One of the ways Kristine and I like to relax is to draw on our chalkboard wall as we listen to music. My brothers are working on recording a new album, so we used one of their songs as our inspiration. Part of that song accompanies this video. Kristine and I both have our own styles of thinking visually as we create abstract shapes and patterns as a way of processing our thoughts. This is the first time we’ve done this together and merged our two styles into the same image. The song was written and performed by Seth Gilbertson and produced by Steve Gilbertson.
Tag Archives: Tree
Birthday Cake (decorating)
One of my family’s birthday traditions is decorating a cake for the birthday person. Growing up mom would let us pick out the shape and design we wanted for our cake and then she would decorate it for us. As we got older we helped her make and decorate our birthday cake. Everything I know about cake decorating I learned from my mom. This year I made my cake by myself.
Starting out, I frosted the sides and top edges of the cake with homemade white buttercream frosting.
Then I colored a portion of the frosting that I’d put aside sky blue. I dropped the blue frosting on top of the cake and blended it into the white frosting with a knife.
I decided to do the writing next (usually my mom and I put the writing on last when we make cakes together, but I decided to put it on at this point so I’d know how much space I needed/had left over for the rest of the cake design). Piping in writing is challenging! Before I piped the writing in on the cake I practiced on a piece of parchment paper so I had an idea of how large to make the writing and what sort of letter spacing I would need.
I forgot to take a picture of just the tree structure… so here ya go, two steps in one… I mixed some coco powder in to a portion of the buttercream frosting to make a rich brown frosting then used a star tip to create bark for my tree. Next I put two different buttercream icing greens (one a bit more yellow-green, the other more blue-green) together in the icing bag with a leaf tip so I’d get variegated leaves. I piped on leaves wherever I thought the tree needed some leaves. I could have stopped there, but mom gave me a few new tips for my birthday so I decided to use more of them and add some flowers to the tree.
Orange is my favorite color… so, orangey-peach flowers! Next I added yellow centers to the flowers.
And here’s a picture of the finished cake! I am very happy with how it looks. It tasted good too!
Christmas Tree Topper
Time Lapse Christmas Tree Decorating
Today we picked and cut down our Christmas tree for the year. We were a little more conservative than in previous years and got a 9ft tree. (We have gone up to 14ft in the past.) We thought a fun creative project would be to shoot a time-lapse video of our time decorating the tree. You get to enjoy four hours worth of work in less than a minute – lucky you.
(You may have noticed that our tree does not have a topper yet… we’re looking forward to showing you the one Kristine is making in our next post!)