It is no secret that the last few months have not been easy to live through for my family – or that it is very hard to get the creative spirit flowing again.  But other people still have celebrations to enjoy and they still want cakes to grace their table so I must try to oblige.

Normally, at this time of year, my grandson would have been enjoying his birthday cake - created to match his desire as far as theme goes…but since his tragic and untimely death last year I will never again  have the pleasure of seeing his face beam at my confectionary creation for him. His 10th birthday this year was celebrated in a rather different way – which I will write about next week.

So, the cake I have made this month is for Lisa, who is 21!  I have never met her but was asked by her aunt if I could make a cake with a theme suitable for a Hair and Beauty Student.

I had just 14 days notice so had to come up with a design and work out the logistics for making it fairly swiftly…which I have to say was quite a challenge under the circumstances.  However, I am pleased with the way it has turned out.

The whole of this decoration is edible – with the exception of the stick part of the mascara wand and the stick part of the nail varnish brush which are sugarpaste wrapped around a cocktail stick.  I was going to use more items of make up but it just looked far too fussy so I have stuck with a select few!  I am particularly pleased with the mascara wand and was sorely tempted to try to shove it into the tube to see if it really worked!!  I also like my hairgrip (kirby grip)  decorations which are royal icing piped to form the ‘grip’ bit with a sugarpaste flower and a sugarpaste pearl for decoration

So, all that remains now is to deliver it and hope that today goes well for Lisa!

Wooohoooo!!  I have finally made it to the end of Thing-a-Day 2011 without missing a day!

It has been really hard though and I am sure that if I had not chosen to do a zentangle theme for the month that I would have fallen by the wayside.  As I mentioned on Day 1, my family has had a really bad year and my creativity has taken a real knocking but in doing a daily zentangle I have had the opportunity to focus on something that quickly and easily develops into a thing of beauty with little conscious thought and without the fear of ‘getting it wrong’ or staring at a blank page.  And it has helped me by giving me a few minutes each day where I can just get lost in the process of zentangling and enjoying my classical music without giving thought to the things that trouble me on a daily basis.  And yes, I think it has helped me to get a little bit excited about starting something new and more challenging, creatively speaking, over the next few weeks.

So, anyway, today I did my final letters of X,Y and Z.  And then worked on trying to arrange my 36 tiles onto a piece of black mount board – which was not quite as easy as I expected as the board would only accommodate 5 tiles across and 8 tiles down – so I could not carry out my original plan of 6 tiles by 6, or even 4 by 9!

So this is my final arrangement…

… although I think I will create two narrow border pieces to run alongside the bottom 4 rows, perhaps with my name and the date worked into it somehow, and this will create a neater rectangular shape before sticking everything down and framing it.

Putting this together made me think of the samplers that ‘young ladies’ created in centuaries gone by where they displayed their prowess with their repetoire of embroidery stitches creating a needleworked alphabet…and how like embroidery it is, creating patterns one stroke or stitch at a time.

And so I have met the Thing-a-Day challenge, one day at a time, and hope that everyone who participated enjoyed their month of creativity too, and hopefully we will all be doing it again next year!!

Just one more day to go for this year’s Thing-a-Day.  I only have 3 more letters to go to finish my quest to make a zentangle for every letter of the alphabet … so I should be able to do it!

I will try to get them all mounted and photograph it for tomorrow’s grand finale!!!

The end of February is now in sight and I am at risk of not quite managing to have the full zentangle alphabet finished…

That is really not an option for me and so I have to spend rather more than half an hour getting a minimum of 3 letters done each day for the next 3 days.

I did want to get them all mounted at the end of the month too, so fingers crossed that I find the time for that!

Very short of time today – but just enough to doodle a quick Q for my Zentangle collection.

Two more offerings for ‘Operation Zentangle’…

I am determined to get the whole alphabet finished by the end of the month so I shall have to step up production over the weekend!

Oh dear…

I did have a plan…

to make a Zentangle for each letter of the alphabet and the numbers 0-9 during Thing-a-Day this year.

And it all started so well!

But then there were cakes I had to make…

and my beautiful granddaughter to welcome into the world…

So here we are on day 23 and I still have 12 letters of the alphabet to do!!

Will I be able to do it?

I will certainly give it a go!!

What kind of day have I had?

Yes – that describes it exactly!!

Having spent the day and last night helping my daughter with her new baby on her return from hospital I have has no time to sit down and concentrate on my ‘Thing’ for Thing-a-Day.

I needed something I could do really, really quickly…

…what could I do..????????

The most creative thing I have been able to do today is take photographs of my new granddaughter, who was born early this morning.

One of my favourite ones is this one of my granddaughter with her brand new and much wanted little sister.