Valentine's Cookie Class

Housebox Creativity

I thought I would show off a little creativity from one of our customers. Marge, a volunteer at St. Paul's Lutheran School in Fairmont, MN sent me some photos from the housebox projects created by the students before the holidays.

Using just the Museum of Modern Rubber Housebox Template and colored papers, the kids created some darling houses for the holidays!

Marge told us a little about the arts program at St. Paul's:

The art program is manned by volunteers and teachers.  The volunteers go into each classroom with prints of the Masters , I believe from the National Gallery of Art, and present the art history lessons at least once or twice a month.  Some volunteers are artists themselves and expand on the techniques, etc. suggested by each of the great Masters.  The teacher then gathers the material from the store room (not too much) and at least once a week has an art project based on what the students have learned.  Color, design, texture, etc.  (3M mfg. is in town and has given us some materials to use as well. Many of our church's members work there.)   The program is from 1st thru 8th grade.   Students finish at their own pace and during free time can finish an art project, finish homework, or read.

 Marge even loans some of her own tools to the school for use in the art program.

Volunteerism is alive and well at St. Paul's. Marge shares that many in the community volunteer:

I am a volunteer every Wednesday and grade Math, English, Spelling and Spanish papers. Latin is taught by one of our retired teachers.  Our teachers not only teach the basics, but also teach their own gym, and eat with the students at lunch time.  So you see we have many volunteers who mentor, read to the groups, etc.   Our basketball, soccer, etc. coaches are all men teachers and volunteers who help out the sports programs.  A faithful volunteer has the cheerleading squads.  Our religion classes are also taught by each teacher.  Pastors teach the Confirmation lessons once a week to Public and SPLS.  Many of our students are in the upper percentile at the two high schools in town.....Martin Luther H.S. and Fairmont H.S.  Dedication and hard work is the name of the game.

We're  going to ship a package to the school this week to help with that supply closet. And we're so happy Marge shared her lovely pictures with us!!!  The kids are very talented and imaginative!  Thank you Marge!

Happy New Year!

Just wanted to take a moment and wish all of our customers and fans a blessed and happy new year. There were a lot of ups and downs these past few years but we are so happy our doors are still open to serve you all with the best food safe crafting products around!

We were so busy with glass bead sales in December that we never got a Christmas cover up over here! So we thought we would compromise this month. The cover bouquet was actually a Christmas one...but if you change the phrase stamp, it could easily work for January! Let's take a look at the whole bouquet:

 The bouquet was created by our original owner, Chef Laure'l. I just love her creativity and how she used our snow frame stamp to add to the theme and by making a cut cookie for the bouquet, she added a different shape. It's kind of a billboard with a nice phrase!  By changing the phrase...it would fit any month!

The other stamps are January's Snowman and the Let It Snow circle theme image.

We are back in the shop as of Monday and welcome your custom food safe stamp orders!

Christmas Rubber Stamped Cookies

Scenes from Christmas cookie class:

Mistletoe:

Joyful Ornament:

December Santa (from our Cookie of the Month line)

Mrs. Frosty

Holly Wreath

Thanksgiving Cookie Class

Student work from last week's cookie bouquet class:

Stamping Mistakes

Students in our food safe rubber stamping classes always worry about making a mistake. But there really is no reason to worry... this is the only craft where you can eat your mistakes!

 Seriously, I always tell my students that an artist is not someone who never makes mistakes. It's someone who knows how to hide their accidents!

 Any number of things can go wrong with inexperienced stampers or bakers... we get both kinds in our class...

For bakers, they are not used to coating rubber stamps with ink and aren't used to tamping the stamp on a pad, checking it for good coverage and then stamping.  For those folks, we recommend a foam coated rubber brayer to get an even coat of ink on the food safe stamp. And we train them to ink immediately before stamping.

Stampers have no issues with the coating the stamp fully with ink but often are unaware of pastry tools that aid the process such as a fondant smoother. This piece of plastic makes the fondant oh so soft and it will take the ink much more readily.

Still, there can be mistakes. Waiting too long after inking to stamp; not pressing down with even, gentle pressure; dropping the stamp on the fondant...these can all lead to mis-prints.  There is little that can be done with too much ink... simply cut out and eat or trash.

But for too little, it's easy to fix.  See the area on the sunflower where it's too light?

I take a wet, thin sable brush and drag it through the dry ink on the lid of my stamp pad. I twist as I load the brush to bring the tip to a fine point.

Then I just paint in the missing details with the stamp pad black on my brush. If you are not comfortable painting, you can use a food writer in black.

November Header

Here's a lovey rubber stamped cookie bouquet idea for November from our teacher in San Diego.

This bouquet features the following rubber stamps:

Fall Bounty
Cornucopia (from our Thanksgiving Set)
Golden Gobbler
November Scarecrow (on sale!)

Hats (also from our Thanksgiving Set)
Autumn Foliage