We have revisited an old past-time – that of making gumpaste flowers. Somewhere along the line, I started saying to myself, while creating my beauties, “A thing of beauty is a joy forever” (stolen from Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady). It really is, you know. We had an occasion in January to make a cake for my nurse’s birthday, and I had fortunately, already made some practice flowers a couple of weeks before, which I was able to plop down on the cake, and voila! birthday cake ready to go.

Since I spent so much of my time making scrapbooks in the fall, I felt like it was time to spend some time on my flowers, and I decided to branch out a little bit, try some new techniques and some new flowers. I don’t pretend to be Nicholas Lodge, as this is certainly not my career, but I think many of my flowers do rival his (before he starts dusting them, and this is one of those new techniques that I am talking about experimenting with).

I have a shelf that I’m storing my “spares” on now, right behind my craft desk, where I work on my scrapbooks. It’s always handy to have spare flowers around. One of the other nurses had a birthday today, so I whipped up a hummingbird cake to have something to put flowers on, lol. My carpal tunnel was repaired years ago, but I’m still protective of my wrists, and don’t do lace and strings much any more. . . Maybe if my boys decide to ever get married, I’ll come out of retirement for them, and make some lace again, but for now, we’re just happily adding to my gumpaste garden.

*the pink and blue flowered cake was for Mary, the purple & white was for Haley.