I've signed myself up for a local bake-off. It's on Nov 1 and I'm doing an apple theme: brown butter cake with apple custard filling and caramelized white chocolate frosting. I'm going to decorate with basket weave piping, apple macarons, and apple cake pops.

I've never been good at piping so I'm most scared of that bit. I'm good at macarons when I do them regularly, but right now I'm out of practice and my first attempt at shells a few days ago went poorly.

The most stressful bit is that this is the perfect opportunity to launch a business since the hosts will hand out your card to all the guests. So I have to figure out exactly what I want to do there. I have two days to get them my business cards.

Made a little bag charm for my bestie's birthday! She is a palaeobotanist artist with a significant interest in Ginkgos (her area of study). So i took three colours of leather to represent the colour changes of the leaves, downloaded a detailed recreation of leaves from Ginkgo biloba that she drew and used that to cut out and make the leaves for the charm. She was beyond happy with the result! Really fun little project.

I adopted some large beautiful succulents over the weekend. I am moving some of my other plants to the front courtyard with the new ones since the sun doesn’t hit our backyard right at the moment.

Now I get to figure out how I want to arrange them for the winter months. A couple smaller ones fit in an unused water fountain and I kind of like that look, but I do need to find some other items to decorate a bit 😁

Edit: I had some gorgeous morning glory plants that were winding up a wooden structure in the backyard. It was so pretty, but the plant got a bad case of spider mites while I was on vacation and I had to cut it all down to avoid the spread. Just means more plant pots to play with now 🤣

This clothes store I like makes flannels with a little pen pocket on the shoulder, but the sleeves are too short. 😮‍💨

So I took some fabric from old flannels, cut out a mock-up, and I'm gonna sew them onto the ones I have.

Oh man I did amazing makeup last night. I was super proud of it and I posted a couple of pictures in the weekly chatter thread, but then I woke up in the middle of the night and deleted them because I'm leery of putting my face on the internet.