not? :) luckily my sisters are visiting, so i had both hands free for long enough stretches to enable me to make this. hurray for sisters!

it's hummingbird cake (pineapple/banana/pecan) with cream cheese icing, and each half of the earth is composed of two 8" cakes (torted into four layers) plus half a torted 6" cake on top. then, the whole thing is carved into shape (i could have bought a special pan, but this worked fine). i covered each half in fondant, inverted one, and stuck them together. (structural notes: there are dowels supporting the bottom tier (hemisphere?) of the cake, and i put hot glue between the two pieces of cardboard to help hold the two tiers together.) the fondant on the bottom half threatened to fall off -- and in the heat at the park, it did start to slip -- but i added a band of fondant around the center to bind the two halves together.



the continents are piped on in royal icing, which i did by looking at a map and using latitude and longitude lines as a guide. i got a bit impatient around 1 a.m., so the filling in of the land masses got a bit sloppy at the end. good enough! (i'm learning the beauty of that phrase.) the topper -- a girl holding a toy airplane -- is made of fondant, with a piece of wire in there to support the arms. it's eva-like, but as she'll tell you, her hair is a little bit lighter... the flags are to denote places of interest, places we've found on the map time and time again. ("mama, show me seattle again. remember when we saw the face needle?" she's still working on pronouncing that "sp" consonant blend :)



the location of the party moved at the last minute from our back yard to a park 20 minutes away... so the cake suddenly had to survive an unplanned transport and *then* had to endure the texas summer heat. i'm surprised that it did all of that without a hitch. (we rigged up a clever support system in a cooler.) it didn't come out exactly the way i envisioned it, but i'm quite happy with it. and it was really tasty, too.

rocking chairs

in honor of father's day, here are photos of the rocking chairs my dad made for my daughter. (she received the larger chair for her first birthday, and upon realizing it was a bit too big, he promptly started making the smaller one for christmas! thus, two chairs...) now that he has two new granddaughters as of this year, he's got more woodworking ahead of him, it seems.

both my parents have always helped me to know that i can probably make most anything -- or, more accurately: it might not work out at first, but it's sure worth giving it a try. the first thing i made with my dad (that i recall making) was a wooden jigsaw puzzle. i colored a drawing on a scrap of plywood with some crayons, and he used the table saw (okay, so it wasn't a jigsaw, but who's ever heard of a table saw puzzle?) to cut it into about 10 pieces. strangely, this resulted in a really challenging puzzle that adults had difficulty putting together, even after a bit of practice.

happy father's day, dad. :)

home made

yesterday we welcomed hazel into our family. she was born peacefully at home, and we're all doing well...

frog meets bear

sometimes i get into this mode where i enjoy some project so much, i then repeat it (with variations) several more times before moving on to something else. well, those bears i made last week were pretty entertaining... so this week i made a frog. (seriously, the kyuuto amigurumi book is totally worth it -- for the price, it would have been worthwhile had i made only one project out of it, and i've done three already...)

my main difficulty, though, is the facial expression. this is as true of stuffed animals as it is of dolls (when i made eva's doll, i restitched the second eye about ten times so she didn't look depressed or crazy, and in the end i gave up and settled for half-drunk -- isn't it weird how a pupil half a milimeter to the side can cause a whole different expression?). it took some effort to get the frog eyes to look roughly balanced, and then i did the mouth (which is embroidered since i had no red felt on hand) three times before he looked friendly and not like he might try to eat you in your sleep. expressions are harder than they seem, and i have much respect for people who have learned to do this well. (i luck into a passable expression eventually, but some people can achieve the look they want with actual skill.)

this is for a friend's little girl, but i think first i'll have to convince eva to relinquish it. she's been ribbit-ing it around the house for a few days now. and of course, she's now asking about her bear. soon...

crochet stitch marking trick

i hate stitch markers. there, i said it. sure, it's nice not losing your place in crochet (or knitting, but i'm basically a crocheter). but they're so annoying! (*whine*...) they get caught in your working yarn, it slows you down having to remove and replace them, ... i just don't like using them.

but on my last project, i came up with something that really works, won't fall off, and takes almost zero effort to place or remove. it's so simple that i'm sure lots of other people have come up with it before, but i've never read about it anywhere, so i thought i'd share.

basically, take a short length (4-6 inches, whatever) of contrasting scrap yarn. when you get to the place you want to mark, just drape it across the previous row of stitches before you make the next stitch. the contrasting yarn will be caught under the stitch, and that's your mark. but here's the cool part: when you get to the next row/round, no need to pull it out and reinsert it, just flip one end of the contrasting yarn, say, from the front to the back. on the next row/round, flip it back to the front. the result is what looks like a little vertical row of running embroidery stitches. when you're done, just pull and it comes right out.

