Baby Pennant Cake

So last week’s “Book Club” was a celebration of the new additions that will be coming to our neighborhood soon.  We’ve got two ladies who are expecting and we decided to go bonkers for babies in April.  Mary asked me to make cupcakes to celebrate, but I was in the mood for a cake.  And I think it turned out darling, if I do say so myself!

This cake is a two tier stacked cake construction – here’s the nitty gritty for those cake nerds out there:

Tier One

• Two 9″ layer devil’s food chocolate cake
• Basic buttercream tinted with Wilton’s Royal Blue
• I used a 104 petal tip to create the ruffles

Tier Two

• Two 6″ layer white cake
• Basic buttercream tinted with Wilton’s Pink
• I used a 103 petal tip to create the ruffles

This cake came together really quickly and I was super pleased with the ruffles!  The pennants add that cute little bunting touch.  I simply created them in Photoshop, cut them out and taped them to a piece of butcher’s twine.  I then tied the twine to two wooden skewers and stuck them in the top tier.

Here’s a little pennant printable for you to try on your next cake! 

–Martta

Kindle Fire Case – Lined Pouch

I’m on a “I pinned it, I made it” roll here folks.  My latest project is a Kindle case for my Mom.  

When I saw this adorable bunting zipper pouch on Pinterest made by Suzanne at Just Another Hangup, I knew I had to make one.  

But I already had a case for my Kindle….what I needed was someone who didn’t have a case for their Kindle.

Thank goodness my Mom did me a solid by not only receiving the new Kindle Fire for Christmas, but also by being too lazy to get a new case for it by the time her birthday rolled around.  Woot!  I’ll take advantage of that!

But you know, of course, I didn’t want to exactly duplicate the bunting case (although it is totally adorable).  I decided to go with a kite theme instead.

I rounded up the scraps from the reversible shopper I made for Mom – she just loves batiks – and I picked up a 1/3 of a yard of linen and a matching 12″ zipper.  I also pulled some medium weight interfacing and batting from my stash.

In all honesty I actually made this little pouch twice – I’m a chronic under-sizer when it comes to making sleeves for electronics.  Especially when I don’t have one in hand to test with (Hint, Hint ) …..Anyway, the first attempt was adorable!  And perfectly petite!  It *just* fit the Kindle Fire.  But it had to be persuaded to do so…..that’s no good!  I wanted to throw it into the pile of other not-quite-right sewing projects, but it’s cute as a pouch all the same so my Mother is enjoying it as a mini-purse

So here I am back at the drawing board with a few modifications to that original pass for this second round.  The first thing you’ll need to do is cut your pieces.  I’ve gone with 9″x7″ cut size on this pouch because that will be plenty big when you’re finished!  You’ll need to cut:

• 2 Exterior pieces
• 2 Interior pieces
• 2 Batting pieces
• 2 Interfacing pieces (optional)

The interfacing is optional, but my linen is so flimsy, I wanted to add body and hopefully prevent a few future wrinkles.

I wanted to jazz up the interior and really work with the kite theme so I didn’t just cut a rectangle for the interior pieces.  I actually pieced a kite shape together from my remnants.  But being lazy, I didn’t want to measure and cut all the pieces.  So I laid it out and played with it a bit before hand using one of my exterior pieces as a guide.  As long as you’ve got a square (or mostly) corner piece this lazy method should work for you.

I started with the top and once I had that in place, I added the bottom pieces.    

You can play with the angle until it looks kite-like enough for you.  Then sew all the pieces together and press the seams

I used one of the exterior fabric pieces as a guide to cut out my interior piece. 

Using this same method I made a little mini kite to attach to the outside of one of the exteriors.  My only recommendation here is to trim back the seam allowance on the points of the kite so they don’t accidentally sneak out when you’ve attached it to the pouch. 

Now on to the batting.  I didn’t want to get too fancy with the quilting here so I just stitched along the seams and added a border all around to attach the batting to the interior pieces. 

Ok is almost time to assemble, but I need to decorate that exterior fabric first.  Here’s the hard part – you’ve got to pick your kite placement.  There’s really no wrong choice here.  So I picked a spot and pinned the kite in place.  I did some freehand sewing to come up with a kite string – retracing the path a few times to match the style of the pennant pouch.Then, I covered the end of the string with the kite and stitched it into place as well.  Finally, I folded up a few scraps of fabric and cut out triangles to use as kite tales, quickly attaching them on the string. 

Now it’s on to assembly!  There is a wonderful blog post over on Flossie Tea Cakes that explains how to assemble a lined pouch and I’ve used this method for my pouch.  It’s a little difficult to make sure you’re stitching the zipper straight as it is sandwiched between two pieces of fabric, but all your ragged ends get tucked inside away from potential catches on zipper teeth.

It’s looking great now!  Just needs a finishing touch.  I don’t have a nice matching navy ribbon so I grabbed one more remnant of batik and stitched two narrow rectangles. I cut out the rectangles and threaded it through the zipper to act as a perfectly coordinating zipper tie.  Excellent!  I hope this one fits – I’ll have to ask Mom to send me a picture when she gets the new pouch.

–Martta

Race for the Cure Wrap Up

We had an amazing time in the survivor’s tent at Race for the Cure this year!  I think it was all the details and hard work the entire committee put into the event that made it happen!

Some of the highlights on the decoration front included:

The hanging of all those paper pom poms and word phrases

They looked a little ragged on the day of, but the impact still came across.  I hung them when the tent was set up on Friday and in between then and race time we had 20-35 mile per hour winds….since there are no walls on the tent I was happy to see them still there at all!!

We had chalk artists come and draw a pink carpet that led survivors straight into our tent:

Once they arrived we had chalk directions on the ground that pointed to the highlights of the tent including: Goodie bag pick up (if they had missed out before the race), face painting, photo booth, massage chairs and of course, breakfast!

This was a great last minute add when we realized we were working with such a large area!  An improvement for next year might be to have the directions posted on a sign post for folks to check out when they walk in – that way it’s at eye level.

The photo booth was a hit!  I didn’t leave the area the whole time I was so busy taking pictures for people with their cameras or cell phones.  We did have two stations set up.  First we had a white backdrop with the fringey ribbon:

We miscalculated a bit on the white background fabric but saved the day with some excess table skirt.  One of the members on the committee had her husband build the structure out of PVC pipe – they were pretty genius.  The finished size was approximately 8′x10′.

So that one looked great, but this one…..we’ll not so much

So sad!  It was like a creepy haunted house crepe paper disaster!  The inspiration looked like this:

So effortless and wonderful…..yeah what a disaster!  It was SUPER humid on race day and you know what paper is not a fan of?  that’s right, it’s water.  On the one or two pictures we got in before it totally fell apart it looked GREAT.  But lesson learned.  Use fabric for this sort of backdrop outdoors!

It was the props in the photo booth area that made it so fun.  We had pom poms, tiaras, mustaches, crowns and lips on sticks, empty frames but by far the two most popular props were the year badges:

and the sashes:

On the year badges we went up to 22 and happily had to figure out a way to make a 34 for someone!  For the sashes we had two Survivor sashes, and one each of the following: My Mom, Co-Survivor, My Hero, Champ and Co-Star.  We’ll add a My Sister for next year’s race.

Loads of ideas and inspiration for next year!

–Martta