My niece recently celebrated her 30th birthday and as the family crafter, I scored all of the wooden numbers that decorated the tables that night. What a treasure for a compulsive crafter! As a thank you, I promised to make one specially decorated "30" for the birthday girl to keep as a memento of the occasion. She left it in my hands to decorate it in any style I wanted but she did stipulate one thing.... that it be in her favourite colour - PINK! I knew immediately what I wanted to do - give the numbers a faux marble finish using resin. Marble is all the rage at the moment and achieving this look with resin is much easier than you might think! This faux marble technique was developed by the clever folks at ETI  more than 20 years ago and I promise you that it is super easy and gives marble-ous results! Here's what you'll need: ETI Envirotex-Lite resin Acrylic paint in four coordinating colours. I chose titanium white for the background, light pink as the main colour......

In my last post I showed you how I combined polystyrene disks and felt to make some really yummy looking faux mini gâteaux. But what would a cream sponge cake be without a strawberry on top? So today, I'm going to show you how easy it is to make strawberries from felt. All you need is red and green felt, yellow and green thread, stuffing, a needle, a sewing machine and scissors. You'll also need something round to trace around. I used a ribbon spool - the perfect size for lifesize medium strawberries! Begin by tracing the circle onto the red felt. Use a permanent marker so you can easily see where to cut. Cut out the circle, fold it in half and then cut on the fold line. You now have two semi circles. Fold each of these in half and then stitch the straight edge. You can see that I've just stitched a bunch of these semi circles and left them joined. I just cut them apart as I'm ready to make them. Once you've separated them, turn the seam to the inside. Fill the con......

One of the highlights of my sister's big birthday bash was the Faux Pâtisserie we put together to help dress the party room. It was filled with wonderful pastries, cakes and chocolates, all of which were crafted from supplies you can pick up from your local craft shop. Today I'm sharing the "how-to" for making your own mini gâteau like the pink one below. For this example, I've used polystyrene disks, acrylic paint (which sticks surprisingly well to polystyrene!), ric rac, lace, felt and a ribbon flower. I also used Aleene's Tacky Craft glue and some toothpicks to hold things together. If you've got white acrylic paint in your craft supplies then you can make a pastel shade of any colour paint you have. Pink seemed like a good idea for this cake. All you need to do is mix a little of your chosen colour into a LOT of white paint. You can see I had way to much pink paint here but it shows you just how intense the colour was before I toned it down with white.......