Portal Cake

My younger brother David just had his 17th birthday, I wanted to make him a cool cake so I decided on the 'companion cube'. It is from the video game Portal, David loves that game and it so happens that I do too  : )

I started off with making marshmallows for the marshmallow fondant. I have never worked with fondant before and heard that the marshmallow kind tasted the best, so that is what I made.

I needed to get a square cake pan (how did I not have one already?!) I'm cheap, so even though this would be a four layer cake, I just got one pan... 

4 hours of baking/cooling time later, the chocolate agave cakes were ready to be frosted! David's favorite color is orange, that that is what I made the inner frosting. The frosting was a 'cream-cheese frosting' folded into sweetened whipped cream, sorry I don't have a recipe I just made it up as I went (It turned out really good though) The key thing is you need a lot of it...

I frosted the middle of each cake liberally but you also have to frost all of the outside so the fondant will stick to it.

The fondant was a little tricky to work with, but it was fun to try something new. After I rolled it out and cut the pieces, I would get them a little wet so that they would stick to each other better.

The fondant part of decorating the cake took me about 3 hours to do (that was with the fondant already being made) The cake didn't turn out perfect but it was pretty good for my first time!

The Cake was a big hit with everyone!

And the slices were huge...

    

Crib Skirt.

Both Chantel and Helena have been trying to find ways to make their nurseries extra cute and give some personality to the room. A colorful way is to add a crib bumper but those are a suffocation hazard and it is recommended that you don't use them, so back to square one... And then I saw this cute tutorial on making a crib skirt and just like that, we had the perfect thing for the room!

      

Chantel loved the idea of having pleats, she already had some brown curtains in the room and I had some leftover striped fabric for the chair, so the colors were all set. (the blue in the middle is hidden under the mattress and is just a scrap piece holding everything together)  

I was trying to do everything for as cheap as possible, so I went to target and checked out their curtain section. Luck was on my side, they had the same brown curtain that Chantel had in the widow and they were on sale too! $4 later I had everything I needed :)   

The tutorial was pretty good and fairly easy to follow. I didn't line the skirt (like they suggest) and I think it still turned out fine, I also made the skirt shorter then the tutorial says to, Chantel's crib had slightly diffrent dimensions (so make sure to measure the crib before you start!!)  

It turned out really cute and went very well in the nursery. It is great to add color, style and also hide all that storage space! When Helena comes out in May for her Utah baby shower, I am going to make one for her to take back with her! 

Hot Potato

Dave now teaches the kids who are 3 years old in primary, and I get to help him when his partner is out of town. Last time I helped, they played 'hot potato' with a crayon box, Dave would put on a primary song and when it stopped, whoever had the 'hot potato' would answer a question about the lesson. The questions were like 'what is something you use water for?' "drink!' 'brushing your teeth!', the kids really enjoyed it. I however vowed to make something better then a crayon box for the 'potato' for next time.

   

And here he is! I had Dave draw the outline of what he wanted the potato shape to be and then I just cut it out of felt, I enjoyed using the felt because it is easy to hand stitch. He is not perfect but I wasn't going for perfect, I wanted him to be a little quirky (success!)  

I filled him with rice so he would have a little weight to him for when the kids tossed him around, he is about 5" tall (so not too tiny) I also added a tie, he is in church after all... The whole thing took me maybe two hours and I'm very happy with how he turned out :)  

So Ugly (Part 3)

I'm almost sad posting this last entry about Chantel's chair, I feel as if I'm truly done with it now that I show you the finished product (even though I have already given the chair to Chantel...) and for some reason that is a little sad. But luckily I'm working on a ton of other baby related protects, as some of you may know my sister Helena is also pregnant! So I have a lot of ideas of things to make for the two new babies coming to the family! 

Because the back of the chair had some indents, I decided to work with them instead of trying to cover them up. After I slipped the cover on, I sewed through the material and foam so the fabric would contour to the existing shape of the chair back.

I then tried, for the first time, to make Cover Buttons! It was actually kind of fun and they turned out really cute.

Cover Buttons are just two pieces of metal that you can add fabric to, it comes with a little plastic thing that stretches the fabric over the metal making your own custom buttons!  

I then added my super cute buttons onto the back of the chair. Isn't that adorable? I then trimmed the excess  fabric and then hand stitched the bottom of the cover onto the foam back.

The last step was to Scotch Guarded the fabric, so it would stand up a little batter to wear!

Drum roll please.....  

  

Isn't it beautiful!? Well I think it is and so does Chantel! I brought it over to her a few weeks ago and just recently helped her set up the baby's room and I must say, this looks a whole lot better then it originally did and goes much better with their white nursery decor!

