Happy New Year Sweet Friends! I have something super fun to tell you about! It’s called Sweet Arts Guild. I finally had time to get it going on and it’s going to be a blast!
First off, I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season! I was completely buried in the whirlwind of Holiday orders and events. It’s nice to finally be coming up for some air. I went straight from my busiest wedding season into the holidays and it kicked my butt. Whew! I did a special offer for Thanksgiving, build your own gingerbread house kits in the beginning of December and 3 pop-up events before Christmas that went very well. All in all a very successful but very exhausting holiday season! I am working on a post about how to plan and execute a successful pop-up event. I have been doing them for 4 years now and have dialed in what works and what doesn’t. So, I want to share what I have learned along the way for those of you that have a cake business. Stay tuned for that!
New Year, New Endeavors
2018 was kind of weird for me. It was really great for my custom cake business, I had my best year ever! Woohoo! Not gonna complain about that! But I had some big plans for the blog and my teaching side of caking that got a bit squashed because of it. Boo!
Plans for 2019
So 2019 is my year to put a little more priority on that side of things. That’s the plan anyway. But you know it’s hard to turn away a paying order to save time for creating tutorials and blogging? It’s gonna take some serious will power to turn paying customer away! I hope you guys will help keep me focused and encouraged! Help me make my teaching and blogging just as successful as creating custom cakes!
Sweet Arts Guild
My first big project of 2019 is the creation of a new kind of facebook group!! I just launched on January 1st and I was so excited to see lots of people eager to join. We have almost 200 members in less than 24 hours! Sweet!
So here’s the low down. This is a project based cake decorating and sweet arts group designed to help develop cake decorating and sugar art skills through guided, hands on projects & activities. We are learning, practicing, supporting each other and having fun! We are focused on growing not only our hands on skills set but also stretching our creative brain. Part of this process is to train ourselves to think outside the box. Grow our artistic skills and practice our creative skills. Challenging ourselves to be deeply creative & exploring new ways to find inspiration.
Some of the features of this group:
~ Monthly group projects. The project will be based on a specific skill or recipe for everyone to learn and practice. I will be posting various links to tutorials, information, tools and recipes through the month pertaining to this project for you guys to check out and learn from. Ask questions in the group and share your own tips and tricks at any time! We are all at different skill levels, so if the project is something you have done before then I will challenge you to take that skill to the next level by getting creative, pushing your boundaries and creating a new twist on the skill, something we haven’t seen before.
~ Tipsy Tuesdays. Myself and other cake decorating gurus will share tips, tricks and other cake decorating innovations on selected Tuesdays.
~ Baking and cake decorating challenges. These will be themed challenges that must incorporate using a specific product, tool or ingredient. My plan is to get sponsors to provide discount coupons on the item we will be using in the challenge.
~ Cake Decorating Contest. At least once a year Sweet Arts Guild will host a themed cake decorating contest. There will be an entry fee and specific rules just like a live cake show competition. Prizes will include cash, products and awards. Remember Threadcakes?!!
~ Recipe and product reviews & demos
~ Exclusive discounts for tutorials from Shani’s Sweet Art and other online cake decorating instructors
~ 1 group Cake Collaboration per year. In fact Sweet Arts Guild has already hosted it’s first group collaboration – Myths & Legends <<< check it out! It even has it’s own website >>> Myths & Legends – A Sugar Art Collaboration. It was a really fantastic collaboration and I am looking forward to polling the group for ideas on our next theme!
Future plans for Sweet Arts Guild
So for the first few months as I get the group set up and running, incorporating new ideas, tweaking the details and process and we all get into the swing of things, this will be a free group. My ultimate plan is for this to be a subscription membership group. Mind you, the subscription fee will be small and very reasonable, I promise! Plus all founding members will be offered a major discount for the lifetime of their membership. So if you are loving this group concept, jump on in now and become a founding member. My hope is to create a community that is very focused and invested in learning and growing their sugar art skills and I think that by having a small membership fee we will gather a community of very motivated and engaged members. THAT is good for everyone!
Sooo, I hope you all will join me over there and check it out. I promise it’s going to be a really fun way to learn and grow your cakes skills!!
Sweet Arts Guild – A new kind of cake decorating Facebook group
Let me know in the comments if you have any fun ideas I can incorporate into the group. I’d love to hear your thoughts!!
Have a sweet day!
It sounds like a great idea. I am an english ex pat who lives in Cape Town, South Africa and there are very few, if any, cake decorators in SA who wish to share their ideas online, so I have to reach out to the internet for all my inspiration/tutorials and dare I say it products which sometimes more to import than the product itself. There are also very very few places in Cape Town who do actual classes for anyone who would like a short course and not a full blown chef’s course, so I applaud your venture and feel that I would like to be part of it.
I’m very excited! I’m always wanting to learn and indeed have much more to learn so this will be great. Thank you for creating this group and allowing me to be a part of it!
I am glad you are excited about the new group Shirley. It is going to be a blast! Thanks for joining!!