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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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...

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.

Store Closing Haul

The mega Books-A-Million store over in Sanford is closing, and offered an extra 20% off on their current stock -- all sales final -- so I went over to do some shopping. Safely but sadly there was no one in the store but me the entire time I was there. The Holly Jackson novel is for Katherine, the Halloween board book is for Oliver, and the copy of Garden Spells is to keep on hand because I give that book to everyone. The rest of the books are for me. I love Anne Cleeves, and the Galbraith novel sounded interesting (the first couple weren't, but I'm willing to take another chance.) The Escape Room is by a new-to-me author, plus it was cheap. The GreenCraft mag is just a guilty pleasure. Hopefully the smaller BAM nearer to me won't close. I don't buy many books from brick-and-mortar stores these days, but that's really the last one within reasonable driving distance.

Valerean

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