Sugarcraft Course Week 3 (I missed week 2)

Before I start the blog post for this week I want to apologise for my absence. I've been really busy lately with splitting my time between London and here and I just haven't had the chance to get everything done. I can't say much more than that but I hope that in the months to come you'll all see why I've been so busy and why this is really exciting for us both personally and also with my new business venture. 

As you know, I've been doing a sugarcraft course at Greenwich community college. This week we learnt how to pipe a basket of flowers on a covered cake board. 

Finished basket

We did this in stages, first step was to cover the board. Very straightforward. Colour your sugarpaste, roll it out and place it on the board. Cut around the edge and smooth it all over. To ensure the paste sticks to the board you can use a touch of water. 

Second step was the challenging part. Piping the basket and flowers. We did this using techniques we'd learnt in the first week. First pipe a large swirl in the centre of the board and a smaller one at the bottom. This forms the top and the bottom of the basket.Draw 2 vertical lines joining the swirls forming the edges of the basket. Between these draw so vertical lines, 3, one in the centre and one either side. Then pipe horizontal lines these need to give the effect of a weave so top line pipe to the second line, stop and then pipe from the other side of that line to the edge. Next row down pipe between the 3 central lines. Then back to piping across the 2 edge lines. Do this all the way down and then fill in the edges. 

Weave on basket

For the handle you want to pipe a large curved line from the edge of each swirl and then lots of little diagonal lines across it. 

Now we're on to the flowers. Start off with drawing some vertical green lines randomly from the basket. These will form the stems of the flowers. Using whatever colour you like pipe 6 spots in a flower formation leaving space in the middle for a yellow dot. These are your flowers, place them randomly over the green stems. Do a variety of colours. Finally for the leaves pipe lots of green spots off the stems and pull slightly as you lift, this gives a leaf shape. 

Flowers and stems

As always there's lots of improvement required but this can only be achieved with practice, which I intend on doing. I forgot to take a picture of the one I created in class so this was a quick replica so I had some photos. Next time I do it I'll try and take step by step photos. 

Next week we're doing modelling, this I will certainly need step by step photos in order to write a blog post. For now though, get practising your piping!!