Birthdays and Art

Okay, so your thinking to yourself what does art have to do with birthdays? Well, actually quite a bit.
Monday (August 8th) was my youngest daughter's birthday. She just turned 5. How time flies I'll tell ya. I wanted to do something special for Maggie's birthday so I decided instead of buying or slapping some frosting on a cake that I would actually tackle on making a cake myself. I'll admit the only cake making training I've ever had was watching my own mother make them. She was a pro. I would sit and watch her in the kitchen whenever she would painstakingly work on a cake for a client. My mom created cakes with such ease that she made it look easy. Well, its not exactly easy when you don't have much in the way of cake decorating materials. I just had the bags, the tips and one couplet(mental note, purchase more to make switching colors MUCH easier on yourself).
But what I did manage to do and create was short of a miracle. Granted we live about 45 miles away from any nearest craft store. I did manage to come up short with the brown color after asking Marilyn to grab the colors , Copper and Brown. According to her she thought the color was copper brown. Ugh, 13 yr olds. Anyways I substituted with some chocolate and a can of dark chocolate frosting for the hair.

Well, I think you'll be mighty impressed. Granted, once again I underestimated how much confectioner's sugar I needed for the butter cream frosting. But the Dora cake I created, turned out pretty darned good I should say.

I frosted the end with whatever frosting I had left and it gave the edge a tied died look.

Of course without art, or some semblance of artistic ability I don't think I would have been able to create the Dora cake. Strike that. I think my mother's cake making gene kicked in at the very last moment. Or maybe summoning the cake gods helped too. I don't know , either way Dora turned out to be a hit and it was so good the cake was gone by the very next day.


I will admit I do enjoy doing a little bit of food art. So last night when I was super bored I decided to go ahead and create some jello oranges. Yes, you read that right. The outsides were oranges and the insides were made of jello. So I went into the kitchen scoured through the cupboards because not to long ago I had so much jello in my cupboard I actually had to tell Tim to stop buying it. To find that we didn't have many left and the color I wanted was gone!! So I settled for some blue , yellow and green Jello. Mixed it all together in a jiggler recipe ( you need 4 3 oz boxes mind you) and had the joy of scooping out the oranges. I cut them in half, scooped them out ( all the while having the juice burn the cuts I had gotten the day before by trying to pull a glass that got sucked down our garbage disposal) and put all the insides of the orange inside a bowl. Once I did that I poured my jello concoction inside the orange and set them in the fridge overnight. What I woke up to was some jello inside an orange. So I cut them like I would any orange wedge and , Voila'. Jello Oranges.

The girls loved them and they had some for breakfast and ate the rest for lunch.

So that's all for the food art for now. Next we've been working on art for the Spartansburg fair. We've been quite creative lately and its been a great way to pass what little time of summer we have left. So here are some of our art projects we've done so far. First you'll be thinking I am the most creative person in the world for coming up with some of these ideas. Well, I'm not. I'll give the website Pinterest all of the credit. Its where I've gotten my ideas and we've spawned them off and made them our very own. I'll admit it took me a little while to figure out even what Pinterest was and its purpose. But I finally figured it out it was a place where I can find ideas, and pin them on my own board for future reference. Simple yet so convenient.

This 3D collage was created by Hannah. It turned out super cute and she had oodles of fun making it. We didn't have the wrinkly cardboard that comes from boxes, so we created our own with a cereal box cardboard, and just bending it so it was wrinkly for the bun. The plate was created with some scrapbook paper I had laying around and we used different types of medium. Construction paper, noodles, oatmeal, paper bags and whatever else we could find to make the sandwich.

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So while Hannah was working on her sandwich I gave Maggie a job to do. I printed out a fishbowl template and had her paint it so it could dry while we were gone to the Art Show down town. Every year the Art Guild holds an Art show at the park. It was super fun this year. We saw an Elvis impersonator , I mean who says the King is dead?


After he was finished singing , we went around the gazebo and they had a fun puppet show. The title was Aesop's fables. Maggie really enjoyed this because many of the stories she's read with the Brillkids Aesop's fables books.


While that was going on the art was being judged. Marilyn had entered a picture of hers that she drew this year. It turned out pretty good. In the end she received 2nd place for it. We're very proud of her. My girls really are very artistic.




At the end of the art show we had the pleasure of watching the Airforce Band of Flights, and all I can say is , "Wow!" It was better than watching any celebrity singer any day. Great singers and music plus our country's super heroes make awesome entertainment.

( Girls pictured with Senior Airman Kelly Perry. One of the singers of Systems Go Airforce Band of Flights)

(Maggie grooving to the music)

Once we came home Maggie's 'fish' bowl was all dried out and we were able to do the finishing touches by using mixed beans for the fish rocks , her hand for the fish and some Cheerios for the bubbles.

Isn't it amazing what you can do with food? But it sure did turn out pretty cute that's for sure.
The girls have been working really hard on the rest of their art work. My girls really enjoy working on different types of art. I will continue to record more of their art that they've been working on this week for the fair. So stay tuned!