Top Hat Buddy for St. Patrick's Day - Tutorial

This St. Patrick's Day design is similar to the one I made for Ecrandal's cookie cutters. The cookie cutter can be found (Here) and has many different design options that I'll show at the bottom of this post.  Today I'll show how I make a leprechaun.

I outlined the area where the hat is going to be, and filled in the band with black and let dry.

When the outline was dry I filled in the face area with flesh tone icing. I like the face better without an obvious outline, but that's just me.

Using an orange red icing I filled in the hair after the face area was completely dry.

I flooded the hat area with green icing and sprinkled green sugar on top for a little sparkle.

I added the mouth, nose, and eye outlines using a fine tip edible food marker.

I filled in the eye outline with white flood icing and dragged it into the corners with a toothpick.

With flood icing I added the buckle and let dry. I really should have used outline consistency icing, but I got lazy and used this instead. You can see it's not as sharp as it would have been had I thickened up the icing.

I used a black food marker to fill in the eye area. I decided to sharpen up the area around the buckle with black outline icing.

A drop of white icing finishes the eye, and a fine line food marker details the hair and freckles.

I added petal dust to the cheeks with a Q-tip, and this little guy is done.

Here are the original cookies I made for Ecrandal. You can easily make a patriotic buddy, or a chimney sweep, or even a magician. The hat can be changed into a cowboy hat or bowler with some creative cutting.

♥ Happy Decorating ♥

Fantasy Get Well Flowers

I made a quick bunch of fantasy flowers for my baby sister in Alaska using some cutters I made a couple of years ago for (these). I wasn't able to make them into an actual bouquet for her because I knew they probably wouldn't  make it there without some breakage.

These are some of the background and filler leaves. Sorry for the blurry photo, but I took these really fast so they could be sent out and didn't preview them first.

A couple more leaf sets.

Larger fantasy flower set.

2 more fantasy flowers.

Smaller filler flowers.

Here is the whole set arranged into a bouquet of sorts. I took this photo and made it into a get well card for her.  That way as she's unwrapping all the individual cookies she can look at this photo and at least get some idea of what was in my head.

♥ Happy Decorating ♥

My Cookie Cutter Organization

I know this has been done before, but thought I'd show how I organize my cookie cutters in hopes that it will be helpful to someone out there.
First of all I admit I don't have nearly the amount of cookie cutters that some of my cookie friends have accumulated, but I found a neat and tidy way to store them so that I can view them all easily without even opening the container. I posted it a year ago on my flickr site but thought I'd update it here as well.

Here is how I used to store my cookie cutters. Does this look familiar? I had to rummage through the whole box, or dump them out to even see what was in there.

Here is what I use now. It's a see through scrapbook case made to hold those large 12 x 12 sheets of scrapbooking paper. I admit they aren't cheap, so I buy them at Michaels or Joanne's using a 40% off coupon or wait until they come on sale.

Remember that jumbled box of cutters at the top of the page? Well here is about half of them covering the bottom of the scrapbooking case. On top of these I place a piece of poster board cut to fit inside the case. Why? So I can place another layer of cutters on top.

Here is the second layer of cookie cutters, which are all the remaining ones from the jumbled box above. Normally I use black poster board because the cutters show up better against it, but the store ran out, and these were on sale, so blue it is.

You can see where smaller cutters can be added inside larger ones.

The best part is that I can easily view my cutters through the case, and because I added the poster board to separate the layers, I can flip the case over to view the other side as well. It's so much easier now to find the cutter I need.

This is showing the black poster board in an older photo.

And here is how easily they stack. At the very top are smaller versions of the same case that I use for my mini cutters.

And that is how I store my cookie cutters.

♥ Happy Decorating ♥