a little off-course....

in my networks and follows and forums and likes i came across Lila Loa's contest to turn a gift shape into something that isn't a present.  you can view the entries and winners here.
and finally, belatedly, here is my little creation.  i turned mine upside-down, added a little half circle, made a lovely scene that would have delighted you all... then my computer blew up.  so i didn't get to enter the contest.

so there's that.

i have tons of pictures to show you, by the way.  i did birthdays, a baptism, a bridal shower.... maybe by fall you'll see them!  we have a loner laptop in the meantime, a fine machine that doesn't improve on Taco Bell's wifi's suckiness.  so sorry kids, you'll see these pics as time allows, but please believe me, my head isn't in the clouds. :)  and for the love of all things frosted, if you know of a place near Elgin that needs my mad skillz, EMAIL ME.  i'm going a little crazy being unemployed and cooped up.  meanwhile, have a spectacular summer, you crazy kids...

zoobie zoobie zoooo.....

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.

what i would have said to the Madmen suggestion, had i thought of it then, was that he had the right era, but the wrong show.  in hindsight, i see now that i was imitating a mid-60's Pepe le Pue (Pew?) cartoon, from the Chuck-Jones-as-director category of cartoons.  he did Tom and Jerry too, with the same floppy scribbles, giving you the suggestion of a flower, or a filigreed archway, or a scrollish table leg. it was loose and casual, and the same sloppy-pretty kinds of patterns can be found in all my grandmother's scarves and dresses from about 1966 to 1972.  the colors however, were inspired by what i'm seeing in season now.  all i saw all winter was brown and grey coats.  we need some summer-of-love colors now. amiright?

and this will be my 100th entry, and will likely bring my 10,000th page view. (grins and chair dancing) thanks again for stopping by and liking my silly little cookies. more to come!

the last of winter...

sometime after the tattoo cookies, when winter was getting monotonously dark and dismal, i made flood dots, dragged a few with a toothpick, and outlined them with edible markers to make some flowers. the purple edge got a brush of dry pearl dust.
they were pretty and cheered me up. then i had hubby Jeff take them to work to pass the cheer along.
i added simplified versions of these flowers to the Valentine's Day mini hearts i did, but i'd like to do a big cookie with a big tacky-wallpaper-like flourish of blossoms. in crazy hippie colors. all summer long.
i haven't made cookies since last month's lizards, which i still have to post.  don't worry, i intend to be enormously busy with cookies this summer. and if you can think of a few challenges for me, drop me a line. till then, stick around for April Fools/birthday cookies, baby cookies, retirement cookies, probably a ton more flowers, and in the very near future, i'm going to give a cake a try. ("gasp! but katie, you don't do cake!"  "true, but i do do awesome.  and i just said 'doodoo'...")

some unrelated quickies...

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...

then i tried a little plaid with the markers and airbrush.  i cut strips out of a big yogurt lid and sprayed once, then again after a 90 degree turn, then drew in some skinny lines.  these were just a test cookie; Jeff also brought these to work.  circles with patterns are nice filler cookies, like when you only need a few that are meticulously decorated, and a few dozen of something easy to make and share.  like pink on pink plaid would go so sweetly with a picture shape for a baby shower. or as you'll see coming up, cows and cow print circles.

and i did a Valentine's Day project for the niece and nephew, but we didn't head in that direction till the following Sunday when the cookies had gotten dry, so i sent them to work with Jeff.  they liked them anyway.  flood dots were outlined with edible marker on tiny hearts, with a few forget-me-nots.  maybe i'll do a Valentine's Day part 2, St Patrick edition, and make green hearts. :) green plaid hearts? 
and i'm still pondering a shape for an April Fool's Day birthday party...
and some lizards will be crawling this way...
and i know i'll make something for the office this month...  busy busy...

pow! boom! zap!

