#EFFit

And the other pile of pictures I’m sitting on was from Elgin’s first annual Fringe Fest.  I took part because if I look at everything as a no, I won’t do anything, right?  So here was a never before art show for artist who were not quite mainstream and I thought, yes, let’s see what can happen here.  I inquired, was (enthusiastically, I might add) encouraged to join in the fun, and after much daydreaming, I narrowed it down to my five favorite (that week) shapes.

I participated on a Saturday, first at the Family Fringe Fest, in a wee park in the middle of town.  Here’s my table…

I chose shapes and techniques based on what I thought would demonstrate my skills as an artist.  I don’t usually use that word self-reflectively, as art is usually in the eye of the beholder, but if I were to attempt to convince you that lovely things can happen on a cookie, as well as a on canvas or stage, I’d have to bring the good stuff.  So I brought:

Rockets—a composite shape, and the airbrushed water-color spots make the moons look nice and cratered.

Asters--A mini fondant cutter added extra petals to a sun shape, with multiple shades of yellow to accentuate the wavy contours of the petals.

Grapes—each grape was a piped dot, sugared in 2 shades of purple, or brushed with purple pearl dust.  They were gorgeous up close.  It’s also a composite shape that I made with a mini maple leaf and an upside-down Christmas tree.

Geckos—aqua blue, like a gecko isn’t, with little arabesque gold dots.  Scales are so unevolved, right?  These were the hot seller—they might be my favorite too.

And the fest was selling stenciled t-shirts with the twitter hashtag #EFFit.  So I made a few myself with a homemade stencil and some “paint splatters” with my airbrush.

When the Family portion ended, I packed up and finished up the afternoon and evening outside the Side Street Studio Arts, so incoming ticket buyers would see my wares.  I did well, but probably could have gotten away with simpler designs for less.  The kids wanted cookies no matter what they looked like.  But I wasn’t there to “sell” my baking skills, though I always bring them of course, I really did want to make this hard on myself as an illustrator—making them in volume, and making them awesome.  And I did it.  And if I have the space and time this summer, I expect I’ll be signing up again.  So see you on the fringe ;)

super readers, super stars

The Gail Borden Library’s “Read on the Wild Side” challenge is to log 100,000 reading hours as a community.  (the program’s name is a hat-tip to the library’s “SuperCroc” exhibit—that thing is flippin’ huge!)  through the library’s Gold Star Program , youth programs and organizations, schools, parks and recreation and daycares etc, that serve kids can become “gold star partners” by agreeing to sign up children for the program and to measure and record the time kids spend reading.

In The Neighborhood (ITN Fresh is the little café in the library) catered the event recognizing these star readers, and i, INT’s new employee, made these star cookies.  (more info on the job later, the E. Dundee location isn’t open yet, but i’ll be there on my new adventure.)  i have many pounds of respect to heap on people that help kids read, so this project had to be pretty.  gold icing and gold pearl dust was the backdrop for subtle scattered airbrushed stars in a darker gold.  i’m looking forward to more library-centric projects for the cafe, and would love all your suggestions.  i’m already daydreaming about children’s book characters, harvest season fruits and foliage, sci-fi, Halloween…   

congrats and thanks to the Gold Star Partners, and stay tuned for my version of John Lennon’s baby art.  i’m seeing little giraffes in my future.

Christmas rush, part 3: teaching!

in December Jennifer emailed me, asking if i could do a cookie decorating demonstration for the Glen Ellyn Newcomers, "a social organization for women who are new to the area" who were having a holiday cookie exchange.  awesome, i thought. after kids, suburban women are my biggest fans.  i read on: Jennifer had already planned on another baker, but she had to cancel for health reasons, and now it was a scramble to replace her.  [related: i once asked my facebook friends who knew me back in the day, what they thought i would have become upon growing up.  almost universally they agreed, something with art and/or teaching. (Spock eyebrow)] 

