A Cake and a Flop

Yesterday I made something...unusual.  I found some great ideas off CraftGawker and Pintrest that I wanted to try out, so I chose a lamp that I really liked but didn't fit our style anywhere:

And decided to alter it.  I bought 1/2 yard of cream and brown fabric and cut them into 2" strips.  I like to fold the fabric over and over so I don't have to cut straight for very long to make each strip.  They ended up looking like this:

I cut off the beads from the top of the lamp, then I started sewing down the middle of each strip to create a ruffle.  9 stitch tension and 4 (longest) stitch length.  This went really fast.  Then I hot glued the stitched part to the lamp, starting at the bottom and alternating colors.  This is where I think I went wrong, for it ended up looking like something from the 70's traveled forward in time and threw up on the lamp:

And lit up it looks like this:

The colors are meh.  I am very dissatisfied.  I wish I had randomized the colors, bought two more colors, and instead of doing straight lines, let them meander all over the lamp.  I did fray the edges of the fabric strips to try giving it a little more appeal, but it's just ugly and I'm feeling down about it.


The bright point is the cake I made for a very special little boy in my life who turned 1!  His Mama and Daddy decided on a balloons/rainbow theme and pretty much left the design to me.  I wanted it to be special, so I made the inside a rainbow and didn't tell anyone until it was cut.  The little smash cake was rainbow inside too!  It was fun and looked like this:

The inside looked like this:

To achieve the look, I made up a batch of White Almond Sour Cream cake (WASC on Cakecentral.com) that was 1400 or so grams in weight.  I put 200g into each of 7 bowls and mixed in a LOT of color.  I wanted it to be very vibrant.

I put 100g of each color into 2-8" rounds.  I measured these by using the tare function on my awesome digital scale.  I let it settle naturally between each color so it spread well and more evenly.  Next time, I am going to coat the entire pan with the red and use more red than any other color so it shows up more, and go less and less as I get closer to the center.  Does that make sense?  Anyway, after I shaved the top to make it level, it looked like this:

I was so happy with how pretty and loud the colors came out.  Yay!  Happy Birthday little buddy!