Oh clever craftsters, does anyone know of an alternative to candy melts for making things like cupcake pops? Here in the UK they can be quite hard to find and also expensive. Has anyone used something else that works? I have heard that colouring white chocolate doesn't work as it doesn't dry hard enough to keep the pops on the stick - is that right? Any tips gratefully received!

Ta muchly
xx

I made this for a friend's birthday, who likes the game Portal. It's a bit squat but hopefully you can probably tell what it's supposed to be. 




It's just a home-made sponge cake base, with chocolate butter cream and chocolate sprinkles. The decoration is piped white icing (just icing sugar and water) and the red things are Skittles, because glace cherries, while they probably would have looked better, are ick! 

Comments/constructive criticism appreciated
Thanks for looking 

So what do you do when you find some old jigsaw pieces under the sofa? You make jewellery from them of course! This isn't the only one I have made - but so far my photographing skills (which as you can see from the pic leave a bit to be desired!) have meant that none of the others has come out like at all. Bah.

Ok so I have 0 money at the moment (trying to support my student husband on a librarian's wage...) so for my mother's birthday I decided to recon an old picture frame I got for 25p in a charity shop. (Before, it was just chipped black wood frame, with a piece of glass, held together with packing tape. Yuk.) She liked it anyway, so that's all that matters
C&C welcome

Ok so I'm posting this more for the cautionary tale than for the cake itself which didn't turn out as good as I'd wanted.

So, I decided to make a Watchman cake for DH's birthday, but I wanted it to be a surprise. FAIL. My idea initially was to bake it at my parents' house, but DH decided that "oh, you're seeing your parents, I'll come along too" so that didn't work. I then decided to tell the truth and say I was making something for him so could he keep away from the kitchen. But no, when I came home with the ingredients for the cake DH  decided to try to sneak a look in the bag. Bah. So then I tried to bake it and ice it without anything else being given away, with DH claiming that he was hungry/thirsty/wanted to go into the back garden the whole time. Oh and him saying "Can I see it yet?" every few minutes - and "Is that cake I smell? - Can I have some?" For goodness sake!!!
Anyways... so the thing ended up being rushed and not exactly how I wanted it to turn out. So the moral of the story is I think, if you have a man (or lady) as nosy as mine, just get it over with and let them know what you're making them! There, my good deed is done for the day

So here it is anyway -


Still tasted yummy

I have no idea how I ended up with so many picks but I thought I'd do something useful with them and voila!



hope you like them

P.s. sorry about the naff camera-phone photo, which does *not* do the lovely sparkly beads justice at all!

Phlizz
xxx

and Needed a new handbag - so I made this our of the old packet The red and grey material is the lining and the red, green and blue dots are little coloured plastic gems:



I hope you like it!

Phlizz
xxx

I love this board and get such inspiration from it but, ok well, this is my first post and the first pair of shoes I've tried to tart-up, so please don't be too harsh!

So I took an old pair of Converse that were just boringly brown with pink dots (which you can see at the top of the tongue) and made them look like this - please follow links
 




Clearly this is only one shoe, but the other one basically looks the same!
Constructive criticism appreciated ( I like them anyway!) Thanks for looking

Phlizz
xxx