the bake sale

like i said, i'm behind, and these, dear reader, are from the pre-Christmas bake sale at Trinity Lutheran back in November. after this, i'm afraid, you'll be bored to death with months of the pictures of what i was doing over the Christmas season, all busy and stuff. there will be ornaments and poinsettia and snowflakes until Easter.
nah, you'll love it. it'll be like back before digital cameras and you didnt pick up your Christmas pictures from Walgreens until around Valentine's Day. "aw, remember those?" you'll say, and tilt your head and smile. you-> :)
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.
when i took this picture i was reminded of a documentary about the making of the movie Fantasia. this was back when artists sat at drafting tables and drew all day and brought a lunchbox to work. no boardrooms and focus groups. and this one guy had to come up with the forest that these little (it's been a while, cherubs? little centaurs?) were prancing through, but he wanted a really great color for the leaves. something really astoundingly not-treelike. then at lunch, one of his colleges was eating a slice of a jellyroll and he had a eureka moment over that berry-magenta of the jelly filling. so he went back and used that color to paint the trees. i paused for a moment and tried to imagine if such a tree were real, that these cookies were a just imitation, and i bet the bark would be blue, and roots all exposed and twisty. and i see 2 scenarios for such a palette: either it's a result of it being some crazy fantastic alien landscape, or some atmospheric event with moonlight shining on fall foliage during a frost, making those weird moonscape colors...
i totally over think it, but golly, it's just funner that way. and it's true, if something were paint by numbers, i never followed the directions. and later i'll rock your eyeballs with some purple snowflakes. :) and a bunch of other things. first i have to make purses and "plants" (yes, more Cheech-and-Chong fans) till then, high 5s!