Whimsical Tissue Paper Flowers

             After taking a roadtrip for two weeks and returning home to begin immediately searching for a job (remember? My book store job closed, so sad! But life marches on) I have been swamped and unable to bring you any tutorials! I am now preparing for my very FIRST craft selling event (and it's for a great cause! Go check out the Toco Festival in Jellystone Park!) and I'm totally excited and TOTALLY scrambling to make sure my friend and I have enough items to sell. So, unfortunately I'm leaving you AGAIN without a tutorial. Instead I leave you with a fun concept and I'm sure all you crafty  whips out there can figure out where I am going with this ;) .

                  

Originally, I had a photo of the inspiration craft on here but I removed it because I did not have permission to use the photo, so to be safe I removed it. Sorry for any confusion!

  

My craft today is inspired by some browsing through Pinterest, where I found a wonderful tutorial on oversized, dreamy tissue paper flowers, and you can find the tutorial for them at Design Sponge. They are made by a company called Ruche, and they gave a great description on how to make them, but I wanted to make them for a window display and didn't want to get into chicken wire and cement (I tend to injure myself with chicken wire, and I get REAL messy with cement!). My budget was also...well, pretty much nothing. More or less, I had about $6 and whatever items I could find on hand. 

See? There's even a pile of junk sitting on the floor around my pretty flowers (and by junk I mean supplies I thought I might destroy to make more flowers!). 

To create my smaller scale version of those whimsical flowers:

For the flower stem:

Cut a piece of strong cardboard (I used a box that a shelf came in) into a slightly curved shape as "tall" as you want your flower to be. The flowers shown here are actually about 3 feet tall, and the curve just adds a bit of dimension to the shape. Then take either another piece of long cardboard or use poster board  (about 5 inches shorter than the curved piece) and bend into a "triangle" shape to add stability and dimension (You can see the straight line down the middle of the pink flower- this is the poster board). Hot glue that to the curved piece of cardboard, starting at the part that you will use as the top. 

Take a smaller piece of cardboard, about 5 inches in height by about 4-5 inches wide. Cut a slit in the bottom of the curved cardboard piece, and slide the 5x5 inside to use as a bottom stablizer (you may want to trim this to be wider at the bottom as a triangle shape to give a more natural flower stem shape). 

Take 2 toilet paper rolls as cut them in half. Then cut a piece of posterboard big enough to fit the curved board, the 5x5 board, and the now 4 pieces of toilet paper tube (one on each side of the stem). Hot glue this poster board to the bottom of everything, creating a base for the flower. Use heavy paper (I used tightly rolled newspaper) or another weighted agent and fill the toilet paper rolls. Make sure the rolls are also glued to the cardboard flower stem. 

For the Flower:

Cut a piece of poster board in an oval roughly the size of your hand (maybe a little bigger, depending on the flower size). Hot glue that to the top of the flower stem. This is now the base of your flower. Cut out large, tear drop shaped "petals" and hot glue them to the base as you desire. 

To finish it off:

Wrap the flower stem in green tissue, making sure to tuck loose tissue paper ends away if you can, then hot glue on  nice, big, loose leaves for added whimsy.

                            

Learning The Art of Sugar Cookies

              I've been eye-balling sugar cookies for some time. Since my first attempt at baking sugar cookies I have always burned them, miserably. I just couldn't tell when they were done, ya know? With my final weekend working at the bookstore that I have absolutely loved working at coming up, I decided I was going to suck it up and learn to make good cookies. I originally considered making a cake, but a cake is hard to split up into individual "take home" size pieces and keep it looking pretty. Cupcakes were another option, but with cookies you can make them beautiful, bag them up, and send them on their way still looking beautiful.

            Cookies became the forefront in my mind when I ran into a photo of Star Wars cookies on Pinterest. They were made by Sweet Sugar Belle. In case you're wondering, this is where I became OBSESSED with making a beautiful cookie and icing it to my heart's desire. Last year, I acquired a 100 piece cookie cutter set from Bed Bath and Beyond for $10. Awesome deal, right? I still haven't used any of them. When I decided to make these cookies, the cookie cutters where still being store at my mom's house and I'm too lazy/procrastinate-y to go pick them up. So I improvised, since I wanted a fairly simple shape.

A "TiVo" cookie cutter

 The only large cookie cutter I had on hand (I did have some small hearts and leaves for fondant but that didn't fit the bill!) was this bizarre TIVO TV cookie cutter my mom found for like 30 cents at goodwill. It had little legs like their logo, but I straightened those out for a more rectangular shape. I also used pre-mixed cookie dough but I was careful dough, but I was careful to let my egg and butter come to room temperature (Seriously, go read every article at www.sweetsugarbelle.com! She has amazing tips, techniques, hints, all that good stuff!) before mixing. I cranked the oven to 400 degrees, and put my smaller set of cookies in for 7 minutes. I smelled the burning before I saw it, whoops! I didn't think they'd burn that fast. Anyway, on my second set of cookies (my "real" cookies) I baked them for seriously, about 5 minutes and they came out beautifully. 

Whoops (7 minutes in my oven)

Royal Icing

A better baked sugar cookie (5 minutes in my oven)


After the cookies had cooled overnight, I mixed up some Royal Icing then split it into bowls for coloring. I knew I wanted the background white, black writing, and pink for the Breast Cancer Ribbon, as these are all part of our logo.
I used the Shpritz method from One Tough Cookie to make different consistencies of icing. It almost seems unfair, they made it so easy for me the first time around in making cookies I feel like I have a head start over those who have worked on them for years! Not like I'm anywhere NEAR that level yet, but now that I'm on the road... who knows ;) . 

Clean Lines

   My outline started out pretty shakey, but by the time I approached my fourth or fifth cookie (why did I move on to the burned ones AFTER the pretty ones and not visa versa? Who knows) my lines where looking mighty pretty! I let those dry about ten minutes, then took the piping icing out of the bag back into the bowl, where I thinned it down with some spray bottle water and turned it into a "flood" icing (I'm telling you, read everything Sweet Sugar Belle has written. Then you can join my lingo for this post!) . I went to the cookies and began "flooding" their middles with the icing. It wasn't as runny as I had hoped, but I used a warm spatula (Think "Smoothing out Buttercream Frosting" method here) to fill them in more consistently.

I was a little low on the white (whoops, didn't think THAT through) so mine were not as "filled" as I had hoped, but it was enough to give a nice white background. I let those dry for about 15 minutes (I should have given MORE TIME, my black icing bled onto my cookies and I'm suspecting that is why!) and wrote "Sue's News" on the cookies. 

Finally, I added the Breast Cancer Awareness ribbon to each cookie, and it became the WHOLE design for one cookie because I forgot to write the store name on there, whoops! It was a happy accident, though. 

There's alot of words here, I hope it doesn't take away from the fun of decorating cookies! Get out there and give it a shot! I'm sure mine will only improve from here, and I hope yours do, too!