Sugarcraft

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Honeysuckle on a piece of sugar paper.
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How does one display a specimen piece of floral work in competition to make it different? This time I made a piece of paper from sugar, giving details of the honeysuckle.

I placed it on a board and tried to make it look like the top of a card table with wooden banding. This nearly disqualified me as the banding made the board slightly over the permitted size.

Irises Along the Shore.
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The Iris is my favourite flower. Ten years ago, when I created this piece, there were no commercial aids available for work such as this.

I created everything from sugar, including the shell and the seaweed and the reason that I won first prize in the Open Master Class, was that very few people made irises because they were known to be so difficult to construct.

The idea came to me whilst walking along a beach.

Summer Time.
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An invitation to demonstrate at the 20^th Anniversary of the South African Cake Decoration Association lead me to create this piece. Everything apart from the wires and base birch block was made from sugar.

This took a month to make but putting the composition together was the most difficult part. It arrived in Johannesburg without any breakage and the head pastry chef at the Victoria Falls Hotel asked me to show his staff how it was done.

Spring Time.
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Every four years the British Sugarcraft Guild, hold a major international exhibition in Telford England. There are many competitions throughout the event, but exhibiting on the Table of Honour is by invitation only.

This Ikebana style arrangement was made for the Table of Honour. The fruit is made from marzipan and the lilies and forsythia are all painstakingly made from sugar. It was a difficult piece to transport because of the height and for the 800 mile journey from Inverness to Telford and back, I had to make a wire frame to hold the forsythia in place.

Figurines in Sugar.
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"Five Day Figurine Course."

These figures were made for teaching purposes. I had a group of Japanese students wishing to learn this technique. They all achieved it after a 5 day accelerated course.

The students were actually shown how to make heads and limbs, but I had to make seven sets prior to the lessons so that they would be dry enough to use in the lessons. Waiting for their own efforts to dry would have taken a couple of days, so they used the ones I had made in advance.

Before the figurine was dressed, the features had to be painted on the face. When demonstrating, I asked would they like Elizabeth Taylor eyebrows or Greta Garbo eyebrows. Every single face ended up looking like a Japanese doll.