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.
a neat thing about comic books is that they're full of pictures.  they even have pictures to depict what you cant see--sound.  in text we call it onomatopoeia. but if you draw it, a big colorful blast shape with a KA-POW, etc, right in the middle is a cool graphic by itself.  and who doesn't chuckle when watching fight scenes in old Batman episodes? (Oof! Splat!)
so i made Evelyn some comic-style action sounds in what were supposed to be yellow blue and red, but oh that red, i need a new brand, because i could only get dark pink.  but it's ok, because girls like pink too.
all 3 colors were applied one after the other so they dried flat, then i "inked" them with the edible marker.  the imprecision of the piping lent to a nice sketchy, hand-drawn effect with the marker, like fun little doodles.  the shapes were a flower for 'pop,' 2 asymmetrical flowers for 'boom,' and 2 elongated stars for 'zap.'
and i've mentioned before that not everyone gets up close to admire the cake before it's eaten.  if you're late, or standing in back, you may miss the big communal dessert/art before it's divided up, but once we were done singing, and the cake was being cut, the plate of cookies circled the room and everyone got a fun piece of comic book art, via a cookie. and anyone who had ever read a comic book got the connection without any direct reference to a character.  besides, the birthday kid is always enough of a character :)  Happy Birthday Evelyn!
and stay tuned for cows and lizards and hearts and plants and plaid, and more flowers... and feel free to throw a few suggestions my way for April Fool's Day, i'm pondering that too...

temporary tattoos

Happy New Year! i'm way behind with posting, so let's get started...
the hubby works with Vanessa who was kind enough to watch the kiddo for a few hours one day. i said i'd pay her in cookies if she wanted, because she was usually the first to raid the bag of mistake/sub-par/experimental cookies that i sometimes send to work with Jeff to share. she agreed.
i made 2 designs: tattoos, and ----s. i didnt take pictures of the ----s because i didnt think it would be too cool to post ----s, seeing as kids probably like this blog--mine does anyway. but i'll describe them for ya! they were about 4 inches, skinny, bended every which way, had subtle 'circulatory' attributes (some big words to trip up the kids), chocolate jimmies for hair, or brown sanding sugar for stubble. i also made them in Caucasian and [let's-call-it-] Latino hues.
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...
i dont think i got a report back about the tattoos as Vanessa was so floored by the awesomeness of a dozen little ----s. i think Jeff even said she was eagerly showing customers. Jeff later joked with her that she went straight home and put them all in her mouth at once. i had him ask her which end she started with.
we're terrible!
after all the "coming up" listed in the previous post, there will also be silver stars, purses, and NYE clocks. i'm a busy gal. stay tuned....

los muertos!

my last post talked about my artistic origins. all that drawing i did as a kid looked nice on the refrigerator, and i made some really swell coffee mugs in ceramics class, but these little edible drawings are what people remember now. i get asked all the time, "how's the cookie business?" and it's frustrating to have to still be a hobbyist, not a business-ist, but people keep encouraging me, and i keep baking. and behind the scenes, i'm thinking a lot about the future too. i see myself aproned, flecked with stray luster dust, piping a billion dots on some bride-zilla's fairy-tale-wedding favors and humming happily to myself. i'm not necessarily famous in this scenario, but if the cookie world calls on me to be on TV, or be lauded in magazines i just may have to go along. and since i won't get there with boring cookies, i've been aspiring to new levels of awesomeness. i'd like to make cookies such that Martha Stewart would say "holy fondant, those are gorgeous." even if they're just cookies for a 6 year old's birthday, or Uncle Bob's retirement party. because really, if someone is special enough to get a cookie, the cookie should also be special, right?
now how do i segue into these Dia de los Muertos cookies? maybe since i'm talking about the future, i could point out that even if i'm rich and famous, there's still the great equalizer, death, which José Guadalupe Posada illustrated with "La Calavera Catrina" portraying a rich woman as a dressed-up skeleton, and inspiring Dia de los Muertos imagery for the last century. (yay, art history lesson!) i just have to say, if i die, and you feel some need to dig up my skull and have a "poor Yorick" moment, by all means, rinse it off and paint some flowers on it. (you knew her well, a woman of infinite jest...)
i googled a good skull image, resized it, glued it to a plastic yogurt lid, cut it out with an x-acto knife, and airbrushed over it onto a white-iced skull cookie. when dry, i drew with food writing markers. drawback: not enough colors in the pack of markers...
on the way, that one owl, a wine party, some horseback riding, and maybe some deer hunting. mmmm, woodsy...

