Let Them Make Cake

Here's one of my guilty pleasures: watching Is It Cake?, a competition for hyper realistic cake artists who try to fool the judges with their art. It's a guilty pleasure because while I love to bake I can't eat cake because of all the sugar that's usually involved. All three seasons are presently available on Netflix, but I think season three is my favorite.

It's a fun show, and the usual cut-throat nastiness of competition productions is completely missing. I don't know if it's just the nature of cake artists, but the contestants are all supportive of each other and cheer each other on. Trying to guess what is cake and what isn't is insanely hard, too. I'm right only about half of the time. The combinations of cake, filling and icing are also amazing. In this season one of the contestants made a strawberry and fennel cake -- I would never have put those two flavors together, but everyone seemed to love it.

What I like most about the show is the inclusiveness; there are all shapes, sizes and colors of contestants, each with their own backstory. This season's cast included a Sikh young man from Canada and a Venezuelan native who immigrated to the US, and both were enormously talented and wonderful guys. Also, the winner is special to me for reasons I won't say because it will spoil the grand finale, but I was super happy about them winning. Anyway, if you want to watch something fun, try an episode.

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Other Stashes

Along with clearing out the spare bedroom and tidying my office and our guest bedroom, I decided to reorganize some of my stashes. This is all the yarn I have on hand, sorted by color. It looks like a lot, but lately I've been using up a minimum of half a bin every month, so this is approximately a year's supply. All of my solid color cotton perle thread. I go through a lot of this every year, too. I need a container in which I can fit all of it together, but I haven't found the right one yet. I won't show you all of my fabric -- I'm still reorganizing this stash -- but I went through everything and donated two bins of fabric I won't need to the local quilter's guild.

Goodwill Gamble #2 Arrives

My second Goodwill gamble arrived; this is one I paid ten bucks for last month. Just inside the lid was a big roll of plastic mesh that I think is for latchhook work. In the auction listing it looked like fabric to me, so that was unexpected. Someone at the seller's end was nice enough to put a note on this pinned fabric. I'll put on my gloves before I take it out to inspect it. The embroidered green fabric turned out to be 1-1/2 yards of sequinned and three-dimensional designer fabric. I'll guess this cost somewhere between $20.00 to $30.00 a yard, and it's in pristine condition. But here's a shot of everything in the lot, which is mostly crafty odds and ends with a small amount of cotton fabrics, a large amount of synethetic fabrics, and some other surprises. The original owner of these was probably a Catholic school teacher; these beads, crosses and medallions are the kind of rosary kits for kids to make at Sunday school or Bible camp (and s...

Love Means This

Invested in a couple of hand-dyed bundles from one of my favorite fabric artists. This one said "Make me into something for Valentine's Day." So I went for a quilted and embellished tote. I kept thinking about what love means to me as I worked on it. Here's the finished tote. Although I was tempted to embellish with beads and pins, I got sick and only felt well enough to do a little stitching every night. As I worked I thought about how often love seems disappointing to us, especially when it fails to live up to our expectations. But now that I've experienced love in many forms, I can say that it's made me a better person than I might have been without it. Love is a precious thing, and should be appreciated in all its forms. I am very grateful for the love of my guy, my child and my friends who have stuck with me all these years. That's you two, in case you're wondering. :) Also finally found something to do with a ve...

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