Frosty Handpainted Hare

Last year my contribution to Killer Zebra's charity calendar was 'January'. (You can buy the 2019 calendar here, to which I contributed 'August'.)

Travel Cookie Set: Luggage Label tutorial

You wait ages for a tutorial and then two arrive at once!

In this post I shall be showing you how I made these 'embossed leather' luggage labels and in the next, the vintage maps with three dimensional topography.

The brief for this set was to combine the elements of a Pacific island cruise, vintage map hobby and 50th Wedding Anniversary celebration. I threw in a few hibiscus flowers and, of course, plenty of gold lustre. But I wanted to create a contrast with the aged leather luggage labels making use of these great 'leather' tutorials by Yankee Girl Yummies and LilaLoa.

You will need:

Label shaped cookies with hole 

Brown royal icing in piping and flood consistencies

Piping bags with PME tips 1.5 and 2 or equivalent

Dark brown and black gel or paste food colouring and dusts

Water

Both fat and fine food use only paintbrushes

Gold lustre edible paint, or lustre dust with a little essence to dilute

String (edible or not, your choice!)

A note on the cookies: I don't have a cutter for these, I simply cut out rectangles with a scalpel and ruler, chopped off two corners, and poked a hole using a large bore tip, or a straw. 

1.  In order to create a twist on the leather idea, I decided to see if I could 'emboss' the lettering into the surface. I considered using the royal icing embossing effect I created for my first 'What's New, Honeycat?' tutorial, Coffee and Cookies, for Cookie Connection, but that technique needs a bit of speed before the flood layer crusts over and I wasn't sure I could get the lettering to be neat enough. So I chose to pipe the letters first and flood around them. 

2. Once the lettering had thoroughly dried, I piped brown flood around the rest of the cookie (piping a small ring around the hole first to act as a dam). It was a little tricky piping around the letters. I used a PME tip 2, and a scribe tool to ensure all the crevices and corners were filled. I let this dry overnight.

3. To get the general leather effect, I used a mixture of the methods mentioned above by Yankee Girl Yummies and LilaLoa, painting and dusting  in blotches, using fat soft brushes and mixtures of browns and black. When it came to the letters though, I used a paintbrush and darker paint around each section of each letter, to create more depth. I wanted these letters to look like they'd really been stamped into the leather.

4. Once the paint was dry (really just a matter of a few minutes in the deyhdrator) I used edible metallic paint in gold to highlight the lettering. Gold lustre dust mixed with a little essence would have worked fine here too, but I'm finding the ready made paint by Rainbow Dust (similar or the same as what's in their Click and Twist pens) to be really bright, as well as drying without leaving a dusty surface, even if you paint it on quite thickly. 

The metallic paint dries quickly too, so all that remains is to pop a piece of string in the tops and tie them to your luggage.

Now your luggage is sorted, you'll need to make sure you've got your maps ready. Remember to subscribe so you don't miss the next installment!

Steampunk Cookies for a Wedding

I was asked just after Christmas to make a set of steampunk wedding favours. After some useless excitement, a lot of daft ideas and finally some sensible thinking, I decided to create a design using royal icing transfers, where the elements are piped onto a translucent silicon sheet, or parchment paper, tracing a print of the design underneath. Given a couple of days to dry thoroughly, these delicate icing embellishments can be carefully peeled off, and attached to the main cookie (once you've discarded the many, many, many broken ones and tried not to get too disheartened).

Of course I had to start with cogwheels. Once piped in a couple of colours, I painted over with shades of brown to mimic the streaks of polished brass, then sprayed them with a mixture of gold and bronze lustre spray.

The client requested keys which also fit nicely into the theme of metallic working parts and were an opportunity to add a little more elaborate detail, though of course the stems were extremely delicate and prone to breaking. I painted these in lustre dust mixed with a little alcohol-based lemon essence for a brighter metallic gleam.

I wanted to include the wedding date, and thought of a variety of ways this could be done, but decided 'typewriter keys' would add a little more dimension. Piped in purple, and sprayed with gold, then outlined in brown which was then painted in gold. Much less prone to breakage and very satisfying to make, so I now have lots spare.

What I really wanted to do was to create something delicate and pretty whilst being obviously steampunk, so I decided to use the base as a form of decorative 'backplate' to the working parts above, using the filigree wet on wet technique onto which I gently dropped the seperate elements.

And this is where I started to have fun, as late at night, half way through, I very sensibly decided to record the process, never having made a video before. This first video shows this stage of the cookie decorating, highly edited to remove the parts where you can't actually see what my hands are doing, and set to a marvellous piece of music called Requiem for a Fish by the Freak Fandango Orchestra - how could I not choose a piece of music with that name?! - because I have no intention of letting anyone know what my voice sounds like.

This second video shows piping of chain links, the date, and 'rivets' to finish off the base, set to Roberto Billi's Sfioro because it's a great piece of music (though I don't know what he's singing about!) and because he's wearing a top hat on the album cover.

And now I want to video ALL THE THINGS and set them to more mad music. I also have lots of cogwheels left. Valentine's may well be steampunk this year...