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By Deborah Leigh
Ever since I saw Sara Jessica Parker eating a pink frosted cupcake from The Magnolia Bakery in New York City on Sex and The City, I have been obsessed with cupcakes. I never knew a cupcake could be so pretty. Since I didn’t live in New York, I started going to local bakeries trying to find a similar cupcake. I didn’t find that particular one like the one from The Magnolia Bakery, but I found others that were equally enchanting.
There is a problem with cupcake fever though. The whole act of acquiring the cupcake and eating the cupcake is a fleeting experience. I wanted to make my relationship with these treasures last longer, so I found myself trying to capture them before the noshing took place.
At first, I took photos and then I tried to draw them, but I found that collages really made the cupcakes pop. I liked reducing down the image to simple lines and then building back the cupcake with cut-out sections of paper.
I really enjoy coming up with different designs and finding the right paper combination. It’s like putting together a puzzle. At first, I used decorative scrap book paper and text from vintage books, looking for ways to portray the swirls of the frosting and the lines of the cupcake paper. Then I started using found images clipped from fashion magazines, using skirts to show the pleats of the cupcake paper. I even made a cupcake collage with clippings from a home furnishing magazine, using parts of curtains, dishes and towels.
At The Scrap Box in Ann Arbor, I searched for new cupcake collage materials. This store is known for its creative recycling. They offer samples, seconds, and scraps, a good kind of “junk” which can be recycled into other expressions of creativity. I found some wonderful wallpaper scraps for a new cupcake collage and even a clipping with actual strawberries, which I had to put one on top of the cupcake.
Another new collage material I discovered along the way was postage stamps. I found some inexpensive worldwide packets on EBay, where I got a lot of 300 stamps. I divided up all the stamps into color piles and built the cupcake collage from there, using variations of blue for the cupcake paper. Red and orange colored stamps became the frosting.
As a way to get feedback, I started posting my cupcake collages on Flickr and they got a very favorable response, encouraging me to make more. The blog “Cupcakes Take The Cake” really like them, too, and they featured several of them on their blog, saying that I had a wonderfully endless cup caking imagination. Soon after that, I tried posted them on Zazzle as greeting cards. I like the idea of my cupcake collages making someone’s birthday distinctive, and the interesting thing is that my girly pink cupcake collages seem to be the favorite. There must be something special about a pink frosted cupcake.
