Worldcon

Note to self: a week in the Mile High City while still recovering from bronchitis is perhaps not smart. The last day I kept finding myself panting.

It was a fine con, rather spread-out (and not just because the hotels were all over the place--someone told me that from the convention center doors to the dealer's room was 1/4 mile), but enjoyable. I got to Denver around 3pm, checked in at the hotel and changed clothes, and as klages, my roommate, arrived at about the same time, we went over to get registered. The first person I encountered was Terry Boren, a wonderful writer who was at Clarion with me um...**mumble** 27 years ago. As a matter of fact, my very first convention was Denvention 2, right after Clarion. Anyway: Thursday was spent mostly in the bar (there's a shock), although Ellen and I wound up having a nifty dinner with Nancy Kress and divers others (shoot me: I wasn't taking notes). More bar, then back to my hotel, where I found tnh and a cloud of her Viable Paradise students, and wound up sitting up talking with them for a while.
( Cut for Extreme Rambling... )

bull!

bull
Originally uploaded by madrobins

Tonight we got to work with Royal Icing: it's a thick, meringue-y icing that dries hard--not great for all-over cake decorations, but good for pictures that you put on top of cakes, and things like butterflies or escutcheons or things like that. Heraldic crests! Police badges! Superheroes! Or, in the case of tonight's class, zodiacal signs. You can do this with any outlined pattern: take a picture from a coloring book, lie some cellophane over it, and pipe the outline in Royal Icing, then dilute the icing until it flows and pipe that in around the outline. This ain't terrible for a first time, but it's not a thing of delicacy and beauty. Maybe next time.

Next week is the last class of the intermediate course. It's tiered cakes. I have to design a multi-tiered cake and decide what I want to put on it--escutcheons, flowers, butterflies... you name it. Or I will, and will report back.

Already thinking about the advanced class.