My love affair with artscow.com

 If you haven't checked out artscow.com yet, don't.  You will be hooked, especially when they have items on sale with free shipping!  I started using their website when I changed over from traditional scrapbooking to digital. It is so much easier to just have my laptop and not have to worry about buying a bunch of supplies and then figuring out how to store everything too!  I've made books for each of the kids, family albums, grandchildren albums for grandparents, a wedding book for my sister and even an ABC album for my niece.  They have lots of digital scrapbooking items for free and even more paid items.  With that same design concept you can also make very cool gifts. 

Here's just one album cover, you can see the inside pages at this link

 Here are some of my favorite other gifts

I have a canvas of each of my animals in black and white, with accents to match their names.  Did you know that some Dalmatians have blue spots?  Well, not really, but it's fun to edit their spots in pictures.

                                     

Since I have dogs, these double sided tags are wonderful!  A cute design, picture and the dog's name on one side, address and two phone numbers easily fit on the other side!    The dog tags were on sale for $1.99 each shipping included.

Peggy was a foster dog of mine that my Dad and Stepmom adopted.  BTW, her full name is Peg Leg Peggy because when I picked her up from the shelter she was missing a back foot and it looked like she had a peg leg.  They all have their stories and each one of my foster dogs holds a special place in my heart.  It's even better when family adopts and I get to see them often!





 This first was a purse for my grandmother.  The second was a handbag that I bought for my sister.  She used it as a diaper bag and it was the perfect size. The quote is so perfect about raising children.

And a favorite for those card players out there.  You can use the same picture or all different.

They even have ornaments!  These were only 2.99 each shipped!

And I love this one! Although it took forever to get because my shipment went to some lady in Georgia, so they had to reorder for me.  The one downfall is this company is overseas, so allow a month for them to create your design and ship.

So, pretend you didn't see any of these cool gifts and don't go to artscow.com.  Seriously, it's addicting, like Pinterest addicting, no joke!

Modeling Chocolate and Mickey Mouse

I'm working on the design for a Super Mario Bros. cake for the upcoming birthday party. Last year I used Duff Goldman's fondant for the black part of the Mickey Mouse cake and modeling chocolate for the red part. Duff's fondant is the best tasting fondant I've ever tasted, but the modeling chocolate was even better, so I think I will stick with it again this year. The recipe is simple and the color can be any color you find Wilton candy. Here's the ingredients from the Wilton website

• 1 bag of candy melts
• 1/4 cup of light corn syrup

Melt the candy melts, add corn syrup and stir. I then put the mixture into cake pan with wax paper overlapping the sides and let sit out overnight. The next day I broke off a piece and kneaded it together. Once that piece was soft, I kept adding more to it until I finally had a ball that was easily pliable. On your surface, spread out cornstarch or I've heard powdered sugar works as well to prevent sticking. I rolled it out to 1/8 inch thick and larger than my cake piece that I needed to cover.  I then formed it tight against the sides and bottom of the cake.  I used a knife to cut away the extra pieces and then smoothed out other spots with my fingers.
And here was the result:

I just thought I would pass this along to encourage others to try it out too!

Amy