…a sugar skull cross stitch pattern

I have a whole back log of patterns I’d like to do. A lot of things get in the way, like work and festivals and class, although at least 60% of what gets in the way is sheer laziness. I’ll sift through images for awhile, or I’ll do a shitty sketch of something, or I’ll go too far into cleaning up an image and butcher it and say fuck it, and then get bored and waste an hour on cracked.

The sugar skull is one of those back log projects. I figured it would be super easy to find a sample that I really liked and that I could base my pattern off of, but somehow I just wasn’t thrilled with anything I saw. I putzed around for awhile and then finally committed to putting this together in the most ridiculous method ever.

I didn’t like the shape of any of the sugar skulls, so I used an actual anatomical sketch. I also found a basic star shape, a heart, a rose, and a bindi. After everything was said and done, the bindi I chose looked a bit goofy–kind of like a blue guy doing a weird little jig–but hopefully that’s just me. Seriously though, if you like everything about the pattern except that little guy, let me know and I’ll put something better there, no charge. I made a composite of all the little pieces and printed it up. Actually, I printed just the skull, rose and bindi the first time, but it turned out I’m so inept at drawing that I had to add the heart and star.

I then traced the whole thing. I know what you’re thinking, why didn’t I just trace it in photoshop, but I will again remind you of my gross ineptitude. I’ve found that unless the image is already well defined, it’s hard for me to trace on the computer. I also figured that, even though the other elements were fairly crisped it was just easier for me to trace them along with the skull. I had planned on drawing out all the additional details at this stage as well, but I had symmetry issues. Also, I got this far before going away for a week, and when I came back, I had absolutely no interest in continuing this phase.

I scanned it back into my computer and finished it up with additional details and full color. Like most of my designs, I wasn’t particularly happy with the results; the shadowing is a bit cheesier than usual for me, and neither of the eyes did exactly what I wanted them to do. Both are common elements in the sugar skull art I’d seen, but the star’s proportions and shading are awkward and the other side looks like a daisy eye patch. I liked how the rose came out, and the chin and top flowers worked out nicely, but you’d be amazed how long it took me to get those forehead flowers looking that mediocre.

I worked my usual magic in KG Stitch. I’m not sure if I’m getting better at it or if I’m just settling for inferior quality, but I’ve whittled this step down to about 2 hours. The skull outline and the rose are extremely clean–I actually did a total recolor of the rose after the conversion didn’t get the fade quite right–and I touched up just about everything, but I did leave the dithering on the edges of the details. I figure if the stitcher wants better polished edges, it’s a totally simple fix. Otherwise, it sort of works for additional texture. Or something. I shouldn’t cover my laziness with excuses.

It’s a great pattern, I just suck at selling things. You should ignore the horrible sales pitch and buy it from me anyway at craftisart.

Wilton Class 1 (part 1 of 2)

Now that I’ve been out of college for five years, I’ve been missing the learning environment. Don’t get me wrong; school sucks. That doesn’t have anything to do with the education part of it, though, it has to do with the curriculum. And, you know, tests. Homework. Presentations. American History at eight AM. All that was lame, but learning something new is pretty awesome.

The great thing about doing it at the adult level is you get to pick what you learn. I decided that I should get a formal education in cake decorating. It’s something that I’ve always loved to do, and I’ve always been incredibly mediocre at. I have an entire set of decorating tips and I have no idea how to use any of them. Michaels is offering the class for $22.50, and between that and supplies I spent under $50, which I think is pretty effing cheap for four two-hour classes.

For class one, we were required to bring the kit, cookies, and dye. I feel like we must also have had to bring in frosting, but this was a month ago now and oddly, I just don’t remember that. Huh. Anyway, he only big cookie cutters I have are heart shaped, and I was a bit concerned about showing up with the wrong shaped cookie, but then it turned out I was the only one that actually baked cookies for it. I thought it was kind of strange–I mean, don’t you take a cake decorating class because you bake and want your baked goods to look better?–but who am I to judge?

The author of this blog is who I am to judge. But apparently the most popular reason to take the class is to decorate your own wedding cake or the wedding cake of a specific person. Seems like an awful lot of time to devote to a single cake, but who am I to…well, we already established that, I guess.

We had fun in class, and our instructor showed us how to make buttercream suitable for decorating and how to level a cake and all that. I knew how to do most of what we went over in class, but that’s okay, because I like to be better than my peers. I know it’s shallow, and frankly, I don’t care. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be the best. I did learn to do a crumb coat first before putting a clean coat of icing on the cake, which totally made sense and I can’t believe I never figured that out on my own.

