Inedible Cupcakes and Incredibly Edible Chocolates

Last night I went down to the South Loop to take a chocolate-making class at Canady Le Chocolatiere.

I had bought a Groupon to take this class sometime last fall with two friends.  One of them used it right away (and I haven't forgiven her for it) but my other friend, Sarah, kindly waited to use it with me.  I was glad to have her there because there was a lot of info to absorb and a second set of ears was quite helpful.  I never knew how serious chocolate making is, although it shouldn't have surprised me!
           But the class was a great success and I have a lovely box of filled chocolates made by myself and the other students to enjoy over the next few days, depending on how long I can make myself wait to open it.  If I show some real restraint I may even save it to share with a friend.

           I had planned to send some of those chocolates off to a few friends who have birthdays in the next week, but my selfishness has gotten the better of me, so instead I woke up this morning and made them some turtles out of the mixed nuts and old hershey bars.  Well, they look cute anyway :-)
           Tomorrow afternoon I am going to my first ever baby shower (for parents who are my own generation anyway).   My friends Brian and Anaïs, who got married last April (you may recall, I made them a quilt for their wedding) moved out to Las Vegas for work in the fall, so I haven't seen them since September.  I didn't even know Anaïs was pregnant when she left, so it will be very exciting to see her tomorrow.

          I am a very bad guest at weddings and showers because I don't like to buy things from the gift registry.  I would much rather make them something, which often turns out to be not as pretty as I had pictured in my mind.  This project was no different!  I made some "cupcakes" out of receiving blankets and onesies, inspired by this post I found online.  Not being a big coffee drinker, my coffee-maker is teeny tiny, so my coffee filters were not the full-sized ones I needed for this project, so I made do with some parchment paper and scallop-edged scissors.

           I found this sweet guy, Mumble Billie Bear, at Anthropologie last week.  I brought him home, put him on my dining table, and then he started helping me with my homework.  I thought for a while that maybe I shouldn't give him away.  He looked at me with his kind of sad eyes like he wasn't sure I should give him away either, but after we picked out a fitting ribbon to tie around his neck, he looks more excited for the party.  I think that Baby Girl Caccamo will love her new, very soft bear.  Hopefully I will get to visit him sometime.

Cupcake mania on a Sunday afternoon

A while ago my friend Brittany and I signed up to take a cupcake decorating class this weekend.  If I had known I would be having a physics test the following day (which I should be studying for right now instead of writing this post!) I may not have planned it.  Nevertheless, the 2 hour class was a sweet study break.
            The class was run by Give me Some Sugar, taught by a lady who seems to split her time between a couple different bakeries, giving classes, and offering private classes in people's homes (she'll even clean up your kitchen afterward).

            We started by making cake balls, which are just balls of crumbled cake mixed (by our own hands) with some buttercream frosting, then chilled in the fridge for about a half hour.  Here's Brittany, getting her hands right in there and mixing things up.

            We got to dip them in multi-colored candy melts, and could even put them on lollipop sticks to make them look like lollipops.  This was my first cake-ball experience and I was not bowled over, but I could be talked into giving them a second try.  Even though most of mine didn't look as cute as I wanted them to, they tasted just fine.

            We each had 6 cupcakes to decorate however we wanted.  There were 3 little girls in the class who went pretty crazy with the frosting and sprinkles especially.  I wish I had gotten a picture of some of those cupcakes.  Brittany's and mine were a little more subdued.  I was taking my sweet time with some of them, and was actually the last person to finish frosting my cakes.

            I experimented with a basket-weave, which I had never tried before.

            Brittany and I each made a plaid cupcake (mine is on the right).
            We also got to try out some fondant, which Brittany and I agreed doesn't taste that good, but I'm definitely going to decorate with it again, and hopefully soon!

             The best (or worst) part of the whole class was that we each got to take home our cupcakes and cake-balls, so I've got about a week of desserts in my fridge.  Unless someone wants to come over and help me eat them!

Getting Sketchy

I've been taking a drawing class to help me put together a portfolio for architecture schools (and hopefully get a letter of recommendation from the teacher?).  It's a 10 week class and today we hit the halfway mark.
             It's been a good experience for me.  I haven't really drawn anything since high school, and then it was abstract stuff.  It's been really eye-opening to try to draw actual objects and go through the frustrations of not having them turn out the way I'd like.  It's also very different from the art I normally do; when I'm sewing, quilting, or needlepointing, I feel like I can see how it will turn out, but when I'm drawing it's like anything could happen.
           I've been enjoying it overall (aside from the fact that it's 3 hours every Sunday morning) and I think I have some good work to show for it.  Here are a few of my favorite pieces, including one I drew in this morning's class.

             This one is from the 3rd week, when we drew fruit with pastels.  I really enjoyed working with colors.

            This one is from this morning's class.  We were working with graphite, which is good because you can be more precise with a sharpened pencil, but I surprised myself by making all my lines and marks shaded instead of drawn.

Printroduction

Yesterday morning, I had the first class of a 5-class Introduction to Screenprinting at the Lillstreet Art Center.  It had been a while since I'd been in an actual art class, so I was a little nervous about what to expect the first day, etc.  It was a small group of students - mostly women - and certainly some crafty individuals, like me.  My teacher, Thomas Lucas, showed us some prints from previous classes, which intimidated me at first because they all seemed so clever and clean, but really got my creative juices flowing.

            He also told us about a few Print exhibits going on downtown right now.  Nate and I were headed downtown to the CSO for the evening (to hear Pavel Gomziakov play the Haydn Cello Concerto in C Major - it was fabulous!) so we decided to go down a few hours early to check out these exhibits.  It was lucky we got down there this weekend because the Printervention exhibit is closing in just a few days.  This was a really neat collection of old fashioned-type political/propaganda posters that were all made recently, regarding issues of today, with a sense of humor.

            The other exhibit, at the Chicago Cultural Center, was "graphic works" by Romare Bearden.  These prints looked a lot less like what you would expect of "prints" and more of what you would call a collage.  And they are definitely a lot more advanced than what I can accomplish any time soon, but it was a really great introduction to what printing can be - so much more than I had thought.  The print I'm showing here (one of my favorites for obvious reasons) is actually a lot more of a traditional print - many of them had great textures that just made you wonder . . . "how?"