My cake is finally started!

Ok..............you're never going to believe this!!  I STARTED ON MY CAKE TODAY!!!!   I know.....it's about time, lol.  I leave for the cake show is 17 days (yikes!!), and won't get anything really done on Monday - I'm going to the Sox game :D  

I did some more research on stuff for the cake today, and also started making the flowers for it.  I'm making Forget-Me-Nots.  They are the state flower for Alaska.  I borrowed a plunger cutter from a friend to make them, since they are very tiny.  My first dilemma came about when trying to figure out how to attach wire to the small flowers.  Normally I'd thread the flower onto the wire, and the wire would form the bud of the flower, but the flowers are very tiny and I didn't think that would work.

There is a cake decorating website that I belong to, so I went there and posted the question to everyone there.  I also posted on my Facebook page asking for suggestions.  I got lots of great suggestions from both places and ended up using some flower stamens that I had as the centers and put the flowers on them. 

The flower stamens are white, and the flower centers are yellow.  So, I tried coloring the stamen with an edible marker, and that worked ok.  Except I had about 150 stamens to color......so I mixed some food coloring with vodka and dipped the stamens into the mixture to color them.  It worked awesome!!!  I dipped them all and stuck them into some styrofoam to dry. 

In the meantime, I colored some gumpaste to the right shade of blue (used sky blue and turquoise), rolled it out, then ran it through the pasta attachment for my kitchenaid (number 5).  Ran it through, put it into the Wilton practice sheets I have (they are fabulous for keeping the gumpaste from drying out, especially with a wet face cloth over them). 

Thought I'd be smart and cut out all the blossoms from one practice board so I could just thin them and attach them to the stamens..................except they dry out when you do that.  Yes, I found that out the hard way.  Had to throw away and entire sheet of flowers.  No, I didn't count them, that would have been too depressing.  So, I cut each flower out as I did them.  I have 147 stamens, and got 74 flowers done.  I have the rest to finish tomorrow.

Did you start on any projects today?