At the end of the class, we practiced using a star tip on our cookies. I’d forgotten to bring the food coloring–somehow, I missed that line on our syllabus sheet–and was offered color by my classmates, but I didn’t see any reason for it beyond making these two pictures better, so I declined. The cookies pictured are the ones that made it home, as I do have the recipe for the best sugar cookies on earth. The one that’s broken (that I put stitches on, how freaking adorable is that) was a casualty of shipping, but you know that chunk of cookie was devoured the moment I realized it hadn’t made it to class. And it was delicious.

For the second class, we had to bring a cake. I tried making a mocha cake, but like the mocha cheesecake I made a couple months back, it was meh. If anyone has a good trick for adding a coffee flavor to pastry, please let me know; reducing brewed coffee and adding that Starbucks Via shit both failed. For filling I made chocolate ganache, which was tasty but oddly lumpy. Overall, the best thing I can say about it was it was cake. I also made buttercream following the directions in the book. I’ve now made it three times, and have yet to figure it out. I just can’t get the consistency right.

When I got to class a couple minutes late, I was surprised to find only one of my classmates there. We waited a couple minutes before an employee came by and said our instructor was running very late. We didn’t mind, and we hung out and chitchatted and bought stuff and had a nice time. Our other classmates showed up and we didn’t notice that an hour had passed when the employee came by and expressed her concern that the instructor hadn’t shown up yet. To make a long story roughly the length of a story a normal person would tell, there was a miscommunication between the employee and the instructor and she wasn’t coming. We almost left, then one of my classmates said that since we were here anyway, we may as well have our own little class.

We were supposed to copy one of several outlines given in our workbook, which included a cupcake, a fish, and a hamburger. I cannot possibly explain why those were our options, and I immediately rejected those and brought my own image, of a coffee cup. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t the greatest choice ever, but we all got a good laugh out of the turd floating in the coffee cup. I had also planned on more attractive steam, but it ended up being more of a nod to the concept than actual steam. Also, you might be thinking that my eye for detail is so great that I actual put the bottom lip thing on the ceramic saucer; it’s not. I was able to pipe a steady flow of buttercream up until that point, and thankfully, it worked out.

The decorative borders didn’t go nearly so well. I thought at the time that having the instructor there would have helped this problem immensely, but during the next class, she said she didn’t have much of a solution, either. The ‘pearl’ border just doesn’t look right at the amateur level. I did do better with them in class, but I ultimately decided that I should stick with shell and be happy that my shells look really nice.

And yes, I know now that I need to cover my cake board.

…a Peeps cake for easter

As far as holidays go, Easter is not a favorite of mine. It goes back to the whole pagan thing. As much as it brings me joy at Christmas to decorate trees and burn yule logs and give presents and do all those pagan things that the christians somehow think belong to them, it irks me that they celebrate the resurrection of Jesus with fertility rights. How can you possibly think bunnies and eggs have anything to do with zombie Jesus? It makes no sense!

But I’ll take even the flimsiest excuse to bake a cake.

Holy shit, that’s a peep.

Every year, Lisa makes a cake for her family’s easter thing. And every year, it’s a box mix that’s decorated in a style that is, in my kindest words, juvenile. Last year it was carved into a rudimentary rabbit head, which may have worked if she hadn’t used yellow decorating gel for facial features. The poor thing looked like a devil ghost.

So this year, I took over the project. I know, I know, I should let Lisa do these things herself, I shouldn’t be taking her pet projects away from her, but I just can’t resist. I need to make everything perfect in the bitchiest way possible.

For the cake, I made a standard white cake, substituting coconut milk for the regular milk. It came out a bit dense, but not excessively so. We filled it with marshmallow cream to get make it as peep-like as possible, and also to make it almost prohibitively sweet. After sifting through several overly complicated coconut frosting recipes, I ended up making the same substitution I had in the cake mix on a buttercream frosting.

The biggest problem we had in assembling the cake was the crumbs. I don’t know why this one was particularly bad, but nothing stuck like it was supposed to. I swear, that marshmallow cream could be used to glue bricks together, but the crumbs were so bad that even after the cake was assembled and left to sit overnight, when it was sliced, the layers came apart like we’d separated them with parchment paper. Because the marshmallow cream was so thick and wouldn’t stick to the cake, I ended up spreading it with my fingers. Messy, but successful.

I used a shameful amount of blue dye to get that color. I actually said, “Oh god, that was way too much dye,” when I squirted it into the buttercream, and then I think I ended up adding more to it.  There really needs to be a better way to dye icing. Way back when I did Craig’s grooms cake, my fondant was nearly unworkable because of so much dye needing to be added.

