decorating with my daughter

My daughter loves to decorate cakes (and cupcakes) and today we decided to do a project together. I was messing around in the Cricut Craft Room while Emily was adding fondant to a small square cake. We soon hooked the computer up to the Cricut Cake mini and began cutting on some candy clay.

I was inspired to try the candy clay after a post on the Cricut Circle blog by Cindy where she shared decorating cookies with candy clay. I learned quite a lot today while working with the candy clay...use lots of powder sugar to thicken it, at least on a warm summer day. We took to freezing the clay on the mats before cutting then freezing after cutting and freezing after removing the extra material around the cuts. And work fast to transfer the images. The cuts were from Create a Critter (sun shape) and Cricut Decals (scuba diver) and Crciut Craftroom Basics (letters FUN) I used the hide contour tool on the scuba diver to remove some of the finer details knowing it would be impossible to maintain the cuts with the candy clay, in fact we had to reattach the arms because they were so skinny they wouldn't stay connected!

Over all I am quite pleased with my first use of candy clay and DD (darling daughter), Emily added her piped frosting for a nice finished touch!

Happy B-Day USA

I wanted to make some fun jewelery to wear to my SIL's 4th of July party so I pulled out some printable shrink plastic, turned on the Imagine and started designing on my gypsy. I used three stars in two sizes (3" and 4.5") and the buccaneer Imagine cartridge for some patterns - blue stripes and red polka dots. I fill each star with pattern, the 3" with blue stripes and the center 4.5" with the red dots. Cut the shrink plastic used my crop-a-dile to make holes in the arms of the stars for jump rings then used my embossing heat gun to shrink. The stars shrunk to about 1" and 2". I used some large gold colored jump rings my DD had in her stash of beading materials, along with a few gold colored beads for a little extra flair. I wanted the necklace to be "light" in that the focus would be on the stars and stripes in honor of Independence day - Happy Birthday to the United States!!

I didn't have any chain to attach my star "charms" but I had some pretty gauzy-type ribbon that was just right for the look I was attempting. In all I like the necklace, it was a fun project to have something festive for the fun day. This is the first time I have used printable shrink plastic and was very happy with the results. The only thing I need to adjust is the depth of cutting, perhaps use multi-cut for a better cut.