Awesome Cupcakes of Doom!

I have finished my felt cupcakes for Little Miss, you will notice that only half of them have bead sprinkles.  After beading them for two nights and only getting three done, I just couldn’t make myself do all six.The sprinkles are super sparkly and I hope she likes them.  I guess if it is really a big issue with her I can always go back and bead the three plain ones.Happy Holidays everyone, I’ll see you guys next week!

How Long Does it Take to Make Cupcakes?

Apparently quite a while.  I was expecting to show you the first set of six cupcakes today, however, they aren’t quite finished.  I’m blaming Facebook, an old friend from art school found me and we spent the afternoon catching up.

I have finished the cupcakes and wrappers.

I did not flute the wrappers and instead used tie-dyed felt (who knew there was such a thing?).  I might even add some hot pink rick rack around the middle to make them fancier! 

I have started on the frosting, the pieces are cut out and sewn together, but the hand sewing and stuffing has just begun.

It reminds me of hot pink poo.  They’re really going to be bright and fun.  I just need to decide what color of bead sprinkles I’m going to add, silver, pink, orange?  Help me decide.  I’m hoping to accomplish more on these later, I would like to get the other batch of six finished this weekend, so I can check this off my list.

Testing for a Handmade Christmas

I have mentioned before that I like to test things out before I really make them and today I have been testing a felt cupcake pattern from buggabugs.etsy.com. This pattern is really adorable and features the base cupcake pattern and six icing choices. Little Miss is getting a play kitchen for Christmas this year and since that used up the majority of my shopping budget I decided to make some accessories to go with it and what better than felt cupcakes!

What I want to make is two sets of cupcakes, six chocolate and six white and I want the icing on each set to match. Today I made samples of the cupcakes and the icings that I thought I would like.

I really like the two on the top right, the one on the bottom left is okay, but no quite what I was looking for. This pattern really has a lot of detail and an excellent level of realism for felt food. The cupcakes even have removable “papers”.

I am really glad that I decided to give this pattern a test run first, I really learned a lot and I think that the finished cupcakes will be fabulous!

What I learned:

Purchase felt by the yard instead of by the rectangle, it will eliminate the need to sew some seams in the frosting.

Sewing a round bottom onto straight sides using a 1/8” sew allowance on a sewing machine is really hard for me and I will be happier with the results if I hand sew the bottom on.

Don't forget to buy matching thread.

The pattern is perfectly sized to fit in a real cupcake tin.

Hand sewing takes time, but the finished results are worth it.

This pattern was definitely worth the investment, it is well written and has a lot of photos to walk you through all the different steps. I would have to say that almost anyone should be able to make these cupcakes, although it may be time consuming for someone with less experience. Be aware that hand sewing is required for finishing the frosting. The level of detail in this pattern really makes these little cupcakes realistic and I am excited to try another pattern from this designer. This pattern is for personal use only, but I imagine that I will be making this for gifts for years to come. The designer has a large variety of food and toy patterns available, you really should check it out.

Now all I need is some more felt and a couple of cupcake tins from the dollar store and I’ll have another package to wrap up. Don’t worry, I’ll share pictures when I’m finished.

Fancy Play Food Tutorial (the Easy Way)

My daughter recently received a doll house for her birthday.  It is a homemade one and doesn’t have a lot of accessories, so I decided we needed some play food.  There are a lot of really talented people making miniature food with polymer clay, but I don’t have time to hand sculpt fancy concoctions and I definitely don’t want to spend a lot of money buying something that can be easily lost or broken.

Materials:

• Scrap polymer clay
• acrylic paint, like apple barrel or folk art brands
• acrylic sealer, I would use a spray
• baby powder or cornstarch to use as a mold release

• Play-doh sweet creations set (my daughter received this for Christmas, Play-doh has a lot of different sets and there are a variety of different shaped molds so check your sets, ask your friends and keep an eye out at yard sales, these molds work great for polymer clay).   The green and the red ones on the left are some that I found in our collection.

Start by conditioning your clay, it need to be warm and soft to produce a good shape.  You can condition it by hand kneading or you can run it through the pasta machine a few times.

Use a brush to apply baby powder or corn starch to the inside of your molds.  Roll the clay into small balls and then firmly press a ball into the mold.  I use my thumb to really get it in there good.  There will be excess clay around the outside edge of the mold and this is what I use to pull the clay out. 

After removing the clay from the mold the bottoms can be rough.  I used my tissue blade to slice the excess clay off.  The piece can be easily sculpted and reshaped, remember this is just play food don’t make yourself crazy making it “perfect”.  Here they are ready for the oven. Bake according to the package directions, mine were supposed to be baked at 275 for 30 to 40 minutes, but I must have bumped the temperature dial on my toaster oven because they came out looking like this.

I guess it’s good I used scrap clay and was planning to paint them anyway :).

Paint your creations to make them look like real food and then seal with acrylic sealer.I was able to whip these up in an couple of days (during nap time and such) and my daughter was delighted with them.  An older child would be able to help you make/paint the shapes, but it was a bit beyond my three year old abilities.  ***Always supervise small children with this play food as it can be a choking hazard.***