Quote of the day

Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day. - Winnie the Pooh

I think Pooh Bear has seen my long To Do list...

Cake. Believe it...or not.

When I was little it was the done thing to bring a delicious cake or cupcakes to kinder on one's birthday. All the little kinder friends would gather around, sing a rousing rendition of Happy Birthday To You (you look like a monkey...aaaaaaand you smell like one too), and share in the deliciousness of a homemade chocolate cake or a marbled rainbow cake.

These days, it seems, things are a little different. Birthday cake poses a genuine risk for children with allergies, but also suffers because it doesn't fit in with the healthy food picture that we try to paint for our preschoolers.

These days (at my son's preschool, at least) the children still sing 'Happy Birthday' but the candles they blow out are glued precariously to the top of a strange looking 'cake' made from plaster of paris turned out of an ice cream container mold. This 'cake' has been decorated with a liberal amount of fleurescent paint and wildly sprinkled with glitter and confetti, but it's been around for a good many years and is starting to look a bit sad and sorry and not quite as festive as a preschooler might expect on his or her birthday!

So, my son's kinder teacher recently* asked me if I would make them a new 'fake cake', and of course I got on to it immediately.
By recently I mean sometime around July last year...but who's counting?

So here it is. I hope it was worth the wait! It is decorated with real fondant over two polystyrene 'cake' rounds. The candle holders are set into the top of the cake so the appropriate number of candles can be inserted for the birthday child. The cake has been hot glued onto the board and I'm hoping that once the fondant has set rock hard the whole thing will last a couple of years!

Drawstring bag from a skirt

Today I whipped up a little thrifted drawstring bag for my daughter's tap shoes.
I found this gorgeous skirt at my local op shop recently for 50c and I thought the fabric was so pretty it would be just right for a little dance shoes bag.

Loosely inspired by this tutorial I simply cut a rectangle of fabric from the middle of the skirt making sure to include the pretty ruffles (4 pieces of fabric including the lining). I turned and sewed a simple casing along the top edge, turned it all right sides together and stitched around it! I then used a scrap of ribbon from my stash for the drawstring. So simple and pretty!