Little House on the Prairie Cookies

Last week I made cookies for a Little House on the Prairie party. 

I made the gingham using my airbrush and a stencil I made.  I got the idea from Glorious Treats.

This is seriously one of my first pictures where the purple actually looks like purple.  I mentioned last week that I got a light tent.  This was my second time using it and I love it!  I have a hard time getting good natural light in our apartment, so I'm really glad I finally gave in and bought it.  Hopefully my photos will be much better from now on.

Oh, and one last thing.  Last month I entered my black and white pattern cookies in LilaLoa's contest and she listed my cookies as one of her favorites!  You can see that post here. 

Tractor Cookies

Here are some cookies I made for my nephew's birthday to match his invitation.

I ended up making the tractor cookie cutter because I ordered the wrong tractor cookie cutter before I saw the invitation.  Oops.  It worked though.

Oh, and I bought a light tent.  What do you think?  Definitely better, although I still need to play around with it.  I think my lights were a little too close to the tent for this picture (the double shadows).  Today I backed them up while taking pictures of some cookies and I think that was a lot better.   Next week I'll share my wildflower cookies for a Little House on the Prairie party.

My Color Chart

I got to meet up with friend Kris from So Cute Cookies last week and she gave me the great idea to test out my gel colors.  I have the hardest time getting good pinks and greens and because of that, I've bought every different one of them I could find.  But I don't really use them because they all give such different results.  So Kris showed me how she tested out different blue colors in various shades and I knew I had to try it with my colors. 

So I took some leftover white icing and colored tiny amounts of it until I ran out.  I got through most of my colors.  The only colors I didn't really get to were the reds, browns, and blacks.  Oh, and leaf green. 

So here's what I ended up with.  Now you all probably know how hard it is to get colors to come out right in cookie photos.  I adjusted the photo the best I could and then Georganne of LilaLoa was kind enough to try to get the coloring better.  So she tinkered with the white balance and here it is:

*(A) is for Americolor and (W) is for Wilton
*Both columns are the same color, the right column just has more gel color added.

The pinks and purples are a bit off, but you get the point.  Not only will this be helpful when I need to match a color (I can just hold the samples up to this and find the best match), but I learned a lot.

For instance, Americolor violet and Wilton violet are really different.  Americolor is much bluer.  Ever since I found Americolor, I've kind of abandoned my Wilton gel colors, but I think Wilton violet is now my favorite purple.

Also, I can't tell the difference between teal and turquoise.  They look exactly the same.  Same with cornflower blue and navy.  And moss green and juniper green.  And sky blue and electric blue.  So if you're just starting out and building up your gel color collection, just pick one of each of those and you'll be good.

Black and White Cookies

The fabulous Georganne of Lilaloa has created a challenge to make cookies using only black and white (and any shade inbetween).  I've always wanted to participate in a cookie challenge but I've never really been able to (either I was too busy or I couldn't think of a good enough idea).  Plus it's so hard to set aside time to make cookies just for fun.  However, I recently came to the decision to no longer pursue orders, but to instead get back to having fun designing and creating cookies.  So when I saw this challenge I knew I had to set aside time to come up with an idea.  I ended up finding my inspiration in scrapbook paper.

 

 

 

 

 

Happy New Year!

 

 

Funny Little Snowmen

Last week I had an order for cookies to match an invitation.  Thank goodness I got to see the invitation because when I was told to make snowmen with holly hats I wasn't quite visuallizing it. 

And luckily Sugarbelle did a tutorial that week on how to make holly leaves, so I used her technique to make the hats.  And I painted the faces on thanks to Arty McGoo's great instruction at Cookie Con. I'm now realizing that I never actually did a post on Cookie Con...oops!  I'll try to at least put up some pictures eventually.

Christmas Minis

Last week, my husband's work had its annual Christmas boutique.  If you remember, I participated in it last year as well.  I made tons of stuff, including decorated sugar cubes, about 70 decorated cookies, and a bunch of minis.  In the end, only the minis sold, and the only way to sell off the 70 decorated cookies was to discount them to $1.50, which was kind of insulting that people thought that's all they were worth.  And I still have a few boxes of the sugar cubes, but at least those never go bad.  Anyway, after last year's disappointment, I thought I would try just making mini cookies, since those were all that really sold last year. 

 

 

In the end, I only sold about 2/3 of the cookies, so it wasn't too bad.  I intentionally didn't mark down the price on the last day (apparently there are a lot of people who wait until the last day, waiting until things go on clearance) because I'd rather give the cookies away to people that will appreciate them than sell them for nothing to people who devalue my work.  Do I sound bitter?  Don't worry, I'll get over it eventually. 

Oh, and in case you're curious, I used my airbrush on the peppermint candy cookies (I made the stencil!) and the snowflake cookies.  My airbrush and I may be friends now after all.  We'll see...

Pumpkins and Flowers

I have been such a bad blogger!  But to tell you the truth, I haven't been making a whole lot of cookies.  I haven't had any orders lately, although I have played around a little bit with recipes. 

A few weeks ago I made some pumpkins using my new toy, the dehydrator.  Can you see a difference?  It definitely adds a shine, but it's not always easy to see in the pictures.

We also recently started attending a new church that has a program for special needs kids.  Teenagers in the church volunteer to be their buddies in the Sunday school class.  I thought that was pretty cool and that they deserved some cookies for to working with my son. 

I also got to attend Cookie Con last week, but I think I'll have to make a separate post on that.  Needless to say, it was amazing!  More to come soon!