Celebrating Jack's 4th birthday virtually

Yes it's been a long time since I shared a non design team blog post but today is a special day! My sweet grandson Jack is 4 today and this is sadly the 2nd time that I have not been able to make him a cake and celebrate his birthday with him in person. My little fella is no longer a toddler but a real little boy and I loved seeing him recently even though we could only meet up outside. Here he is with Daisy (who incredibly will be 8 this year) last weekend.

We had such a great meet up outside.

He has grown so much...

Daisy was able to come to stay for a few days last week as we were providing child care for the Easter holidays. Her Mummy asked if I could make a topper for Jack's cake and I decided that Daisy and I could do this and more when she stayed.

We had fun designing a scene with Jack's model dinosaurs and I make a plaque to sit his favourite one on. 

He sorted out some of his other "besties" we could use!

We had fun making some ponds and rocks out of fondant icing to display them around the cake.

And made boulder candle holders.

So it's a "partial" Nanna cake this year. Hopefully next year we will all be able to celebrate with a proper party!

I also made him a dinosaur birthday card, of course,  using the fab dinosaur stamps from Stampers Grove. Some are out of stock now but there a few left if you are quick! The stenciled background is The forest by Visible Image as it the cool birthday sentiment in their lost for words sentiment set.

a close up

and one last shot

I would like to enter my card into these challenges;

Simon says stamp Monday Cheerful colours

Through the craftroom door anything goes

Crafty sentiments anything goes

Lil patch of crafting friends anything goes

and I'm waving to my friends over at 

Pixie's snippets playground #401

Life is fine my end and I am loving the sunshine and my garden too...I can almost hear it growing at the moment!

I have lots of photos over on Instagram if you would like to have a look. Here is the link to my account; Jane Tyrrrell. I tend to post much more over there these days as blog posts take so long to write and I have a lot of designing commitments (which I really love!)  I think it is the way life is going. I resisted for a long time but I now see it is so much quicker to share. If you pop on over do say hello.

Thanks so much for stopping by, enjoy the sunshine and keep safe.

Back soon,

Bye for now,

Jane x

Now she is 6

My sweetest granddaughter Daisy was 6 yesterday and we celebrated in style at the weekend.

She chose to have a swimming party which was followed by a birthday tea at the leisure centre.

 It really was a fab day and she and everyone enjoyed every minute.

I promised I would share my cake and card but before I do so I must share some brilliant new accessories I bought from Homepride. I have always used their flour and collected their tokens.

I added a brilliant large mixing bowl, mug and tea towel to my little collection of Homepride treasures.
The tea towel artist is the same as the guy who draws for The Great British Bake Off.

The mug is made by Emma Bridgewater.

 The large mixing bowl is made by Mason and it was perfect for mixing the cake in.

 There are Homepride men in relief around the edge! It's awesome. 

So I christened my products making Daisy's cake!

as always I make a raspberry jam Victoria sponge.
I made Daisy fondant icing candle holders 

and a kaleidoscope (yes that's the correct word!) of fondant icing butterflies. I added extra details using powder colours. The extras were used to decorate the cup cakes my daughter made.

For those of you who are cake makers for the first time I used a new fondant icing to cover the cake called Couture made by cakestuff.com and I could not recommend it more highly (and no they did not ask me to say this).  It gave the smoothest coating to the cake which was blemish free and very easy to apply. The only problem is the smallest quantity to buy at the moment is 2.5kg so I had a LOT spare.
I covered the cake and piped a yellow border. 

So finally here is the finished cake.

with some close ups

and here is the birthday girl blowing out her candles

I can also now reveal her card. She loves fairies and I combined that with butterflies and the colours of her cake.
The stamps are all by Visible Image and I die cut Daisy's name and a glittery number 6. The background is brushos and I coloured her dress with a gel pen.

You can just see the glitter of her wings here

 and the shine of the bubbles using Glossy Accents.

I would like to enter my card into the following challenges;

Pixie's snippets playground #365

Sweet stampin 2/3 Make your own background

Addicted to stamps 2/3 anything goes

Mix it up 3/5 anything goes
Addicted to stamps and more anything goes
Crafty Calendar 3/3 cute and girly

Craft Stamper take it make it 3/3 November anything goes

So now she is 6... and just the sweetest girl. I am one very blessed Nanna.

