Kitchen Tea Party

Its getting close now... only a matter of weeks now to the wedding and it was time to gather friends around for my bridal shower - a traditional kitchen tea with a Marie Antoinette inspired theme of "Let them eat cake".

There were good games to play, a lolly jar guessing game, a masterchef inspired "Name that Spice" game and a board game that I designed and handpainted for the occasion.

The cake was decorated by myself including the sugar roses, the results of my cake decorating classes I've been doing recently. 

The table all looked very pretty with mum's fine china cups and tiered cake stands full of little delicate and yummy things to eat. 

As a final note the Kitchen Tea Party was the perfect opportunity to serve up some decorated cookies made for the September Daring Bakers Challenge. The cookies were cut in a variety of leaf shapes and decorated using my new piping nozzles courtesy of cake decorating classes. 

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The September 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Mandy of “What the Fruitcake?!” Mandy challenged everyone to make Decorated Sugar Cookies based on recipes from Peggy Porschen and The Joy of Baking.

New Years Resolve

New Year. New Resolve... I want to pick up a pen or a brush or a pencil more often. Yesterday I hung out at Pond Bar and sketched a bit there... kept thinking how nice they'd look with a little wash of colour and mixed in together... so I need a scanner. It's the one thing I miss most, I can live without a printer easily but not a scanner, the one at works not connected to my computer and its a hassle waiting for that person to leave work or not be busy in order to do anything. So I've bought a scanner..

To celebrate and test it out here is a painting I did last year at Woollomi Wild Edge Retreat in the Hunter Valley...

More scans to come in the next few days for sure... but first I need to buy an external hard drive so I can make space... man I hate technology sometimes

Painting Presents

It is my friends wedding next Wednesday morning and I have bought her a nice bison ceramic salad bowl in a pretty sagey green colour with wooden salad servers. Lately I have gone off purchasing wrapping paper, the designs are either boring or horrendously expensive and just not in my budget but the time the present is purchased. I have a big roll of brown paper I'm using as a base for everything and I just wrap it in an unusual style with odd folded flaps or oragami flourishes at the end, then I can wrap ribbons round it or stick a small bit of feature paper from my supplies to it. For a wedding though something special is required so I dug out my roll of Chinese Silk Paper and paints and did a brush painting of some blue flowers... I forgot I was going to put yellow centres on them once they had dried and in the confusion I wrapped the present before going "oops" I still think it looks find though. 

A few weeks ago for my friends birthday I did her a chinese brush painting of a mountain landscape. She was the one who kindly gave me a framed picture of a duck for my birthday. I decided to make this into a scroll type painting with two balsa rounds. 

The Japanese Haiku in the top corner is very nice and when I get home I will look it up and add it onto this post in a bit

I wish I had a scanner to get a better image of these, they photograph poorly with my mobile phone