Gnumoon's Stuff

Pink and tan and cute all over: baby cookies

I'm not going to lie. The detail on the onesies appeals a little bit too much to my "OCDetail" nature. I could make them all day long.

More Halloween cookies!

There are more in the gallery. :) The haunted house was the favorite:

Missing dog - please help!

(EDIT)

He brought his big booty home in the middle of the night. He wolfed down a bowl of food like he'd never eaten before, and collapsed on the coach, where I suspect he will stay for a while.

Thanks all for the positive vibes!

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Today around 11:30 am, I was putting Max out on the porch and he made a break for it, bounding down the steps and down the driveway. Apparently he ran over to the neighbors' house and met up with Puppy, and the two of them raced off into the woods. This has happened before, but Max was much younger then, and I'm scared his arthritis is really going to hinder any attempts to get home.

If you are a local, in the Valle Crucis/Sugar Grove area, please keep an eye out for a large brown dog, 95 lbs, with a docked tail and a red collar. He is a rhodesian ridgeback/boxer mix, and may be palling around with a skinny black dog in a red collar. Her name is Puppy.

Max may be shy at first, but he is very friendly. Please help us find him. With any luck, he's just wandering around in the woods, but if anyone sees him, please let us know.

Halloween Cookies & Turtley treats

I don't believe in "overkill." Anything worth doing is worth overdoing, in my opinion.

 

Those were my treats, but we let the turtle go collect her own:

Orange and Black

Such an original color scheme. :)

 

 

Swine Flu! (that you can eat)

I love customization. So you can imagine how thrilled I was to make these "Pigs with swine flu" cookies for a Pandemic Response Team of tired nurses who are working round-the-clock to combat the H1N1. Apparently they were a big hit, and rumor has it that the Chief Medical Officer of the company might have taken one to a meeting with some bigwig at the CDC. You can damn well bet that if I ever have a resume for this stuff, it will say, "Clients include: Maggie's mommie, Teagan's mommie, and the CDC."

My favorite part is the snot. Ewwww.

(I'ma get vaccinated now, because making this set has def. set me up for "ironic punishment")

Also, this view is much different now, but it's been a gorgeous commute for us this October:

Halloween cookies: Ghosts & Pumpkins

Oh candy corn, how I love thee. I wrote a haiku, and made 97 cookie yous, to show my adoration.

Yellow & orange

honey infused tummy aches

yet i cannot stop

(also, I am so proud of my Halloween birthday present bowl from LBPS. I'm going to make the raven a santa hat so I can use it year-round. Love it love it love it.)

 

The rest of the set includes ghosts, pumpkins and jack-o-lanterns. What? Ghosts always wear bowties.

 

 

 

All ready to go!

 

I know I said I'd update with songs and witty stories, and I plan to, but I am very very busy these days, and tired to boot. My plan for this week is: Get work done, stay sane, and try to have some fun. We'll see how it goes.

Mickey Mouse jack-o-lantern

I've been too busy to carve pumpkins this year. I know, weird. But we finally got around to doing one this evening, so I could indoctrinate Pookie into the fold. Teach her the ropes, show her how to gut a gourd, draw a face, drop a lighted votive into the top in such a way that it lands without going out OR burning your hand. Okay, that last one, and anything with an exacto knife, may actually be lessons for next year.

Our rudimentary "must be finished in 6 minutes because that's the attention span of a 2 year old" jack-o-lantern turned out decently, I thought. She did try to feed it yogurt and then asked when we'd be eating its head. What are those Baptists teaching her at school, anyway?*

*Apparently it was picture day at school today. I didn't get the memo that it was CHRISTMAS picture day, so my child went flouncing in wearing a black and purple Halloween shirt, polka dot skirt, and bright purple tights. Maybe I'll just Photoshop in a turkey, ships and a dreidel somewhere in the pics and do a "fall/winter holiday card" this year.

 

In other Pookie-news, she has finally fallen in love with the light-up skirt and fairy wings my aunt got her for Halloween last year. It adds something to the overall effect when she pokes at the lit up transluscent threads and proclaims, "Those are fiber optics!" Ah, the magic and wonder of childhood. 

I have compiled a list of more halloween songs, but I left it at work. I'll try to get them posted tomorrow.

Teeny tiny teacups

I was busy all weekend and busy again today, so no witty comments from me now, I just wanted to update on a new order I delivered to a (thankfully!) happy client.

The theme was a Victorian tea party for a little girl's 6th birthday, so I made dark pink and purple fondant teacups and flowers to rest atop miniature cupcakes her mother made. It's a small world, after all.

 

 

Serengeti cookies: Lion, elephant, zebra, hippo and giraffe. Oh my.

Is this the Serencooki?

Bungle in the Jungle?

(I WAS listening to Rush last night, so I guess they could be the {wait for it, wait for it} SerenGeddy set. Gah, that was bad.)

I don't know quite what to call them. But I do know that if you wanted more cute little plains animals, you'd have to go to Kenya (can you believe it? Forget Norway...more like Snoreway).

A friend called me up to do some cookies for her son's 1st birthday, and she sent me this photo of the themed set she was using. Well, I'd been secretly looking for an excuse to make some brightly-colored animals, so I of course jumped at the opportunity to make these.

Here are the inspiration animals. Let's be honest, I blatantly ripped them off.

After careful study of the source material (ie: looking at the printout while stuck in traffic), I realized that I'd have to make a whole set of cutters to get the shapes right, so that was the first order of business:

 

The lion is actually 2 cookies, stacked on top of each other. I didn't make his mane as its own cutter, I used an existing sunflower-shaped cutter and rolled it flatter. The giraffe head is also the zebra head, I just cut off the horns and changed the ear position a little bit after cutting them out. 

