May Arts Design Team Round Two

I say this with no shame: I cannot decorate a cake to save my life. Put a piping bag in my hand and you'll end up with a splattered, runny version of "modern art" on your cake instead of the elegant swirls of frosting you see on Food Network. I don't know why I find it so impossible, but no number of fancy tools will swing my results.
Well, you have to work with what you got, right? In that spirit I came up with my final project for the May Arts Design Team, a cake topper that (fortunately) doesn't involve any cake decorating tools. Oh no: this, my friends, is a ribbon cake topper.

Rainbow style! Because basic white frosting is really the only thing I can manage, so I needed something bold and colorful to cover enhance my decorating.

This is a fun addition that really makes a statement in a room (trust me, the photos don't do it justice.) Here's what you'll need for the project:

A medium sized bowl, scissors, wax paper to keep your work space clean, glue, tape, a paint brush, fabric stiffener, and "mini skewers" (a snazzier way of saying toothpicks.) For the ribbon I used May Art's 3/8" wide satin ribbon, about a half yard for each color. If you had a giant cake you could probably go with their wider version, but this rainbow came out plenty big for my cake.

First, lay out a piece of wax paper to work on. Place your red ribbon down and make sure it's flat, then carefully spread a thin strip of glue all along one edge of it and affix the orange ribbon on top. Keep adding the layers, gluing the next color to the previous one with just a slight overlap. You only want to glue about three-fourths of it down; leave the last 5 or 6 inches free to curl later. When you're done it should look like this:

Don't worry if it looks a little splotchy now, once you apply the stiffener the color will even out. 

Here's where the Snazzy Skewers come into play. Take two toothpicks and glue them to the two ends of the yellow (or green) ribbon, and cut two inch-long strips of the same color to glue on top so it's hidden. 

Here is one end:

Remember on the end you will curl to attach the toothpick at the point you stopped gluing, so the ribbon curls can flow freely off the cake later.

Now wait about 15 minutes for this to set but not dry completely; you still need it to be malleable to bend it. I used my 15 minute break to work out! snack on frosting, who am I kidding.

Grab your bowl and drape the rainbow over the edge, taping down both ends to keep it in place, then paint a thin layer of fabric stiffener over it. This will give your rainbow its curved shape.

Now you'll want to grab something round to wrap your ribbon ends around so they curl. I found straws work well, but really you can use anything you find lying around your house, from pens to  paintbrushes. Wrap each color around its own straw, and again paint it with a thin layer of stiffener to set. And now you've found yourself with...

A hot mess. But, my friends, I remind you of how attractive you feel with a head full of granny curlers. The process isn't so alluring but the end result is what matters! 

Give this about an hour, or overnight, to dry completely. 

When you come back to it, just unstick the rainbow from the bowl and pull the ribbon ends from your straws and voila! A super adorable rainbow cake topper.

 Simply stick the two toothpicks wherever you'd like your rainbow to start and finish, and drape the curls over the side.   (I should also note here that my stiffener is non-toxic, so while I certainly wouldn't eat the rainbow unless I was ravenously hungry, the frosting is perfectly safe.) You could pipe much prettier clouds than mine and cover with blue or silver sprinkles, or add little chocolate coins for the "pot of gold."

 

Now for the best part: cake time!

With Naught But A Sharpie

You know what needs to exist? Sharpie Day. At the risk of sounding like an advertisement for Sharpie, these wondrous little pens are the bees knees. Of course other permanent pens (what are your favorites?) do a great job too, they just don't have quite the marketing department of our favorite brand.
The brand doesn't matter, only that permanent markers are just way too much fun, and a thousand times more versatile than you would guess. There are so many more uses for Sharpies than drawing a mustache on your passed-out friend, and here are a few to prove it:

This cup and tote bag comes from Etsian Brooke's shop, Brookish. The shop hosts all things Jane Austen and boasts her super cool handwriting, but if you want to test your own hand these projects would be so easy. Plain tote bags go for under $10 in almost every craft store and Sharpies are less than $2, so for under $15 you've got yourself a chic, eco-friendly shopping bag with something to say. Wouldn't it be cute to wrap a gift in one of these with your card written on it? That way they can carry the sentiment with them wherever they go, long after a conventional card has been recycled. 

These cups are simple to make, too; just write or draw anything you want, and bake it in a 350 degree oven for half an hour to set in. I might have to start writing mine and my roommate's names on all our cups, so we stop mixing them up all the time. It's a real problem when one roommate likes tap water and hates sparkling, and one loves sparkling and won't drink tap. After ten minutes in room temperature they look the same, and then you've got two very annoyed roommates.  

You could even go crazy and use a few different colors for a truly creative dish:

They look like something Anthropology would sell for $40 dollars apiece, right? How awesome would it be to have a kid's party where everyone got  to draw on a plate and take home a permanent reminder? And if you get them at the dollar store it's a way more cost effective day than going to Marine World and less germ-infested than Chuck-E-Cheez's. 

Or how about this scarf from Hermes?

Um...

...

Sorry I got distracted by the scarf. This is the most beautiful and original piece of fabric I have ever wanted to put around my neck. I want it SO BADLY. But I also think you could look to it as inspiration for your own chic scarf, using just white fabric and a black Sharpie for a neat drawing or sketch to make your outfit truly your own.

Or do you remember that guy famous for drawing a whole wall-to-wall mural in his recreation room with nothing but Sharpies? Beats any wallpaper from Ikea, tell you what.

This is but a taste of the billion projects you can find on the internet involving Sharpies. This is why I think what we really need, as a nation, is a Sharpie Day devoted to crafting with naught but our trusty pens, and maybe some booze. Booze just goes without saying for every holiday.