and here's a bonus: let's say you're in a part of your pattern where you need to count a bunch of rows or rounds. (when it's the same for a big set of rows, i tend to lose track -- and again, too lazy to do something as crazy as use a pencil and jot down a count on some scratch paper.) you can use your marking yarn to count rows (or rounds) -- just pull it out before the section you want to count and replace it at the first row. you can then count the "stitches" created by the contrasting yarn as you proceed; that is, each stitch or space created by the contrasting yarn is one row. now you're marking your rounds (or rows :) and your stitch count at the same time. and there's no little plastic doodad snagging your yarn.

and i should say, i'm sure there are stitch markers out there that actually work well. but i like this, because it's free, and i always have a little scrap of yarn on hand without having to dig around in my bag. give it a try and see what you think. (and as always, if anything is unclear, feel free to ask and i'll try to clarify...)

amigurumi bears

eva started preschool last week (just two afternoons a week), and in order to help her transition, i sat at school with her for the first two days. hmm, what to do with my hands? as i've gotten closer to the end of my pregnancy, i've been less absorbed in crafts (as you may have noticed), so i had nothing (portable) in progress.

i bought the kyuuto amigurumi book a while back, and decided this was a good opportunity to put it to use. i made a tiny orange bear for the baby (which thrilled eva to no end), and then she decided that next i needed to make a green bear for her. so, i made a version of the striped bear project in the book (eva said no stripes, so i omitted those, but liked the size of this bear -- there are three sizes of bears alone offered in the book, let alone a whole assortment of other animals...) i went ahead with plastic eyes for eva's bear, but just embroidered on some eyes for the baby's bear for reasons of safety.

i really like this book -- for about $10 you really can't go wrong. i mean, sure, after you do one or two, you can pretty much make up any sort of amigurumi you want. but, even if you're making up your own patterns, this can still be really useful as a general guide for sizes and patterns of stitch increases, etc.

so, now we have a big sister bear to go with the baby bear. i've hid it from eva so far, so it can be a present ("from the baby" so to speak) after the birth. i'm amazed she hasn't asked for it (the typical toddler "out of sight out of mind" thing), but i'm excited because i know she's going to love it. after all, she squealed and came running when she saw the baby's bear...

(oh, and see my next post for my cool stitch marking trick. very useful for amigurumi or any crochet in the round.)

what everyone needs

i've been telling eva for weeks that i'll embroider her a truffla tree shirt (she's really into "the lorax", which was one of my favorite books as a kid, too). i had planned to do some hand embroidery, but then i saw girl popcorn's machine embroidery tutorial on the craftzine blog and got inspired. while i was on bed rest for a month or so, i watched a lot of crafty tv, which included some of those traditional quilt shows on PBS. one show (hmm, fonz & porter or the other one? it's all a blur) had a guest who basically drew her entire quilt design in thread on black fabric. it ended up looking like a printed fabric, because she used very dense stitching and a variety of colors (unlike basic quilting motifs). so, i sort of combined the two ideas and though my free-motion machine stitching is decidedly inexpert, decided to give it a go on some beloved truffla trees.

sometimes the right tool makes all the difference. i was unaware of the water soluble stabilizer girl popcorn mentions, but it's perfect for the task. you can transfer a very precise line drawing this way, and keep stretchy t-shirt fabric under control at the same time. i always wondered how people did that! so, i just traced some images from the book and fused the stabilizer to the shirt (i also put a layer of soluble stabilizer on the back -- given i still got some puckering, maybe a more basic embroidery stabilizer -- that stays in place? -- would have been preferable?) i then began to stitch the various colors (eva helped me choose thread that matched the trees in the book). here you can see the line drawing and the first trees stitched in.



i did the black outline stitching last so it would stay on top. i thought it would be really difficult to pull off the level of detail i had drawn into the design, but i just went slowly, and was surprised to find it worked out just fine. here's the final result. i haven't machine washed the shirt yet, so maybe some of the puckering will go away? there are a few ink marks from when i rinsed out the stabilizer (they do warn not to use just any pen, but i'm not always known to follow directions), but i think that'll wash out.



not bad for a first attempt, and it really went quite quickly -- an easy one-evening project (i'd still be working on the hand embroidery version well after the baby arrives, i think). more importantly, though, is that eva adores it. i'm so happy to have this technique in hand; just think of all the possibilities...