and then...

after the wine auction in September, i got an email from 3 Vines Cafe in Sleepy Hollow (visit here). they saw my cookies at the auction, and could i do the same cookie for their dinner party, and once again, i turned cookie dough into wine. ok, pictures of wine.
since their logo features red grapes, i stuck to the red/purple shades, and kept the "glass" gold. after getting a feel for it once, round 2, to me, looks quite improved. it was October, and i was getting a little 5-year-oldish about Halloween coming (death! candy! blood! glitter!), and i feared a repeat (and large) order would get monotonous, and i would get frustrated, and then i'd slop it all up. of course i was wrong. i reminisced about my October wedding, and made them all elegant and sparkly, and pouted when i ran out of cookies.
you know i actually used to fear that if i did what i loved, every day, i'd eventually hate it? i have a kind of ADD when it comes to arts and crafts--i crochet, paint, bead, sew, repurpose, wield a camera, (write long droning blog posts) and can make pottery on a wheel, but eventually i put it away and months go by. cookies i could do. every. day. i get that arrived-at-my-happy-place feeling, like a toddler with a blanky, or a stressed college kid with a cigarette.
but now that sounds like i'm addicted, a word which to me speaks to a more self-conscious and anxious frame of mind. and that happy-place is the opposite. i rarely make a cookie design that's an expression of Me. you're not meant to understand me, human, katie, artist, when i make a cookie that looks like a football helmet. it's either a request from someone else, or an attempt to convey something more archetypal to an audience, which by definition is also "someone else." there is a story to be told about [a change, a milestone, an event] and it needs at least one visual. one picture, for the first thousand words. when i'm decorating cookies, i'm part of the illustrative process. in a way, i created nothing especially new. foodwise, it's the same cookie. but in decorating it, i also convey, translate, reveal, represent... i enjoy how it is to be a conduit between "that concept" and "this cookie."
hubby Jeff loves the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but i love the 'making-of' bonus features. (remember, i used to strive for a special effects/make up career, and LOTR spared nuh-thing.) the crew devises a way to mold PVC into metal-looking rings (plastic is lighter) and 2 gents got to work essentially making the chain mail for every actor in every battle in all 3 movies. every day, linking little rings. every work day. for 4 years. !! then the camera was pointed at one and he said, "i wouldn't trade a minute of it for anything, it was the most amazing thing i've done in my life." i toast my wine cookie to that dude.
and also to 3 Vines, for enabling my happy little compulsion, and letting me translate their concepts. owner Flicka emailed that they were stunning. (i bow.) my pleasure.
coming up, i lend a hand to another fundraiser, i mix crazy colors for a bake sale, i make Vanessa some nude cookies (it's only sorta what you think), a lone shoe, lavender snow, poinsettias, choir bells, (award winning!) Bill-Cosby-sweateresque ornaments, Santa Frog, and more ornaments from an evening of (omg!) teaching!

best lamp ever

Jeff's coworker Rita also has a horse stable, and she and her husband have a boarding business. she suggested we bring the kiddo by some time, and when she held a garage sale, Jeff figured hey, what's keeping us. so we went, Rowan rode a pony named Caramel (i think?), and we saw all the big horses too; Ro kept saying yee-haw. [you bet he was a cowboy for Halloween.]
then back at the garage, and amongst the sale items, i spied her sister's lamp. a spherical iridescent thing of beauty straight out of Rainbow Brite's condo. i have a slight lamp-rescuing-complex. and i had no cash on me. crestfallen, i asked Rita if her sister would take cookies for it. she replied, "tell ya what, i'll buy it for you and you can make me the cookies." then she threw in a 3-piece cowboy cookie cutter set, with a horse, hat and boot. [i thought, "SCORE!"]
and after the afore-blogged white pumpkins and the to-be-blogged wine-glass-encore, i made Rita some cowgirl cookies. there was a also hat cookie, but it was cosmetically damaged, but that's ok because the rest of them were [rootin' tootin' ding-dang!] awesome. my other horse cookie cutter is more toy-like; this one turned out more like the animal. but i still gave it a gold mane and something eye-catching on the butt. [i couldn't help it, there had to be some nod to My Little Pony. i think i had my niece Grace in mind--horse lover, Nancy Sinatra sing-alonger--through this whole project.]
the boot's gold pattern was done by laying a stencil over the dried icing, lightly sketching where the spaces fell with an edible marker, then piping with gold. when just dry, i dusted with gold pearl dust.
and i had been dying to try a wet-on-wet technique and combine it with the black marker to make bandannas. white icing was piped right after the pastel so it flattened together. then when dry, i added the black details. it's more the imitation of a motif, than actual bandanna patterns, but i adore them.
the colors themselves are a result of just finishing with some experimental colors for the church bake sale (chartreuse acorns, and brick-red leaves with blue veins) and while they were drying, i added the previous colors to the new icing plus different ratios of red teal and yellow, resulting in these fabulous kitchen-of-tomorrow, 57-Chevy colors. i wanted to sing "stand by your man."
Rita pointed out the cookies' only flaw: "they all got eaten." i'll have to ponder about a Christmas platter for Jeff to take to work. but coming up, after wine, shoes, hands, acorns, leaves, and tattoos, i'll have fabric patters, bells, poinsettias, ornaments, maybe some frogs? stick around...