 i inquired of details, we spoke on the phone, and shazam, the following week found me at Drury Design, unloading my sprinkles and tools and example cookies (left)  in a model kitchen that looked like a Food Network set, from a box that previously held generic firelogs.  i don't travel with my tools, i was at a loss for a neat little rolling plastic organizer thing. (so i walk into a room full of well-accessorized ladies with my log box and lime-green low-top Chuck Taylors looking like amateur-hour.  yet confident in how i would wield the box's contents, so i felt just fine.  c'mon, chef Batali wears orange Crocs...)  i set up in one kitchen while they went over agendas and minutes in the other. then they filed in around the counter, i was introduced, and for the first 10 seconds i was the ill-prepared 7th grade spaz with a book report to present, then i picked up the icing and was instantly zen-master cookie teacher. 

the rest was informal Q&A about my cookie past, tips and tricks, awesome adventures, etc., all while demonstrating flooding dots, piping lines, and fun with colored sanding sugar.  there was a lovely moment when i piped green dots, then switched to red, and when i shook off the loose sugar to reveal 2 colors, there was a collective "ooooooh." i always get a kick out of the perception that this is part magic. (it is!) then i filled a few more bags and let the ladies try their own.

my big "oops" for the evening, and there just had to be one, was that because of time, i had to make the icing the night before so i could grab it from the fridge after work and take it straight to the design store.  problem is, that lets the icing settle a little.  imagine a whipped foam losing it's foaminess. that and the warm room and the warm hands handling the piping bags, and before long we were piping with pink and green soup.  but everyone was a good sport, gave it a try, had fun, and hopefully gave their own batch a try at home. to the left are some of our masterpieces.  i would absolutely teach cookie decorating again.  but i would have a lesson plan, and the aforementioned nifty means to transport the supplies.  but i bet i'll still wear my green sneakers.
i asked Jennifer how she found me--she said Google.  Blogger is part of Google so a search with IL-cookie-decorating-related keywords lands this blog not too far from the top of the search results.   so how often are my cookies viewed? the counter on the blog is set to count individual website visits, but since Blogger changed its dashboard layout, i can also see a count of separate page views. over 5000 people have visited, but those people have lingered and browsed around, and the page view count is nearly at 8800. (!!!) i thank every single one of you for stopping by. i have immensely enjoyed delighting your eyes with cookie stylings.  if you have a second, please take my mini-survey (to the right), and tell your friends to visit (especially if your friends work in bakeries) and if you're a new gal in Glen Ellyn, click that Newcomers link at the top.  then, stop back for clocks, comics, cows, purses, hearts, plaid, houseplants, and whatever i come up with for the office this month.  suggestions welcome. :)

some helping hands

Donna had seen my wine glasses at the 3 Vines dinner and inquired about a cookie favor for a fundraiser she was hosting. she attached a picture of the organization's logo and i had no doubt, some blob-on-blob mimicry with piping wouldn't do; this deserved precision. [the final picture also deserved better lighting. alas, the day job keeps me from good photo-op sunlight!] more on the art in a bit, first:
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!
normally i shy away from logos. branding has become a second kind of identity in our hyper-mediated world. if you were in a strange land, and someone painted a yellow M on a building, you might not suspect that it was meant to convey that there were cheeseburgers inside. but spy the golden arches, and you've *identified*. you instantly know it, like you would a face. when you read "golden arches" you knew who's burgers. you know about swooshes on sneakers, and mermaids on your coffee cup. it becomes a symbol for the thing it sells, and even if you're not buying, you're aware.
so it's no wonder that causes do well with a branded image--think pink ribbons and yellow bracelets. Donna's guests all had to go home with The Logo, and it had to be the same image, like a visual consensus, not some based-on-the-logo "something about cookie hands, i don't know, i ate mine in the car." like i said, it deserved precision. it needed a stencil.
i enlarged the logo, glued it to a plastic lid, and when dry, i veeeery carefully (tiny little fingers!) cut away the black part with an x-acto knife. then i set it to the left a bit, airbrushed with black, outlined in blue, and added the abbreviation with edible marker. i felt the letters were a bit small, and some hands a bit fuzzy, but it was, essentially, the logo.
the NFP status, said Donna, is as of July, and perhaps this logo hasn't gone live yet--all Zellmer roads lead to the pumpkin site. but if i'm working in a Fox Valley area bakery come fall, look for me at Taste for a Cure. mmm, pumpkins.

