Christmas cake - Puss in Boots

A bit less high brow than last year's effort, here's Puss in Boots in full 18th century garb (this is the Perrault version dahling) on stage in a grand panto.  The curtains and edges are 3D, but the stage scene is just painted straight onto royal icing. I sometimes wonder whether decorating the fruit cake is actually my favourite bit of Christmas!

Aand a side view...

Three Sisters resin dioramas

Brooch #2 in the tiny plays series... I've tried to cram as much detail as I can, and even got a bit conceptual -- the golden buildings are meant to be Moscow, seen through the trees. Also included -- text accurate(ish) costumes, a tiny samovar, a birthday cake, and a very boring book (history of the local school, since you asked) in Olga's hands. On Etsy here...

Jerusalem resin dioramas

I've been trying to do tiny scenes in resin for a while -- it's been half fun, half frustrating trying to work out how to make all the tiny parts (some are only a few millimetres high) and to put them into in a coherent scene. These are inspired by my memories of seeing Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem a few years back.

I've tried out a few different designs. They've all got the caravan, but beyond that it's a mixed bag of chickens, tortoise, union jack, beer bottles, drums, litter in each one.

When they're blown up as photos, you see all kinds of imperfections you miss in real life, since they're less than two inches wide. Still, I've worked out that the reason I'm getting microscopic bubbles in the resin is because I'm working in a (very) cold room, so the next batch should have better clarity.

I'm listing them on Etsy even though they're not perfect, because it would be nice for them to have a life in the sun. Now into extensive preparations for the next ones in the series: Three Sisters and Waiting for Godot...

The witching hour

This is a bit silly, but so much fun... a haphazard chocolate cauldron on Flake logs, with sugar glass flames, green potion goo, tentacles, bones, eyeballs....

I was more than usually reliant on cornershop goodies -- part of the fun of Hallowe'en is coming up with novel ways to consume sugar -- so things are made of jam, malteasers, and chocolate fingers. The potion had to look as wet as possible so I used honey with green food colouring on top of buttercream to make a perma-sticky mess.  

Mermaid Brooches

The Poems Underwater project, already responsible for two mermaid cakes, tempted me into making some new brooches for its zine and craft fair in Deptford today. They were just pure fun to work on -- I'm planning to do some more, with slightly less classic looking mermaids/more narrative schemes. Originally, these were meant to be mermaids raiding shipwrecks, hence the nets made from thread and matchstick timber, but the skulls I bought to litter the sand with turned out to be too big, and I was on a deadline...next time.

They are the size of conventional badges, and about half an inch thick in clear resin, with embedded drawings, paint, beads, and couscous impersonating sand. Getting the shine/clarity in photos is none too easy, especially on dark evenings, but they're pretty sparkly.

Then I realised, as I went through the battered biscuit tin that houses years worth of resin experiments, that I've actually got quite a big sea creature inventory. This is a sea monster from a 13th century illumination...

Here's a mermaid cribbed from a medieval bestiary, in ring form.

This is a flying fish -- based on an 18th century naturalist's engraving, so apparently, unlike everything else here, it's real, though frankly I have my doubts.

These things can be got through my Etsy shop -- just message me if they're not listed -- or hopefully at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern Christmas Fayre in December.

My aunt gave me the wool for this cardigan in December 2011, and it's only reached wearable state now -- knitted projects are slow. Especially when you decide to make things as complicated as possible by adding in lots of colours and patterns, and fiddling around with the shape...

This is the pattern I used; from Noro Love Pattern Collection by Jane Ellison. But I'm as incapable of following a knitting pattern as I am a recipe, so made lots of changes. The half length sleeves definitely had to go, as did the knobbly stitch pattern, the breast pockets, and the round neck -- I improvised a v-neck instead.

The wool is brilliant -- it has a self striping effect you can see in its unaltered state on the back of the cardigan. Because the front pieces are half as wide, though, the colour gradation is longer, and I didn't want the long murky brown patches to dominate. It was already a bit of a nightmare trying to get both front pieces to match, because each ball of wool starts at a different part of the colour cycle - I ended up with lots of small balls to get the transitions in the right places. Adding freestyle knitted in fair-isle patterns in other colours made things even more complicated, so that the cardigan spent a lot of its life in bits, in bags of tangling, unravelling balls of wool. 

