How To Survive Blue Monday

So tomorrow is 'Blue Monday', supposedly the most miserable day of the entire year. How uplifting! With the holidays out of the way and the consequent lack of cash, short daylight hours, cold weather and failed resolutions, it's not hard to see why the third Monday in January has built itself such a bad reputation. Here are a few ways to make the whole ordeal a bit more bearable...

DIY: Luggage Tag Business Cards

Today I've got a little DIY post where I'll be showing you how I made my own handmade luggage tag business cards. A business card is often your first opportunity to make a good impression, done right and it's a chance to show a little bit of what you're about and hopefully it might lead to something more. I am of the belief that there's no point in selling yourself as a creative person and then handing over a poor quality, boring, seen-it-a-million-times-before business card. Something out of the ordinary will show straight away that you're an innovative thinker, and there's also more chance that your card won't just get stuffed to the back of a pile, never to see the light of day again. Plus, who doesn't love something handmade right? 

5 Tips For Visually Interesting Sketchbooks

What is it about sketchbooks that make them so intriguing to touch and feel? Is it the fact that they're the most raw insight into a persons creative process? It's no secret that I take great pride in my sketchbooks. Throughout my foundation course it's the thing that I have really consistently enjoyed creating and I actively look forward to updating mine on a daily basis. While a sketchbook is the least judgmental and most forgiving of any artwork, for some it can almost feel too free, and blank pages can be very intimidating! Recently I have shared some snapshots into my own sketchbooks (here and here if you're interested) and today I want to share some ideas and suggestions on how you could go about making your own sketchbook more visually intriguing.  

1. Keep Everything 
For me, displaying bits and pieces from my creative process is a big part of creating an interesting sketchbook. It can be hard to remember to do this to begin with but soon enough it'll become second nature. Everything from paper offcuts to material samples and receipts, anything that tells the story of your working process will make a great addition to a page. Your sketchbook will soon become something of a record of how your work was created which can be so fun to look back on.

2. Methods Of Attachment 
Something that I have found to be useful when I feel like a page is looking a bit dull is using a variety of methods for attaching page elements. For example, if you have a photograph, you might just glue it down with a regular glue stick, or you could use a ripped bit of making tape, a staple, a safety pin, sticky tape around the edge, use string, split pins etc etc. It's surprising how effective this can be at changing the whole look and feel of a page.

3. Variety Is Key
If you want to keep your sketchbook visually interesting throughout for either yourself or the viewer, having a variety of page styles is a great way to achieve this. One page might be full of drawing while the next is a written brainstorm, and the next might be photographs of your process or a mixture of techniques. Try to switch it up every now and again if you tend to stick to one style.

4. Bulk
"Bulk? What the heck is bulk?" I hear you ask. Well my friends, 'bulk' is what me and all of my friends at art school strive for in our sketchbooks. Have you ever seen a sketchbook that is so full to the brim that it will barely close? Yep - that's what we're all after! There's something so beautiful about a book that's so teeming with life, ideas and creativity. Of course, that's not to say that this suits everybody's style and taste, but for me, there's no greater feeling than literally seeing my sketchbook grow in size.

5. Learn To Let Go
This is probably the most important tip that I can give. Your sketchbook is yours and yours only. Ultimately you get to choose what goes in, how you want to work and who gets to see it. Learning to let go and be free with your creative self it vital. Don't hold back - your sketchbook is somewhere you should be able to make a mistake and not lose sleep over it! Don't get caught up with making everything look perfect, just let yourself create without worry and everything else will follow suit.

While these are just some of the things I do when making my own books, the best thing about a sketchbook is that it is completely personal to the creator. You may decide that non of these tips apply to your taste (although I would recommend considering #5!). The most important thing is to express yourself freely - there really are no rules!
What are some of the things you like to do when creating your sketchbooks? I'd love to know about your process! 

Monster Birthday Cake Bake

I realise it's been a ridiculously long time since I last did a baking post, and that makes me quite sad because I've noticed that lately I've just seemed too busy to bake. But I thought today would be the perfect opportunity to change that so I'm really excited to be posting this! It's my boyfriends birthday today and it has become a sort of tradition that I bake him a surprise cake every year. 

I'd seen similar cakes to this one on Pinterest but when I clicked through they had always been done by a professional baker or baking company, so obviously no how-to instructions! Despite this, I thought I'd just have a go with the skills that I already have and see what I could come up with. So here is my attempt at a monster cake!