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!

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!

wine and cookies.

when i bake for Brenda, i drop them off with her husband at the Elgin Y where he works. my last order caught the eye of Kay, their PR director, who asked me to provide some take-away cookie favors for guests at a wine auction fundraiser. at first they were to just be the glasses, which would have looked darling with some gilded filigrie stem design. but when i think of wine, i also think of toga'd Olympians with big piles of grapes. [tangent: i pick wild grapes and make jelly and grape juice. to DIE for, mmmm.]
so i used a simpler glass design, kept the gilded look by using pearl dust on all the surfaces, and baked a mini maple leaf and mini sideways Christmas tree against the stem for more stability and that little nod to Bacchus. the grapes were icing dots and pearl dragees. the "glass" was more like metal with bronze and silver pearl dust over brown and grey icing, respectively, but mom and dad have a totally 70s coaster set that's 'mercury glass,' with like, the profile of the god Mercury in the center. plus a set of tumblers from their (1969) wedding shower that i inherited that have old world maps on them, where North America is Terra Incognita, and they're all snazzed out with gold details. so i may have unconsciously nodded to Bacchus twice with these Me-Decade throw-back Mediterranean glassware effects. all that from being unable to make clear royal icing.
Kay used many exclamation points to tell me that they were awesome and very well received. i believe her; i got an order for an encore. thanks Kay!
...and coming soon, pumpkins, horseback riding, and a thank-you. and later, a bake sale, Thanksgiving/my birthday, and deer hunting. hmm...
and also this post will be seen by my 5000th visitor, unless 2 more people showed up while i typed this. thanks everyone for stopping by, i hope my silly little cookies made ya smile. :)

my kid ate my homework (& thoughts on bake sales)

friend-of-the-fam' and previous client Brenda asked if i wouldn't mind donating my wares to Fox Ridge Elementary's fundraiser last month. i agreed, then pondered all over the place... the suggestion was to do baskets, maybe 2 of a dozen each. i only had to provide contents, but i thought of my reserve of cookie-appropriate containers and how to fill them in some delightful way. it came down to 2 blue mugs and a candy dish, to be tied in my usual cellophane poofy-topped way, containing a scholarly selection--apples, pencils, letters numbers, and rows of sticker-sized gold stars. the idea was to have 3 gift sets, with the candy dish having more of each shape. then my terrible-2y/o got into the candy dish, so i made the mugs and a few favor bags instead. (thanks kid)

luckily i made these, also in favor bags. the designs are piped dots, some dragged with a toothpick. the "metal" is black icing with pearl dust. i was pouting as i was getting to the end of decorating these--i wanted to make one in every combination of colors and patterns. maybe i'll get a wedding/baby shower gig soon? hope so, i can't look at this picture without getting more ideas.

i threw out a line on twitter and facebook, wondering if any area followers wanted to co-donate to a basket, but no bites. meh, we're all busy, it's ok. but with the funds that need raising all over, i'm looking forward to any movement in bake sale culture. they could be like little conventions of local artists (cakes cookies) gardeners (preserves pies) and kitchen warriors (aforementioned and then some) networking their secret recipes into American hearts and pallets while offsetting what's gotten to be a sad [i paused a while here] everything.

secret shoppers from huge food magazines could discover the next home-baked celebrity or publications/blogs could spring up to cover the bake sale bandwagon that everyone is hopping on so they'll be featured in said publications/blogs. all proceeds to charity. are we doing this already? links please, i'm on board. and magazines, i'm for hire...

Brenda says the cookies were a hit, and i'm glad to help. (high 5 Fox Ridge!) coming soon, cherries and blossoms, Heather's baseball birthday do-over, and Henry partys like it's 1921.

i have a daydream...