But worth the wait I think!

The red roses were vaguely inspired by my favourite knitwear designer, Kaffe Fassett's persian poppy design -- I'm working up to a full Kaffe-style all over pattern for my next project, even if it will mean carrying round an Old Sheep Shop's worth of tiny balls of wool.

I feel especially proud of the pockets, which were a lot easier than I'd feared, and ended up slotting neatly into the design. The wooden buttons felt right for the homespun aesthetic I was going for -- each was sewn on with a different shade.

Mermaid cake

A launch party for Poems Underwater on a boat needed a cake, and mermaids were heavily involved -- commissions don't come much more enticing than that. My last mermaid was a medieval one, and I wanted to stick to the theme, but wanted to do a Melusine -- a double tailed mermaid. Her story's different wherever you read it, but her two tails are usually a punishment for seeking revenge against her father, on her mother's behalf. But her mother is enraged with Melusine for her lack of respect, so curses her to swapping her legs for two serpentine coils every Saturday; when Melusine marries, she makes her new husband promise never to enter her chamber on that day. When he breaks his promise and walks in on her soaking in a green marble tub, she turns into a dragon and flies away, leaving only two magical rings and quickly cooling bathwater behind.

This myth is woven into geneology, part of the ancestry myth of several European noble families, notably the French royal family the Lusignans; Melusine is sometimes cast as a princess, who builds her husband a castle with her magic powers. This association has meant that the double tailed Melusine image pops up in heraldic imagery, as it does in this 1586 engraving.

I loved the idea of putting the tub into the design, of showing Melusine relaxed and serenely decorative, before she turns to serpentine fury. And using the shield seemed like a golden opportunity to reference Poems Underwater -- in suitable medieval, sinuous script of course. 

I drew up a quick idea, then while the sponges were in the oven -- I just baked two plain rectangles, ready for carving up later -- I had a brainwave, and remembered my Grandma's set of letter shape cutters. They were just the right size to use to cut the words out of fondant, and with a bit of tweaking and trimming the letters easily transformed to suit my typographical ends.

The actual shaping the sponge part is always brutal and messy -- I always want to use as little icing as possible, so it's an odd kind of geometry arranging the cake into the right kind of 3D shape, ready for draping with fondant. 

You can just about see the construction here -- a fairy cake dewrappered for the head, and then odd slices of cake for the rest, filled with jam and buttercream. 

And then the icing goes on, and it's all serene. The colours are painted on, watercolour style, with food colouring, and I dusted everything with ample blue and gold edible glitter. Because she's magic.

I especially liked how the tub came out...I was trying to make it look like green marble, like in the story.

I brought her head home for breakfast the next day, when both of use were a bit worse for the wear. She was still sparkly, though.

Patched circle skirt

This is one of the rare projects I feel almost completely happy with. The design is a lot more fiddly than it needed to be, but I think it was worth it. The flowery fabric was from Liberty's, and was fiendishly expensive, so I only bought half a metre, which meant I needed a bit of creativity to get a nice full skirt out of it. I cut it into segment shapes, then added strips of plain fabric in between them so the skirt made a full circle, then gathered it into an elastic waistband. I used gold metallic thread to decorate the waistband and hem, and then sewed sequins into the centre of the flowers. The colours are actually incredibly bright but my camera didn't do them any favours - definitely time for a new one.

Triangular performance with choir

Bus jumper

My four year old nephew is obsessed with anything with wheels, so hopefully this jumper will make him happy on some level - it definitely has a lot of vehicles on it. I did a mixture of hand and machine embroidery on it, and used a bit of paint on the clouds, then had loads of fun finding buttons to sew on. The crystal buttons for headlamps are maybe my favourite bit, and I improvised a Volkswagen badge in an optimistic stab at authenticity. 

There's something deeply weird about the whole scenario which only really hit me when it was done. Why are a frog and a tiger driving a bus with no passengers? What precipitated their dramatic turn off the motorway into scrubland? Why are cars floating in the lilac sky? Maybe we should call it a conversation piece.