Wayne's planes

F-I-L Wayne has a birthday mid-April, but whether it's his day or not, if the weather is nice, Wayne can probably be found in the back yard, pushing a grandkid on the swing. while torpedoing through the air, the kids like to look up and squint and point out planes, and birds, and whatever zooms into view.
i have an airplane cookie cutter with a top/bottom perspective that really only lets me decorate the plane to look like the boring underside of the craft, skew it all funny for a side view, or use the outline to suggest an element of the design-- in this case, "looking up." so i made plane-shaped sections of sky with birds and branches and telephone poles and little airplanes, all in silhouette, like when you squint at a blue sky.
the silhouettes were painted on with black food coloring; the brush can only make so fine a line though--i'm considering switching to a food-writing pen. the clouds were layers of white and gray icing dots and white sugar. off in the corner there's a piped icing jet contrail, or as Andrew says, "look! a skywriter!"
happy birthday Grandpa Wayne!
coming soon, silver and sapphire, purses and shoes, music, baby chicks, lambs, moons and stars, maybe dinosaurs, definitely army men, contraband and pyrotechnics, 'my little phonies,' and a few cookies go over the rainbow. (whew!)

Supercookie

the first time i painted, i was 2. dad was painting the living room wall, and i decided to paint the living room rug. at 5 i was still coloring outside the lines, but i knew that i wanted to be an artist. i colored, sloppily, made mud dishes in the garden, cut out hearts and snowflakes. i tried every art and craft. my poor mother had glitter embedded in the rugs till i moved out.
i'm somehow the artist-child of 2 people who'll probably tell you it skipped a generation. dad's mom crocheted, mom's mom sewed and did needlepoint. i have some of their (many!) pieces--they were good. but my parents didn't take up an artsy hobby. they're skilled though--mom can sew, though she follows patterns. i'd take the scraps and make barbie clothes. dad can rewire a house and install a pool, but i've never seen him doodle, and i can't go to a hardware store without a long imaginative pause at the paint samples.
my parents weren't without art appreciation (and not just the pictures i'd hang on the fridge). dad had a pretty-darn-big comic book collection, and he did read them; and mom would dutifully bake and decorate, with the help of yours truly, Christmas cookies. hmm... illustrations and cookie cutters...
so i asked before what do sunflowers and Superman have in common, and the obvious answer is that they both get energy from the sun. (nerd grin) but the alternate answer is that they both look really cool with an "ink and paint" look. most of cookie decorating is to outline a field of color and fill it in. but if you were drawing a comic book, you'd sketch an outline, paint in color, then add the outlines and shading with ink. on a cookie, you'd use food coloring.
first ('cause i still like coloring outside the lines) i removed little sections of the regular symmetrical flower shape with a leaf fondant cutter, and replaced them with whole leaves. larger leaves and a strip of dough made the stems and it all baked into a wind-swept sunflower shape. after the icing was dry, i painted in lines with thinned brown food coloring and ta-da, once again, a delightful marriage of cookies and comic books results in a masterpiece. (bigger nerd grin) don't worry, the fantastic-character and baked-goods genes will live on--my son's alter ego is Cookie Monster.
and why are sunflowers my favorite? in addition to being huge and bright and cheerful, they take a while to get that way, and are worth the wait. if i could combine all my favorite colors, i'd just call the palette "September."
now onward to fall--there will be tractors, and i predict some over-the-hill cheekiness. stay tuned, super-friends...