i spent the afternoon on the road finishing up the Christmas shopping and now i have mere moments before i pick up the kiddo from daycare. so here, quickly, are pears! these were for the Trinity Lutheran annual Christmas Sale. i put 2 in each favor bag for a pair of pears. ha, clever. i love the little blush of orange or green from the airbrush, and how the gold pearl dust makes it Christmasy--like, "partridge in a pear tree" pretty. 
so i'm trying out my new computer. we'll see if i blow it up when i try to upload something. so far facebook doesn't like uploading my pictures. if you see a pretty white cross with little pink flowers in this post, then we're back in business. these were for the baptism party for Ava, daughter of hubby's friend Gabi. mini fondant cutters made the flowers and leaves around the base, and like Evan's baptism cookies, the A was stenciled. some pearl dust finished it nicely, and each were bagged in favor bags. welcome little Ava!
hubby's cousin Dana had a lovely outdoor wedding in California last month--tons of flowers, hanging votive jars and crystals, all in a palette of pinks. prior to, i was tapped by m.o.b. Aunt Donna to create the bridal shower cookies. i went with a lacy umbrella, embellished with fondant flowers with dragee centers. D for Dana, and J for Josh were stenciled on adjoining hearts. Dana emailed back with exclamation points that she loved them.
this is the last batch that i brought to the office, my farewell platter, on my last day. i said the look i was going for was kinda mid to late 60's, to which Mike brought up Madmen (one of my favoritest) but i had to say hmm, and not quite find the explanation beyond something about sundresses, before someone asked me something else, not that i would have been able to remember what i was going to say as the mention of Madmen got that "Zou Bisou Bisou" song in my head again-- aaggh!! Mike wasn't too far off though, as, if you follow the show, they're up to late 1966. i sometimes have to watch an episode 2 or 3 times because i'm so distracted by the look of it. Don Draper buys the Madison Ave. decor, but in 3 Madmen-years, it'll be the year my parents got married, and all that stuff was on sale by then, or at least imitated cheaply, so every striped pillow or barrel lamp shade reminds me of the eventual equivalent that i grew up with, though it was 15 years old by then.
i've mentioned that i have a temp job; i haven't mentioned that it's among commodities journalists. Dad worked here till retirement (which is how i learned of the opening) and i remember him working on Christmas Eve when mad cow disease was found in the US. i remember him bringing home swag from pork conventions [like a t-shirt with a pig in sneakers--"hogs are trendier than you thought"] and i was the only kid in my Spanish class that knew that beef was a big export of Argentina. it's an interesting corner of the world to sit in for 8 hours a day. i
hear one-sided phone conversations about fertilizer, and livestock
reproduction. i heard about MF Global before you did. and i have fine
minds all around me that deliver breaking news about the journey our
food takes. 
often when i do a project i have some leftover dough, so i roll out a few, try a technique, and pass them along to a worthy someone. recently, when it was snowing like crazy, hubby Jeff got a ride home from a coworker with an appreciation for pot-related humor. so i made some pot-leaf cookies (got the cutter at Spencer's, btw) and some pot plants, made from Wilton's ice cream cone. the first question with this is always "are these special cookies?" no. just plain ol' cookies, i'm a good girl. but i got some green-marker practice in, and he got a nifty treat for being helpful. but i'm also thinking of making a Christmas ornament shape into a hooka...
i've mentioned before that i dont like doing licensed characters. being able to copy someone else's art might indicate good hand-eye coordination (or you have a Kopykake projector) but if you want Tinkerbell, i'll leave it to Disney. plus i never understood why Barbie, for instance, when made into a party theme, has to have her face on everything. if i were Barbie, i'd want flowers, or hearts, or something about Barbie at the party--i wouldn't want to eat my own face. so when Evelyn turned 4 and wanted a Spiderman party, i wanted to work around just doing red masks and logos.
this was a pile of funky snowflakes i made for Andrea and her family, for watching the kiddo until we got the ball rolling on day care.
these were the yearly Christmas choir cookies. those lines should have been thinner. but the sparkle cooperated.
long story, these new years stars almost had a destination, but i never got them out the door. Jeff took them to work instead. but i was attempting silver on white effects.
and Lois asked me if i could do something Christmasy with frogs as a get well gift. like my froggy princes, these were a composite of a frog and mini hat. i think this spring he'll need some Easter hats with flowers.
these were for the office cookie exchange. i can now say my cookies are award winning, as i took home the coveted "Best Decorated" trophy Starbucks giftcard. i rule.
the Zellmer Childhood Disease Foundation is named for Mary and Paul Zellmer’s son Jim, who was diagnosed with Type I diabetes when he was 6. to raise awareness and find a cure, they began Pumpkins for a Cure, which is now in it's 7th year of bringing pumpkins every fall to folks around Geneva, IL, and hope to kids with Juvenile Diabetes. read more here to learn more. big high 5 from me, pumpkin farms are awesome!
so this is the batch of frosting that begat so many weird salmon pinks and deep yellows and dingey teals that i've been posting. i sometimes, like a song, get a color stuck in my head. i once brought home stacks of paint sample strips from hardware stores trying to find a purple for my hallway. [Gliddon, "smartypants"] and those couple of days i was thinking of a really tangy chartreuse, and a pale teal, and a terra cotta orange, and a chocolaty brown, and how they aren't the first 4 colors that you'd group together to say "Autumn!" but i've played around with odd colors before, like one fall had a bowl of mini leaves, and a third were purple. the audience's eye accepts electric yellow acorns, or purple leaves, because we subconsciously understand the nonsense aspect of it. it's magical enough that here are cookies that look like leaves; that some should be fantastical colors is perfectly acceptable too. so i made rusty orange leaves with ghostly blue veins, and the aforementioned electric yellow acorns, both in a junior size, like one bigger than mini, but still a kind of little cookie, and packaged them in pairs. Aunt Dahlas and Lois reported that they were quickly bought.
with the remaining "flesh tones," and yellow, blue and pink, i did a series of wet-on-wet designs that, when dry, i outlined with a food writing marker to mimic tattoos. little simple tattoo cliches, but mostly i wanted to practice with the marker, and make some mental notes about icing drying times. (the picture was taken inside, so forgive the greenish-orange.) and i cant make one cookie without thinking of 20 more, so i'll probably be using this technique all year...