So I got to work, and the hardest and most time-consuming part of this set was definitely the array of bright colored icing that had to me made and matched. The hippo alone has seven different colors, some piped on, some painted with a small brush. Yikes. (I'm not insane, really. My friends have started referring to it as OCDetail)

The kid's name is "Teagan," despite my husband's insistence that it is actually "Triscuit," so I made his name and jazzed it up with yet more icing. I'm kind of glad I won't be at this party - there is kind of a lot of sugar going on in these cookies...

 

 

 

Cookielion on the prowl:

As an unlooked-for bonus, I realized after making the cutouts that the hippo head doubles nicely as a portly owl:

 

She Blinded Me with Science. And cookies.

Or is it "Weird (cookie) Science"?

At any rate, here is my latest set, the mad scientists. It's October, and I'm in full Halloween mode. (Also, I've finally found the proper use for a fisheye lens.)

It's also possible the whole thing was an excuse to buy dry ice and make fake brains.

More photos are in the "Cookies" album over there ---->

 

 

Mickey Mouse Jack-o-lanterns & Bats: the happiest cookies on earth

To celebrate my friend's trip to Disney World (an October trip that includes trick-or-treating in the park!), I made them this set of Mickey Mouse jack-o-lanterns and personalized bats. I tried to copy the "Disney" font on the bats, and did an okay job with it. I think my favorite parts are the bat fangs and teeny little dot eyes. 

SSOTD (I owe 2 today, so I'll theme them properly):

Grim Grinning Ghosts, theme to "The Haunted Mansion". That link goes to the "House of Mouse" version, but the original song can be found here on Amazon.

Oogie Boogie's Song, from Nightmare Before Christmas. "Well well well, what have we here?"

Happy Monday: Appalachian football and new music

It finally stopped raining. Woohoo! But not until we all got to get waterlogged at football on Saturday, oh well. As you can see from the photos, it was a lovely day for football in the high country.

Not much else of note happened this weekend. I think I finally changed out of my pajamas to go to the grocery store around 5 pm yesterday. I did rock out a spectacular made-up meal in the crock pot, though, so that's good.

BlueRidgeBlog turned me on to a new, hip, hot way to post my halloween playlists...let's see if it works, eh? I'm 6 songs behind, so here we go:

Hell Bells - AC/DC. No explanation needed, except that I'm conditioned to cheer for a 3rd down stand when I hear the actual bells. Other AC/DC songs that deserve inclusion are Who Made Who (From the spectacular Maximum Overdrive) and Highway to Hell. 

Boris the Spider - Who. Perhaps it's a bit of childish presaging for Roger Daltrey's turn as "Argon the Bus-driving Dragon" in the Wheels on the Bus series.

Spellbound - Lacuna Coil

Tombstone Shadow - Creedence Clearwater Revival. I like this one, but I really do not like Bad Moon Rising, which everyone seems to include as a great Halloween song. Since it's my list, the one gets da boot.

Ghost Town - The Specials. Too much fighting on the dancefloor ...

Psycho Killer - Talking Heads. Fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa.

BONUS SONG! This is not technically a Halloween song, but Goonies was on last night, and I think Chunk, Sloth, the Fratellis, Data, Rand (with awesome shorts over pants costuming) or Cyndi Lauper would be perfectly acceptable costumes. {For bonus points, you could go as Data 2.0, and combine this Data and the one from TNG.}

Goonies R Good Enough - Cyndi Lauper

11 new Halloween songs. El-ev-en, ah ha ha!

Taking a break from cookie/cake madness to bring you more Halloween music madness. I'm 11 behind, so here we go, mwa ha ha ha ha ha...

Walking With a Ghost - The White Stripes

Howling at the Moon - The Ramones. You could really make a whole Halloween mix with nothing but Ramones songs on it. And I have a rule about only including one song on the list per band, but I am absolutely breaking it for these guys. Their BEST Halloween song deserves to be perhaps #2 or #3 on this list, so look for it in October. Also consider: Sheena is a Punk Rocker (anyone know why?) and Psycho Therapy.

Shout at the Devil - Motley Crue. Mostly this is included because a friend loves her some Crue, and I wanted to give her a shout-out.

She Wolf - Shakira. What? It's a halloween song! It's about werewolves! It even includes the WORD "lycanthropy." Catchy too.
Also, she dances in the video like a hybrid of Thriller zombies and the nurses from Silent Hill. (Boys: it might confuse your penis, who won't know if he should be paying attention or running away.)

Day-o, The Banana Boat Song - Harry Belafonte. Goes Hand-in-hand with Shake Seniora, and while they aren't technically scary songs, an entire generation of people associates them wholly with the possession scenes from Beetlejuice.

The Fear - Lily Allen. Ok, not Halloweenie at all, I just love Lily Allen. Carry on.

Them Bones - Alice in Chains. If it's not your particular flavor of AIC, there's also Down in a Hole, We Die Young, or Sludge Factory. 

She Blinded Me With Science - Thomas Dolby. You know it isn't going to go well when the opening scenes of the video announce "Mister Dolby's arrival at the Home for Deranged Scientists."

Dracula - Gorillaz

Haunting Me - Stabbing Westward.

Nature Trail to Hell - Weird Al. I think I saved the very best for last today.

Harvest cookies, now with leaves and squirrels

I have added some photos to the "Cookies" album from this set. Combined with the owls, I think it might be my favorite color scheme/theme so far.