Happy Holidays!

Everyone out there in blogger land,
Have a Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year!
I hope you enjoyed the holiday season and got or did whatever you wanted : )

Yes, I know, my last entry was in October... sometimes life gets in the way. But now that I've worked on (what feels like) a cajillion projects — now I have some time to relax and actually share those. So, regular posting should resume in the new year.

Every year I make a calendar for all my relatives for Christmas... this year I was a little behind on the graphics, which are traditionally my illustrations. If I've really run out of time then occasionally I default to using photos... but generally I draw everything. So, on the first of December when I had 1 illustration done, well, it was crunch time. And in part that is where my time has been... I would come home from work and I'd either be packing etsy orders or illustrating.

I'd like to thank all my etsy customers from both sarahkdesigns & sarahknight : )
And a special thank you to akacinders : )
I hope you all enjoyed your stuff & had wonderful holidays!

Otherwise there was a tirade of cleaning and organizing, even though all my relatives know that the house is generally in a state chaos.

Oh, and, of course, there was the traditional marathon of Christmas cookies. In the event that you've never ventured to this blog in previous years, well, every year I make Christmas cookies. They're actually sour cream cookies, and the recipe yields like 8-10 dozen (depending on the amount of flour and the size of the cookie cutters). This year there were 120 cookies frosted in 19 different colors of frosting. It took 4.5 hours to produce this batch... and, of course, there were photos.

The dough.

Mixing in the 5+ cups of flour is always the hard part. Well, that and trying to remember whether it's baking soda or baking powder... oh, crap it's baking soda. Did I buy baking soda in the weeks before Christmas? No. Was there a moment of panic at 1am when I was set to make these cookies? Yes. Fortunately, the baking soda was right there in the spice cupboard next to the allspice and the Hungarian paprika...

Bake for 5-7 minutes, 375˚F

cleaned up for next year

Time to frost the cookies...
frosting √
food coloring √
sprinkles √
happy-go-lucky knife (aka butter knife) √

there is a system

They're finally frosted! Now they just have to sit on the table for 4 hours for the frosting to dry so that when I put them in the storage container (cake holder turned upside down) they don't all clump together into one giant messy cookie.

(click on graphic to enlarge)

Yes, 19 different colors. 1 box of standard 4-color food coloring, 1 box of neon color food coloring, and you get a good color of violet by just buying violet colored food colorant from the cake decorating section of any store. In the event that we've never covered this before - violet is my favorite color and YES it is that important.

So, again, I hope you're having a wonderful holiday season! And next time around I'll start showing off all the new pictures I've made in the last 25 days.
(or you can peter around here for a sneak peak)