Sharon, who ordered the tiny elephants for her granddaughter's birthday, let me know about her friend Tara's blog, Go West Young Mom (click here ) a blog about kid-/mom-/family-goings-on in these Chicago burbs. just when you feel like you live in the boonies and there's nothing to do, there's someone to point out all the fun events you're missing! it's a lot, by the way, Tara does her research. i gave her a shout-out on twitter, and it turned into emails about cookies for her (then) upcoming Go West Girls' Night Out at Urban Style Salon and Spa in Batavia. the specifications were something holiday-appropriate, yet also like the blog's logo. so i made pink and brown (the blog's colors) pinwheel stars in varying shades and textures.

part one of the day was spent finding the place to drop them off. a small brain shortage on my part led me to type "Geneva" in my GPS. i went west all right. and while i was going south, facing the 2pm-ish sunshine through a salt covered windshield, i ran out of washer fluid. don't worry, i got there. then my plan was to go home, get dinner going, and when hubby showed up to watch the kid, i could go to the event and mingle around.

well, part 2 was hubby coming home with a bloody nose because it was so dry out. then he slipped in the bathroom and hurt his knee. i got him put together, the good sport, and i went back to Geneva. i mean Batavia.

i was pooped, but everyone had a nice time. Tara arranged door prizes (someone won a dozen custom cookies, but i haven't confirmed who yet) tasty catering, and various mini-spa services. i chatted up with a few folks, but i had to scoot out early and hit Osco for a knee brace and Kleenex. high 5 to Tara! i'll be at the next one, and i'll stay longer. :)

since then i've been thinking about parties and cookies. i originally started this blog to show my work, and to get an idea about what the baking-audience expects from the baking-artists. in more than a year, i've determined that so far, they want cupcakes and recipes. but what i'm really gung-ho for is the art. and if i were to do this on bigger and fancier scales, what direction should i take it? my own shop? a picture book? how do i make cookies every day, gain exposure, and increase enthusiasm when (perhaps) the world isn't ready yet?

then i came upon 2 websites. one has guest bloggers sign up to make cookies or cupcakes, blog about them and a personal account of how breast cancer has effected them, and donate the cookies to a group fighting breast cancer (a clinic staff, for instance). another organizes groups to gather for cookie decorating parties (!), and the cookies are donated to various charities. now, i can make cookies all week. i'd love to be employed this way, but i do it as a hobby too. i'll even do it for free if i'm invited to your birthday party, so i'm not out to conquer the world with cookies. i just really want them to be popular enough, at some point, that my skills will be needed in the baking-arts world. in the meantime, how do i get all you people involved?

it's MLK day, a day suggested to be one of service, and i know i've spent too great a time on my rear end. and now i'm discovering opportunities to apply my talents to humanitarianism, and i have this funny habit of noticing where the universe is leading me... here's my very important question, so please reply: if i held a cookie decorating party for charity, would you go?

"gobble gobble"

got a call from Lois from church, wondering if i had some time to make a few cookies for a the yearly bake sale. i always have time for cookies, plus i had an incomplete set of 2nd hand, brown, hand-glazed plates that i didn't need. 4 big plates, 2 small plates, and 3 mugs, all unfit for the microwave, and ultimately doomed to be dropped over the years. i'm a clutz. i buy my plates at the dollar store. anyway, i picked corn, leaves, apples, and mini pumpkins, leaves and acorns. then i arranged them all nicely in/on their mug/plate, wrapped with cellophane, and put the 12 or so extras in favor bags. i'm told they sold out. (yay!)
in the meantime, they caught Dian's eye, and she ordered more corn and leaves for thanksgiving. this time i added a few purple kernels. i love how any color works--this shape is definitly in my top 10 favorites. thanks Dian!

('hey katie, your pictures are starting to look a little fuzzy.' yeah, as it gets darker and colder, i'm working with poorer light, plus i just recently got new contacts, and it turns out i really needed them! moving on...)


then mom remembered the turkeys i made for Eldra last year and wanted 2 dozen made the same way. i wrecked about 6 before i remembered how i did the tail last time. these little guys drove with mom and dad to thanksgiving at my brother's in indiana.

and then for fun, i made these for Andrew and Grace. one lost a head en route. :( but i'm sure he was delicious.