The blog's been quiet but I've been busy! Last month's first excitement was Ghosthunter at the Old Red Lion. The brief was to create a pared down, very naturalistic set on a very low budget.

The carpet was a complete stroke of luck - I found it on the street, covered in dust in a pile of rubbish. Manhandling it into a bin bag and lugging it home on the bus was maybe not my most glamorous design-related moment, but it was worth it to have an authentic pub carpet, complete with cigarette burns and stains.

The costume needed a bit of ingenuity - the individual items are really expensive to buy, and since the show's going on tour hiring didn't make sense. The coat I thought should be an Inverness coat - text specified full Victorian dress, so a full-on cape wouldn't be right, but Inverness coats were popular throughout the Victorian era, and had a half-length cape attached front and back.

You can see an example top right - there's a wrist-length cape over the coat designed to add an extra layer of warmth, which is maybe why they were favoured by coach and cab drivers well into Edwardian times, as familiar from costume dramas. My version was a charity shop coat, supplemented with a cape made from bought wool fabric, with black braid and silver buttons sewn on.

The waistcoat needed a bit of trickery too - its surprisingly hard to come by vintage examples in dark red brocade, and I wanted it to tone with the carpet. I picked up this waistcoat for cheap, dyed it red, and replaced the buttons with silver ones to match the coat.

You can also see the toilet door signs I put on the doors onto doors to the dressing rooms, for a bit of pubby realism. Then finally, this was a lot of fun; I got to go wild copying the flyer art with chalk pens for the corridor on the way in.

The sliceable circus

This is a bit of a ridiculous project - I had the idea ticking away in my head for ages but wasn't sure how to do it. I've always liked cakes with patterns inside - I do a lot of marbling, and have been following Ivan Day's history of the Battenberg cake with interest - so the idea of being able to slice open a cake and get a picture was pretty enticing.

As usual I overcomplicated and decided to do three different animals.

I coloured and baked the batter first, then cut it into the right shapes, spreading melted chocolate round the edges to hold them together, and putting bits of coloured icing in for eyes.

Then I put a layer of green batter with bits of biscuit in it to look like hay, lined up the animals in the tin, and poured the purple batter over to be the background. Unfortunately the animals were really fragile and bits kept dropping off, and had to be stuck on with lots of chocolate.

I iced the outside to look like a circus wagon, which of course involved maximum sweets and glitter - I thought there was no point being understated since its such a ridiculous concept. Sadly glitter never photographs well.

And it sort of worked! Maybe its the circus's hospital wagon, because there are repairs in evidence on all the animals - but I still think you can pretty much tell what they are.

This cake was for one of the founders of the Poems Underwater project, which is building up an amazing range of mermaid-focused history, interviews writing and art. I've always wanted to do a mermaid cake, and have had a soft spot for them ever since I persuaded my parents to get a salt dough mermaid plaque from Camden Lock Market on an ill-fated childhood outing.

There's a kind of purity about medieval mermaid illuminations, matter of factly placed among a menagerie of animals in bestiaries, between the mandrake, manticore and mole, rather than being humanised or sentimentalised. The line drawings are a bit bald and bare to work from, though, I wanted to do something a bit less awkward, and more satisfying so I was loosely inspired by a very late medieval (1430-50) detail from a misericord in Ludlow, Shropshire. I ended up sanitising and cartoonising the original, half by accident - I put the waist ruffle too high up, losing the typical medieval rounded stomach, and imagined in the left arm with a comb, as a counterpart to the right arm with its mirror.

She is completely sculpted out of cake - and looked like this underneath....

And then a draped sheet of rolled out fondant, over a thin layer of buttercream, smoothed the sharp edges into something more workable - I pressed out the scales using the angled lid of a felt tip pen.

Painting it with food colouring was definitely the easy bit, but I wasn't happy with the face - this method isn't delicate enough to do sharp modelling, so it came out very flat - another time, I'd be tempted to make a solid icing 'mask'.

A couple more pictures, to try and show the depth...