For decoration, we poured–doused might be a better word–dyed sugar crystals liberally over the cake and patted them in. I wanted to do the sides, but the frosting dried too quickly and the crystals slid off before we could press them in. For the face, Lisa chopped up a tootsie roll and I shaped them and stuck them in. It worked out really well, and how super cute is that little face!

Lisa wanted to border the cake in crystals, but I put a stop to that with my grass tip. I’m still trying to master that one, so it looks a little clumsy, but that’s okay. I also ran into the unusual problem of the holes getting jammed up with stray crystals. Whoops.

Side note: I used present wrapping cellophane from the dollar store to cover the cake board. I’m totally satisfied with how it works, but that picture doesn’t have focus problems; that’s just how poorly the screens lined up.

…a tie dye cross stitch

…you knew this was bound to happen eventually.

Well, I knew it was, at any rate.

As previously mentioned in my Beetle post, there’s a good chance I’m the biggest hippie you know. I’m vegetarian, I make my own clothing, I vend at jam and bluegrass festivals. I decorate my walls with tapestries, I use salt based deodorant, and I can pitch a tent in seven minutes. I can’t stand patchouli and I have no interest in dreadlocks, but hi, I’m a hippie.

So for all that, I really needed a tie dye cross stitch pattern. It turns out, however, that it is really hard to translate the random chaos of tie dye into a pattern whose scale isn’t monstrous in both size and number of colors. Like the mandala pattern, this is one that’s been sitting on the back burner for awhile. I literally have seven different images on my computer that have all been worked to death, but none of them worked out.

This was one of the failures. I have no idea how today’s reworking was successful, but I fiddled with this forever before giving up on it, and then somehow, months later, it all came together.

I managed to pull that off with just 18 colors. I know that probably doesn’t sound impressive, but there are four shades each of blue and green. It started with 44 colors and I had a hell of a time working them down without getting a big blurry mess. Despite being a great big tie dye, the finished pattern was rather flat looking, so I added a windowpane border, and it made the whole thing pop nicely.

You can buy the pattern here, or contact me about buying it as a kit.

…a brand new pattern, long overdue

I know, I know. It’s been ages since I’ve posted, the few posts I’ve done this year were totally lame, I’m totally not making my goal of 100 posts in a year, I’ve lost that loving feeling, blah blah blah.

I got burnt out. The winter holidays were completely insane and although yay, money, boo, brain hurt. I’m pretty notorious for losing interest quickly in even my most successful and pleasurable of endeavors. I can love what I’m doing, and I can be making what I consider to be lots of money, and I will absolutely get bored of it in six months. It’s why I always have at least three jobs. As long as I have enough jobs, I can take lots of vacations and still be working.

I’m back now, I swear. I feel all revamped and rested, and I think I’m going to focus on selling PDF patterns instead of kits. I’ll still do both, but I figure if I list them as PDFs and mention the option of kits, people who don’t really care will go for whatever is immediately for sale. As much as I don’t mind making the kits, I think a lot of my burn out came from the tedium of so much craft shopping, post office lines, and paper shuffling.

I’m kicking off this new found excitement with a brand new pattern. I say brand new, but that’s kind of a lie; if you’ve seen my reserve listings at craftisart, this design will look familiar to you. It’s a mandala I made a while back, and even converted to cross stitch and cleaned up for sale, but it never felt quite right and I put it on the back burner.

Last night, I finally revisited it. I decided it needed a stitched border on it, and while I was working out the math of getting a border that would fit properly around the mandala I’d already cleaned up, I realized that I just needed to start fresh. So this pattern ended up with a ridiculous amount of hours of work put into it.

But check out how clean that work is:

That is some sexy gradient work right there. Also, those yellows are much better in person; if I haven’t mentioned this before, KG-Chart is awesome but the yellows and oranges are completely off. Now that I’m looking at the detail, I probably should have smoothed out the coloring of that inner squiggly salmonish line, but that’s okay. It works; it’s just extra work for an effect that’s not all that impressive.

You know what is impressive? This border:

See how it’s actually just an expansion of the outer detail work of the mandala? That’s craftsmanship right there.

Honestly, I know absolutely nothing about the cross stitch pattern making industry–I’ve researched it somewhat, and I don’t think there’s an industry now; I’m fairly sure no new patterns have been released by the major companies since 1987–and this might be viewed by a complete cop out, but I REALLY like the look and I kind of want to make a complete mandala on that scale for the precise look of it. The pattern as it is would be 10″ square on 14ct cloth, so I didn’t want to get too crazy with the size.

You can buy it here. And the newish wordpress quick post feature sucks balls, just for the record.

