Week five (or is it four?) of Alternative Materials – Sculpey! Yup, Jimin “taught” us how to use modeling clay to make jewelry. Actually, she mostly explained how to cure it and then told us to figure out how to shape it on our own. I stopped by PLAZA before class and $40 later I had a pile of fimo and a set of powder pigments *splurge* because fimo just didn’t seem to have enough… sparkle? I wasn’t expecting to looooove fimo. I thought Ok Jimin, I’ll humor you for one class, but really I want to get back to making *duh* resin cherries. All of this will make more sense when I post pictures of my class work someday. Turns out I LOVED fimo and I’m pretty darn good at it. At one point Jimin said How many pieces are you planning to make?! I think I was on my tenth…
On what I thought to be the most unrelated of notes, I have also taken to watching cake TV. You know, all those reality shows about bakeries that focus on making special or challenging cakes. There’s that Charm City Cakes one which is aight, apparently Elizabeth has seen them in the flesh. I don’t ever want to see people from TV in real life. Scratch that – I don’t want to see reality TV stars in real life. There’s some sort of double reality thing going on there that weirds me out. I digress…. SO, my favorite of late happens to be CAKE BOSS. I like that the show is about a regular bakery. Yes, they make the occasional fancy cake (usually one per episode) but they also sell all the classic flowery too much color in the icing kind of stuff that makes your teeth ache watching the show in HD. I love the guido (in that adorable sort of way) personalities of the family. It’s like the Sopranos, but with recipes. Anywho, I was wondering where all of this fascination with cakes (esp of the wedding variety) was coming from and then *BAM* yesterday in class it hit me. There’s not much difference between decorating cakes with fondant and molding chocolate and making jewelry out of fimo. In fact, I think fimo and fondant have the same consistency and I know for a fact that many of the molding tools sold by baking supply shops and jewelry/bead/craft stores are the same.
Yup, that means that all the time I spent in front of the tube drooling over pastry was actually preparing me for Alternative Materials and a career in *weird* jewelry. So, it makes sense that I took to it so well and really enjoyed playing around with things. Buddy, the cake boss, taught me that in cake decorating, there aren’t any manuals on how to make exactly what you or the customer wants. You just have to get in there and improvise. Thanks Buddy, that’s exactly what I intend to do.
Here’s a particularly interesting cake from Cake Wrecks. I wouldn’t want this at my wedding, but it does inspire me to make jewels.