I started with four plain sponge cakes, I use Mary Berry's all-in-one cake recipe but you can use whichever one you feel comfortable with. Three of the cakes will be used to stack and make the main body of the cake, while one will be crumbled up to make the cake-pop mixture.

After making the basic cakes I began the decorating process by making the cake-pops, as these are by far the most time consuming part if you don't have a lot of experience with them like me! I have made them before but only once so I don't own a cake-pop tin, so I used the crumbled cake mix method. There are plenty of videos on YouTube of how to do this but really, all you do is crumble up the cake into small bits (I cut off the crust beforehand), and add a scoop of buttercream/frosting so it becomes sticky enough to roll into ball shapes. It's a good idea to use your 'worst' cake for this bit because it doesn't matter if it's a bit misshapen! Once you've rolled them up and added the sticks, I found it helpful to refrigerate them for 10 minutes before decorating so that they were bound together a bit better. I then dipped them in white chocolate and put them in the fridge to fully set.

Next I moved on to icing the cake. I used the same plain buttercream which I added to the cake-pop mix to stack the three cakes on top of each other. Then I made up some more buttercream and coloured it orange (go for whatever colour you want!). I then scooped it into a piping bag and used a nozzle which looks like a star but with a flat edge on one side. Starting from the bottom, I iced little vertical dashes in a circle around the cake, and then made my way up ring by ring, slightly overlapping each row.  This can be quite time consuming but keep at it because it really does look lovely and 'fury' once done!

All that the cake needed then was the finishing touches. I cut out five circles from royal icing that I had coloured black and stuck one to each of the cake-pops with a small blob of buttercream. Then I arranged them into two rows of eyeballs at different heights. The mouth is just cut from royal icing, a black strip and four white triangles for the teeth.

And voilà! This was such a fun cake to make, and although it can be time consuming with the extra element of the cake-pops, it isn't too difficult at all and the result is well worth it because it went down brilliantly with my boyfriend!

If you have any questions about how I created this cake just leave a comment below and I'd love to answer them. Also do let me know what you think about the cake and if you decide to give it a go!

x

How To Have A Productive Day

1. Write A To Do List The Evening Before
As I've mentioned before, I'm one of those people that are very into making lists. If I write all my 'to dos' down on paper, I find it helps stop them scrabbling around in my head and I can actually get on with doing them. If you have a particularly busy day ahead of you, I find the best time to write your to do list is the evening before. You've finished your work for that day, so you know exactly where you stand for tomorrow, yet you're not using up any precious time in the morning brainstorming all the things you need to get done (and probably causing yourself more panic than is needed in the process!).

2. Wake Up To Your Alarm First Time
I know this is a tough one, and I may be being just a tiny weeny bit hypocritical including this, however it really does put you in the right frame of mind to be productive from the outset. When you pull back your covers and jump out of bed first time your alarm goes off (ok, maybe jumping out is asking a little bit to much..), you almost feel as if you've gained some time from nowhere that simply didn't exist before. Of course in reality that time has existed in the past, we've just all been using it to catch the last few minutes of that dream where we married Bradley Cooper.. or whatever it is you may do with your time on the pillow. 

3. Make Your Bed
There's nothing that makes me feel more like a grown up respectable adult than making my bed the moment I get up. It's almost as if i'm over the first hurdle and I've completed a task already. There's also the whole idea of tidy room, tidy mind and it actually does hold some truth. Getting on with work seems much more manageable in a clean and tidy space.

4. Make The Most Of The Morning
Never underestimate the power of your first few hours awake. They have the power to set the pace and overall mood for the entire day. Say you find yourself having lunch at 1pm having done not very much so far, it'll probably be well into the afternoon before you've actually made a decent start on your tasks. On the other hand, if you woke up at 8am and worked solidly until 1pm, you'll feel much more accomplished and motivated to carry on through the afternoon (that is if you haven't finished already!).

5. Focus On One Thing At A Time
I'm a big worrier. I fret 24/7 about things that will probably never happen and this overspills into my work life. If I have say 5 reasonably large things to do in one day, instead of taking it one thing at a time, I'll dabble in one thing before my mind wonders onto worrying about another. MORE HASTE LESS SPEED LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. If I force myself not to even think about another task before the one at hand is finished, I find I get my workload done much faster overall. Plus, if you don't attempt to do a bit of everything at once, you'll be able to tick off whole tasks much quicker which can give you a big boost and sense of achievement.