Clearly before the protective strips of parchment were removed. Those bottles contain red and yellow icing for people to add to their slices.

The hubs did at least as much work on this as I did, I should say. I started with a Food Network cheeseburger cake “recipe”, though I couldn’t find a 2.5-quart bowl, only a 2-quart bowl, and we decided to make only the burger patty chocolate.

A couple of weeks ahead I did a dry run. I thought I would make a finished, decorated product, but I ended up only baking the cake. I used half a box of chocolate cake mix (1 layer) and a full box of vanilla cake mix (3 layers, which seemed annoyingly excessive at first but turned out to be the right amount).

I took photos with my phone for later reference so the next cake wouldn’t be so bottom-heavy – the top “bun” looked silly, like a little hat perched on top, and the bottom bun could lose up to half its thickness and still be fine. However – look! A burger!

At this point we also thought the bare cake for the bun looked nicer than the icing-covered version, though no icing meant no sesame seeds (rice krispies being the universal “hamburger cake sesame seeds” according to my research). That’s actually why we did the “condiments” – the lack of bun icing meant overall a low quantity of icing, and we thought it would be nice for people to be able to add more if they wanted.

The day of the wedding we worked on the cake for SIX HOURS. I did not expect this to be a six-hour cake, but we made a lot of icing and had to go out for more powdered sugar at one point.

Preparing and filling the pans: cut out circles of parchment paper on the regular pans, thorough vegetable shortening on the bowl (via paper towel). A lot more batter in the bowl this time around – two-thirds full. Note that the bowl will take a long time to bake and even the pans will take longer because of the full oven. The tomato slice will be quicker, but for everything else start with a 30 minute timer.

I leveled the chocolate layer on a plate, saving the crumbs so I could put icing around the outside and pat them on (a great idea from the Food Network version). Unfortunately I should have put parchment on the plate beforehand and I lost the middle of the layer when I flipped it onto the bottom bun. A lot of toothpicks and additional icing later and it was okay, but not stable – it kind of disintegrated on the way to the wedding. I was able to make it look all right but there is a reason there aren’t as many photos of the finished cake as there might be…

Flexible dough scraper with rounded edge: the perfect tool to get the top layer out of the bowl.

The hubs insisted on cheese, lettuce, and tomato, and fortunately we had a small-scale cake pan (in fact it was retrieved from the to-donate box, so good timing!). I baked a skinny cake layer and he soaked it in glaze-style icing (powdered sugar and milk, as opposed to the easy vanilla buttercream – plus cocoa powder as appropriate – of the rest). He colored all the icing, except the green which was commercial, and iced on the cheese and lettuce. It was a minor miracle when we added the tomato slice; suddenly it all looked right.

We’ll close with a failed experiment – frilly toothpicks. I cut strips of fruit roll-ups into fringe and rolled them around the ends of bamboo skewers. I corn-starched one side of each strip but probably should have done both… on the way to the wedding they just solidified into a wad of gummy at the end of the skewers.

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Well, not literally; I trimmed the edges this morning. But essentially.

Just a lark, slopped together with lots of mod podge and minimal care. I intend to make more collages in the future, though, so I thought I’d record what went well here and what I would change if I were doing a collage like this to be a serious piece.

The Good:

• I laid my sketch pad paper out on waxed paper and glued magazine clippings off the edge. The waxed paper meant I could turn it over and see the edges for trimming this morning without having to try to peel it off in advance.
• I had tons and tons of the little clippings. I kept cutting them even though I was sure I would end up with something like twice as many as I needed. Nope, I needed all of them.
• I saved out one of each version of the key to make sure they were all represented on the top layer.

The Not So Good:

• I couldn’t get a sweet spot between too much and not enough Mod Podge in its role as adhesive. If it was a thick enough layer not to dry immediately it wrinkled the paper and made it translucent. If I were doing this “for real,” I would … well, I’d be a lot more careful in a lot of ways! But in particular, I wouldn’t use Mod Podge as the primary adhesive. Instead, I’d use a glue stick to attach one round of clippings (probably over half) with minimal overlap but hopefully good coverage. Then I would dab on a thin layer of Mod Podge, covering the whole page, and let it dry. Intermediate layers of Mod Podge should mean I wouldn’t have to worry about making sure the glue stick was all the way out to the corners of every clipping. Repeat with the rest of the non-reserved clippings, and finally with the reserved clippings. Then probably one more layer of Mod Podge, thicker now because the previous coatings should protect the paper from wrinkling.

Quite a bit gained from following that moment of silly inspiration!