I thought I would do a side by side comparison, that way you can really appreciate how much the chair has changed!    

It took me many hours and a few blog posts (One Two and Three!) but I think it came together quite nicely!

So Ugly (Part Two)

After I finished all the painting on Chantel's chair, I got started on the sewing! I was super excited to get rid of that ugly material and replace it with something MUCH better! 

My next step was to find a good fabric, I went to three stores but I finally found something that I could use, it was on sale, worked for either gender and was cute, It fit all my criteria!  

I was using the existing fabric as a pattern so I started carefully ripping out all the seams, after about an hour I stopped being quite so careful and just had at it... but it still turned out fine!

The naked foam, just waiting to become beautiful!

I laid out all my fabric (admired it) and then got ready to cut it up.

I carefully pinned all the old pieces of fabric on, making sure that everything would fit and that the stripes were lined up, then I cut them out!

All my nicely cut pieces, folded and stacked just waiting to be sewn!

The sewing was fairly easy it didn't take very long at all and was very straightforward, I love to sew so I could have done with a little more of it!

The only 'tricky' part was adding the ties for the cushions. It wasn't hard, it just took some thought. I took the shoelace (what I used for the tie) and stitched it onto the chair fabric (only one piece of it) and then  pinned the other piece of the chair fabric together to sew them together like normal. Before I started sewing I flipped the shoelaces down in-between the two pieces of material so that they would be on the outside when I flipped the cover right-side out... 

  

So it ended up looking like this, sorry that might have been confusing I know all of my 'technical' terms  probably made those steps hard to follow... 

I then pressed all my seams (the key to making something look like it wasn't homemade!)

Now the new covers were ready to be put on, I couldn't wait to see what they looked like! Okay so you are probably wondering what the finished product looks like (and thinking 'man I already read two of your blog posts, just show me already!!') but there really are too many pictures and steps to just make this into one or even two posts, but you will see it all completed soon! 

So Ugly (Part One)

My sister Chantel is pregnant and the family could not be more excited! I am dying to know the gender so I can start shopping for him or her but for now we wait... well sort of. Chantel and her husband Mike have wisely decided that they want all the 'big ticket' items to be gender neutral, so they can use them for any future babies, they have also been trying to get the best deal they can on everything... Hence the hideousness of this chair-  

They found it on craigslist... and were perfectly happy with it (I think the excitement of the new baby was blinding them...) Let me tell you, this picture makes the chair look a lot better then it really was in person. So me, being their baby's future-favorite-aunt, decided to help :)

Chantel was super excited at the prospect of a new chair and I got to work. I started with pulling out all the staples on the foot rest (so I could start the reupholstering) there were 150 little staples and my fingers were in pretty bad shape by the time I detached the cardboard off of the wood. I was very excited to be done with that part...   

But it was not meant to be, as the cardboard came off I realized that I was just getting started. The fabric was also attached to the wood on the other side of the cardboard too but instead of using the same type of staples, the fabric was attached with the heavy duty kind. There were another 70 staples to pry off. by the time I was done, I wasn't sure my fingers would ever forgive me. I thought about just cutting all the fabric off but I was planning on using it as my pattern and I needed it intact.

I also started sanding the crap out if the chair to get it ready to paint. I can't describe how much dust there was! The sanding took me about 12 hours in total, I probably could have gotten away with not being quite as thorough but I really wanted this chair to be able to withstand anything (especially being around little children and their grimy little hands!)

Next I cleaned the wood so that all the dust was cleared off of it and then I primed it. I used spray paint because of all the curves, I thought it would give it a better finish and be easier. Two cans of primer later and I was ready to paint the chair white.

 

(you can see my husband's sexy legs in the background of this picture)

I would wipe the chair clean in between coats to make sure there were no specks in the paint. The white took a million (slight exaggeration) coats before it was done, it would have gone faster if I could have found white primer but I could only find a light gray (it worked fine but I needed more white coats overall). I also used a light abrasive to sand down any light bumps right before my last coat of white. I then finished painting it with a clear matte topcoat, it really helped with the over all 'finished' look' and gave it a great feel, once that was dry I buffed the whole thing with a paper towel. That great tip was from my husband, the paper towel was just abrasive enough to get the chair silky smooth but didn't hurt the paint finish.     

(The graveyard of spray paint.)

All the sanding and painting was about 40 hours worth of work but I was meticulous, you could probably cut that time down a bit if you used white primer and if you had a clean work environment so that you didn't have to clean everything so thoroughly before you could start painting again!

It was a ton of work but I am really happy with how it turned  out, want to see how it turned out? Well too bad! You will have to wait for part 2 (or maybe even part 3... who knows!)