IF: Perspective

From the scarecrow's perspective everything seems fine, little does he know there's a naughty bunny burrowed underground chomping through the carrots!

My elephant illustration is pick of the week on the Illustration Friday website!  Finding that out this morning was a lovely surprise, it's made my day and I have a huge grin on my face now.  Have a good weekend everyone. 

IF: Propagate

This weeks Illustration Friday theme is 'propagate'.  So here's an elephant and a bee, both helping to propagate the flowers.  Thought I'd try a different medium this time to give a different look.  I shall have to experiment a bit more.......

IF: Adrift

This clever frog has found a safer way to cross the river, still better keep any eye on those hungry crocodiles though!

Valentine's cupcakes and Mickey Mouse

Here's the latest cakes my husband's been asked to make, some Valentine's cupcakes and a Mickey Mouse cake.  As usual I've lent my hand to decorating, he prefers to bake (and is very good at it - very tasty cakes!) and seeing as I love to make things, I'm best at the decorating.  So we make a pretty good cake making team.

The cupcakes are vanilla sponge with pink buttercream, decorated with fondant icing discs and I've piped letters on spelling out 'I Love You' and decorated them with a few hearts.

The Mickey Mouse cake took a bit longer to do!  But at least he's relatively easy to make, quite simple features so nothing too complicated to make.  

 

He's all cake too, the mouth is sponge (not just masses of icing) and the ears are simply miniature cakes.  Only his nose is a lump of icing.  Everything's cut out by hand too, no special cake tins have been used or any templates, and what you can't tell from the pictures is just how big this cake is.....it's BIG, beats any shop bought cake any day!  

 

Mittens or gloves? Why not have both.

Here's a pair of gloves I've knitted for my sister, fingerless gloves which have a mitten cover.  They're so useful when you're out and about as you don't need to keep taking them off when you need a bit of grip to pick things up or take things out of your bag or wallet, simply flip back the mitten cover and voila, fingertips at the ready.  There's even a lovely sparkly button to hold back the mitten cover if you want it held out of the way.

They're knitted with Sirdar Escape DK yarn, which is self patterning, and has such vivid colours.  It's also really soft and as it's a bit on the chunky side, it makes the gloves very cosy and warm.  I used a Sirdar pattern for these gloves but had to make a few adjustments.  When knitted up according to the pattern for a ladies glove, it turned out rather small (and yes I did knit a tension square), so I used the pattern for a man's glove (I guess we must have man sized hands!) made the cuff a little longer and knitted a complete thumb rather than leaving it fingerless.

Think I might knit a pair for myself one day, first I have to finish a pair of long wrist warmers....... 

IF: Muddy

Lots of options for this weeks theme but it made me think of a story that was in the paper last year about a pig that didn't like getting her trotters all muddy (a bit out of character for a pig!).  So her owners had little wellies made especially for her so she could walk about in the mud without the fear of getting muddy.  Click here if you'd like to read the article and to see a picture of the little pig wearing her new wellies.

IF: Focused

Oh Deer!  Looks like someone's focused in on these two chaps noshing on some tasty leaves, luckily one's been spooked so I'm sure they'll get away!