Sugar!

My niece-in-law Barbara came over today to play with sugar. We had a grand 'ol time learning what we could in working with this medium. We came together with a solid watching-of-The-Food-Network-knowledge, as well as having read these two (one and two) very informative sites. I can't speak for Barbara, but I felt as if this was going to be an easy, conquerable task - something we could do and turn out with something AMAZING by the end of the day. Oh boy was I wrong.
Lessons Learned:

• We are freaking awesome and can do ANYTHING with sugar, we ROCK~!

• 300F is not hot enough - our pulled sugar pieces wilted, and never really ended up hardening, somewhere near 315F was a much more successful final temperature for our sugar- but the sugar hardened much much faster

• FIRE should be used sparingly - we tried using the blow torch directly on a spot we wanted to "weld" and ended up with some rather large holes... heating a knife, and then using the flat side of it against the seam seemed to be far more effective for mending

• Sugar sculptures can apparently explode.

• Sugar sculpture is really really hard, and we have a long way to go, and a whole lot of practice in front of us before we can really say that we have any clue what we are doing