…chocolate covered strawberry cheesecake

I haven’t been posting, despite my claims otherwise. It’s pretty obvious, since there have been only two new posts this year, and it’s pretty hard to hide that fact. It doesn’t mean I haven’t been crafting, though; it just means I haven’t been blogging.

One thing I’ve made a lot of in the past couple months is cheesecake. I have pretty much the best cheesecake recipe ever, and despite everything said about how temperamental cheesecake is, it’s not too difficult to add flavors to it without damaging its integrity. There are definitely some fluid issues that need to be taken into account, but since it’s cheesecake, nobody really notices if it’s a little damper than usual, and it’s always delicious…because it’s cheesecake. By law, it’s delicious.

This week, my roommate’s father was in town, and his favorite cheesecake is strawberry. Supposedly his exact words were something along the lines of, “just make a regular cheesecake, and add a strawberry swirl to it.” That would have been the easy solution, and I totally could have just frikkin bought it at Wal*Mart, and I say screw that. So I made a chocolate covered strawberry cheesecake.

For the crust, I followed my standard graham cracker recipe, with a couple simple substitutions. Instead of the regular honey graham crackers, I used chocolate graham crackers. The recipe I use calls for chopped walnuts, and I used almonds instead, just because it was I happened to have. The flavor actually stood out really well, and I thought the texture worked better. I also omitted the suggested cinnamon.

I followed my cheesecake recipe as usual, except I omitted the teaspoon of vanilla. I separated the batter in half. To the first half, I added about half a tablespoon of vanilla, but honestly, I think I’ve become numb to the taste of vanilla, and the only time I’ll ever be able to appreciate it is I if I scrape it directly out of the bean. Maybe I’ll start omitting it entirely and see if I miss it.

For the strawberry, I thawed frozen strawberries and blended them in the food processor. I don’t know how many I started with, but it was about a cup and a half once processed. I blended it in segments but ultimately used all of it to get the flavor how I wanted it. I didn’t add anything else, and it ended up being very tart once baked. Next time, I’ll add a tablespoon of sugar to sweeten it, although using fresh strawberries would probably also fix it.

It’s been suggested to me that I should swirl the flavors, but I prefer crisp layers. The layers didn’t end up as crisp as I like, but practice makes perfect.

For the topping, I melted together a half cup chocolate and a quarter cup butter. After the cake had cooled for thirty minutes and I had separated the springform, I poured the topping on so it could cool at with the cake.

This was waaay too much topping, and the biggest flaw of the cake. It was absolutely delicious, but it was so firm that we couldn’t break it with a fork without squashing the entire cake. We’ve also been having issues mastering the slicing of the cheesecake, and the chocolate made the dental floss technique impossible. We had to use a serrated knife. You can see the blade marks in the photo.

So to recap, here’s how I recommend altering your favorite cheesecake recipe: substitute chocolate graham crackers for honey graham crackers, almonds for walnuts, and omit any spices from crust.

Add vanilla to half the batter only.

Add 1.5 cups pureed strawberries and 1 tbsp sugar to other half of batter.

Bake as directed.

Melt together .25 cup chocolate and 2 tbsp butter, spread over cheesecake after 30 minutes cooling, making sure to smooth out any thick spots.

Enjoy that shit, ’cause it’s gonna be delicious.

…a brand new store!

If you’ve been trying to click any of my links to my Etsy shop and they haven’t taken you anywhere, have no fear! I’ve packed up and moved shop elsewhere. I’m currently trying out craftisart.com, which is a much smaller site, but also cheaper for me and (hopefully) a lot easier for buyers. Accounts are not necessary for purchasing, and they allow the google and amazon alternatives to paypal. I don’t have those set up yet, but hopefully I’ll get around to it in the next couple weeks.

I’m also going to set up a shop at wepay.com, which takes direct credit payment. It’s only available in the US, but I think between the two shops, I’ll be able to cater to a wider range of needs. I’ll have to work on promotion a lot more, so things might not pan out, but I was expecting the next couple months to be slow, so it’s a good time to work out kinks.

I’ve gotten a lot of my cross stitch patterns posted now, and have changed many of the links in my blog, but I’m still getting things switched over, so not everything is perfect. If there’s an item in which you’re interested that isn’t posted yet, just leave a comment here and I’ll get things set up for you. I’m still trying to figure out how I want to do the PDF versions, so in the meantime, you can drop me a line either here or over at the new store at http://www.craftisart.com/scootybeth/

You can’t go wrong using coupon code ELLABELLE. Trust me on this. It’s valid through February 2012, and it. is. faaaabulous.