Thanks for stopping by,

Back soon,

Bye for now,

Jane x

A glorious Easter birthday

As promised I am back with some photos of Jack's 2nd birthday on Easter Sunday.

 We could not have had more perfect weather, it was like a hot summer's day and we were able to enjoy his birthday lunch outside in the garden.

He adores everything Brio; trains, diggers, boats..anything he can wheel along the track. As he also lives at the seaside I decided to make his cake with this theme in mind. I made a fondant icing Number 2 into a road and created a sea scene complete with lifeguard, buoys for his 2 candles and a whale.

I then added the Brio vehicles;

Here is the whale (which Jack named Tiddler!)

and the coast guard (of course)

Jack really seemed fascinated looking at it...and we all sang him Happy Birthday in the sunshine.

His Mummy and Daisy also made some gorgeous matching cupcakes.

He blew out his candles

and then it was time to get those vehicles moving.

and of course cutting the cake and making a wish with Mummy

My card today is not Jack's card as I forgot to photograph that one but one with a lovely STAMPlorations quote that is so perfect for our darling Jack. It is for sale at Dotty's Teahouse, Carshalton, SM5 2AE

The background is embossed using a wood embossing folder, the dies in my favoruite Tim Hollz world die and I added some stars too. 

I would like to enter my card into the following challenges;

Pixie's snippets playground #350
Simon says stamp Monday going round in circles 

Sweet stampin 2/3 recycle/anything goes

Crafty catz 3/3 anything goes
Creative fingers 3/3 anything goes
Creative artiste 3/3 anything mixed media
Crafter's Castle 2/3 anything goes

 What a memorable day we had...so much fun in the sunshine and so incredible to think that 2 years have raced by since my darling Jack was born.
Special family moments.

Back soon,

Bye for now,

Jane x

A magical rainbow unicorn birthday

The sunshine has returned again after some very heavy rain at the weekend. The ponds are full and looking beautiful.

We are told that the temperature might reach 16c today...how very pleasant.
Yes my sweet little granddaughter Daisy Jane turned 5 on Sunday and as promised I am back with some more photos of her cake. She is unicorn mad and her request this year was for a "rainbow unicorn theme". 

 I confess that this cake turned out to be a real labour of love and a lot more involved than I thought! Daisy's requests were that there should be the rainbow theme, her name must be there and the number 5. The issue I had was that to get the unicorn features in the correct proportions the cake needed to be tall and that meant baking 2 cakes. Now I have been a cake maker and decorator for nearly 37 years but I have never made a 2 tier cake. The Internet is such an amazing source of information and I quickly realised that even though the cakes would just stack and be under 1 piece of icing, they still needed some engineering support in the form of dowelling.

So this is what I did;
I had to create a central support and needed a thin cake board for the top tier (which would be invisible) and then the usual drum at the bottom.

 I also added 3 dowels into the bottom cake and stacked them up.

I had made fondant icing rainbow cloud candle holders...5 of course.

Over the weeks I had also been making flowers and leaves out of petal fondant and painting them up with metallics. I also made ears, eyes and a gold horn, all from fondant icing.

So here is the finished cake, I have photographed it from several angles as it is so hard to show it in its entirety.

and yes I found a place to put a number 5 and a rainbow ribbon made a great base edging.

Her party was a soft play session at a leisure centre and was followed by a family tea party at home.

My daughter made rainbow cupcakes for the children to take home from the afternoon party and Daisy was able to blow her candles out twice... once with her friends

and then again at home with the family in the evening, just before bedtime. Within half an hour of this photo the unicorn was all gone, magically disappearing into all our tummies 😄

I think her little face speaks volumes .

What was also magical was that at lunchtime on her birthday as we were all getting packed up to go out to her party a rainbow appeared in the sky...what a blessing on my sweet girlie.

So it's a cake wrap for another year.

I wonder what her request will be for next year?
My card challenge card today is a very CAS one.....and has the perfect image..yes cake. It's a digi image from Lili of the Valley with a stamped tag. Yes we certainly did celebrate on Sunday.
It's up for sale at Dotty's now.

I would like to enter my card into the following challenges;

Not just cards 2/3 anything goes
Crafting from the heart 1/3 anything goes
Die cuttin divas 1/3 birthdays my dies are spellbinders and Memory box stitched rectangle.

Thanks for getting all the way to the end of this post and for stopping by today.

Back soon,

Bye for now,.

Jane x