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I wore it to the annual Movie Night anniversary celebration this week. One person described it as like yarn-bombing a person. Three others tried it on at the end of the night and described it as both comfortable and comforting. I would call it a big success – especially since I avoided buying any materials (there are three different white yarns in it) and it didn’t take nearly as long as I expected. It did come out bigger than I calculated or intended, but not as big as I feared before trying it on. And if I ever need a clown costume, I just have to find the right accessories!

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Burly Hot-Pants has been with me or one of my former roommates since my senior year of college. I have no idea what sort of action figure he is, except it is not one of the major brands. I bought him at Wal-Mart, I think, and he became our mascot. We had photo shoots like “Burly Storms the Capitol!” (of Virginia) and “Burly in the Lost World!” (after Cha Cha brought home a bucket of plastic dinosaurs). We immediately gave him dark roots and tattoos. I don’t remember when we cut his pants off into short shorts, which eventually died and had to be replaced with new short shorts (those, I made in summer 2005). Originally he hung from the wire shelf in our fridge, a Cha Cha innovation, with a gun in his free hand. The guns disappeared long ago, leaving him only his boots and ammo belt. Near the end of senior year I bought him some Barbie accessories, though the only one that survives is a pearl necklace.

For Nickel’s wedding he acquired a silver Sharpie bow tie, and the necklace became a bracelet or anklet. That may have been when we gave him lipstick and nail polish, though we may also have done that earlier. Alas, the lipstick bled all over his mouth.

Naturally, he needed some new accoutrement for Dana’s wedding. What would be more natural than a Chippendales-style tuxedo jacket and cummerbund? He ditched his brown hot pants altogether in favor of his black plastic codpiece, but kept the boots and ammo belt (you never know what situations may arise at a wedding).

As BHP’s personal tailor and photographer, I present to you: Silver Tie Burly.

You may be able to see in the back that I was watching Quest for the Mighty Sword, the greatest movie ever made.

As tough as he is, Burly has a softer side.

As you can probably tell, the cummerbund in the sneak peek picture was not the final cummerbund; I ended up just taking a length of ribbon and Stitch Witchery-ing velcro on each end.

Construction notes: I started by cutting a straight line across a strip of velvet and lining the bottom up with the top of BHP’s codpiece and the inside with the center of his chest or back, and gradually cutting the front and back pieces to shape. I used fusible interfacing both to stabilize the velvet and in place of sewing the seams (so it is far from the sturdiest item I’ve ever made). After cutting four pieces, to which tails would be attached, I realized it would be better to make two pieces that went around under his arms on each side and only had to be ironed together at the shoulder and center back. I also realized the heavier of the two interfacings I’d gotten to try (both Pellon, but one a lightweight standard-style interfacing and the other a sheer tricot) was the only one that worked – the tricot had too much stretch, which would be desirable in other settings but not when using it like tape. So I cut new pieces from wider velvet and used my tailor’s ham to aid in ironing (I could have used a smaller one! Perhaps I’ll make one). For the tails, I attached a strip of velvet to one side of the back hem, cut it to a nice shape, put another piece against it wrong sides together and cut it to match, and then ironed it on. I decided not to attempt a collar; I rather like the military-vest look of the front as it is, but admittedly the omission had more to do with thinking it would be difficult.

In the picture you can also see my primary inspiration.

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Kate’s current Peeps, all official plushies, are named Peep, Megapeep, Gigapeep, and Terapeep, and she mentioned she was hoping for a Picopeep. I thought I could make her at least a Micropeep out of embroidery floss. Then I realized crocheting sewing thread with a 10 hook (1.3 mm) would be terrific for a Picopeep. I have a couple dozen tiny spools of thread, bought for no good reason in a large bag at the dollar store, and their odd colors included a few plausible Peep hues.

With my bionic vision and retractable tweezer fingers, I completed Picopeep in a mere five hours, a trivial 500% increase over the length of construction of Micropeep. Let’s see the results:

Roses say “I love you.” Sewing-thread crochet peeps say “I love you more than eyesight.”

It is a little-known fact that Peeps’ native terrain is rugged, and in fact they are semi-arboreal.

In seriousness, one difficulty is that, like floss, thread is inelastic. This makes, in particular, the first stitch of the second round very tight. It is also difficult to see the stitches – strong light makes a world of difference! The thread twisted up as I went, though I might have been able to fix that by unrolling it from the spool in advance. I found I would make unintentional increases because the new stitch takes so little room on the previous round’s stitch that it was hard to tell last-used from first-unused. I am curious to know whether a larger hook would be easier; I think the hook I use for embroidery floss is proportionally larger.

To note: Peeps are a registered trademark of Just Born, Inc.

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