Anime North 2011 Crafter's Corner

Just a quick update...
 
Cafe Asta is currently on the wait-list for Anime North 2011's Crafter Corner.

We are... #20  :(

We are... less than pleased, to say the least. We tried really hard to send our emails at the right time, and it was INTENSE. And it's not like we sent it late, in fact, Angela might have sent it one second too early (7:59:59) and Steph sent it right on time (timestamp was 8:00:00).

...and yet, neither of us got a table. (Angela got ignored... and Steph is waitlist #20.)

Ironically, on the AAtoast Livejournal Community (great resource for Anime North artists... or even Toronto artists in general. Super nice people!), there are people who received tables/higher waitlist positions than us, even though their timestamps are later than ours. Makes no sense.

But we will keep working hard! Have no table? No problem! We will just promote in a different fashion!

(We printed new business cards with the money that would've been used on tables!)

We actually have lots of plans in store for this year's Anime North, even if their Crafter's Corner registration process infuriates us, haha. We look forward to serving you all cookies, cookies and more cookies! Just watch this space for updates <3

Behind the Scenes Part 1: Cookies

Hello everyone and welcome again to Café ASTA! 


Angela here, reporting for duty; its been a long time, hasn’t it? Now that Winter is over, with spring comes renewed energy and new ideas for crafts. 


But first things first: both Steph and I think that we are way overdue with introducing some of the things we’ve made since our debut. Sorry everyone for being unable to post these sooner.


When we started coming up with the idea of Café Asta, Steph and I originally wanted to try a whole bunch of different kinds of Sweets deco, but knew that we had to take it slowly, so we decided to limit it to only a few specific kinds of bases: Cookies, Pies, Waffles and Biscuits. 


It doesn’t sound like much but as you may have noticed in our introductory pictures from December, there really is a LOT you can do with just these four types of bases!

It all depends on the sizes, colors and toppings one might want to decorate with, so honestly we stuck the types of things we already knew tasted great and thus made sense for a real-life inspired style. Experimentation followed not long after.

This week's pick:

Cookies (of the Chocolate chip variety):

These were the first that I tried to make and they came out much better than I had expected for being inexperienced with clay modeling. 


In the beginning, everything we made was originally  from white coloured air dry clay that of which we coloured ourselves using acrylic paint or chalk pastels. 


For things like bananas and cookie dough it was quite easy, but the hardest part of making a chocolate chip cookie hands-down is coloring the chocolate chips. 

While kneading a ball of clay about the size of a quarter, you have to add the brown paint little by little: Too much and it would be a huge slimy mess, too little and you’d be there forever. More than once I had been sitting there, kneading the colour completely through the clay for more than 30 minutes!!


Thought I was getting Arthritis from the hand cramps by the end of the week (haha)


It was brief, but this is just part 1 of a  "behind the scenes" series on the items we offer. Stay tuned for the next in the series: ~biscuits!~