Hobbit Cake

Its overly narrative cake time! This is another painted one, based on the scene in the hobbit where Bilbo, Gandalf and the dwarves are set upon by goblins. They escape by climbing trees, which the goblins set fire to, singing the gruesome song I've put on the cake - in excerpted form. Tolkien's songs are generally a bit wordy for decorative applications. Luckily, Gandalf is able to negotiate an eagle rescue.

Its sad that the photo's so blurry - I forgot my camera - as there's a lot of detail that isn't coming across. Most of it was painted in a sneaky corner of Pret A Manger in my lunchbreak, with the benign interference of two Glaswegian lawyers.

This was a ridiculous amount of painting, all started by seeing a vintage dress I loved in Lassco in Borough, which was a fatal combination of too expensive and wrong size. It had little grapes on it, which the seller kindly let me take pictures of. It is by no means symmetrical, despite long intervals obsessing and measuring, but hopefully if I always stand at a slight angle no one will notice.

I already had a black dress I never wore which was a similar style, although without the full skirt, so initially tried just to copy the grapes - but then my maximalist aesthetic took over and I couldn't stop painting, and then of course the hem looked lonely... I used almost an entire pot of gold fabric paint on this one, mixing it with acrylics to tint it as I went. When I have time I'll sew some beads or jewels on to match the original.

Work in Progress

I'm having real problems with resin at the moment - it hasn't been curing properly, maybe because of the weather, maybe because my resin and catalyst have been open too long. So I'm ordering a new brand online - Ice Resin - which will hopefully be better, but am thinking of selling some pop-up cards in the meantime. This one has my characteristic obsession with layers, which are separated by concertina folds at each side, which you can see in the second picture. This needs a bit of tidying up, then its off to the copy shop. The layers will look crisper on the copies, as this one is warped from paint, but its still going to be a challenge getting some properly 3D looking photos.

This may look complicated, but its nothing compared to the next card I'm plotting...

Tom's birthday cake this year wasn't actually the first Super Mario themed one I've done, but it was the first one with a kind of abstract vertical narrative; the bottom scene is fat Mario surrounded by takeaway boxes and pizza etc, and the top one is thin Mario, planting a flag with his target weight on it onto a conquered of mountain of unhealthy foods.

It didn't actually need as much explaining as I'd feared - most of my icing jobs should come with footnotes anyway. Making the meringues under stress/in company was not the wisest move but they are the first ones I've made that don't look like small astronomical objects, so that's nice. Inside it was all sponge and jam, and got eaten despite being part of a cavalcade of cakes.

Christmas cakes, belated

 As usual I over-complicated the Christmas cake this year - its painted fondant with marzipan leaves and piped decoration, and is meant to be the scene in A Christmas Carol where Scrooge sees chained spirits float past his window. I put "The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went" round the edge - a bit grim maybe but robins are dull.

This year's gingerbread house has a double pitched roof which mired me in a geometry for way too long, I could hear every Maths teacher I've ever had sighing as I tried to do Pythagoras,  failed, then realised I didn't even need it. The pattern is emphatically not Union Jacks (not a nationalist project this), I was going for Tudor half-timbered actually. Sadly it suffered many collapses but eventually I smothered its innards with enough icing to keep it together long enough to be transported Up North for New Years.