Teaparties and Lace: Guns at the ready....

This Saturday was a very busy one for me. It’s my mum’s birthday today so we all went over to my brother to celebrate Saturday evening. I was up at 7am making chocolate, peanut butter fudge and probable the largest birthday cake in the world. My mum loves coffee, everyone else loves chocolate so I compromised and made a chocolate sponge with coffee icing courtesy of Nigel Slater’s recipe. It is such a great recipe and everyone seemed to like it. I decorated it with chocolate buttons and walnuts and managed to write a birthday message in melted chocolate on top.

Having iced the cake and piled it up to its full 3 layers of height, my lovely friend Shara came over and we started to make some burlesque pasties and vintage style fascinators. The aim is that when we host our teaparties, guests can try things on, have a giggle and maybe be brave enough to take some home.

We covered the chairs and work table as a precaution (we’ve learnt from experience!!!) and turned on the glue guns on. As they heated up we pooled together all our trimmings and materials...all I can say is you are in for a treat! We have so many fabrics to create loads of different looks and styles, have wonderful vintage buttons and a variety of netting. We’re so excited. Everything we do is a labour of love and we only make things that we love and would wear. This makes it very difficult when the time comes to sell them though as we want to keep them! Shara made an awesome set of black sequin pasties with a matching fascinator and such a cute brooch which I have fallen for (I may have to ask her to make another one for me).

We ended up with quite a few things only ‘working’ for a few hours, I managed to burn my fingers twice and there were feathers everywhere but it was so much fun. We went into the garden to take some photos as the sun was out but it was very cold and windy which is not good when you’re trying to take photos of feathery things! Here is a selection of the best shots: