Drum Roll, please - 2022's Cookie Book!

Hey Everyone!  After a respite of 2 whole years, I got back into the swing of things in the craft cave and produced a cookie book for the sort-of-annual Cookie Exchange.  If you don't remember or are starting at the top of the blog as a new reader, this thing started way back in 2006 as a way for me to make more stuff in my craft cave.  I was never a scrap booker, but always a card maker. I wanted to do more with books, and thus the idea of a recipe book for a Christmas cookie exchange was born.  You can scroll down the list of posts all the way to the bottom and find all the books I've created over the years.  Each one is unique and crafted all by hand by yours truly.  Some years were skipped, like the year I moved to Brookfield.  And of course, we lost a couple to Covid. One year I couldn't get enough bakers to join the fun so I cancelled it.  Its all good.  

If you sign on as a baker, you send me your recipe, I approve it so we have no duplication, and it has to be from scratch as well.  No piping Santa hats on Nutter Butters at this cookie exchange, no sir.  We top out at 15 bakers, so you have to make 15 dozen of your cookies and package them for giving away.  You go home with 14 dozen different home baked cookies and a pretty cool Christmas Keepsake book, if I do say so myself.  

Without further ado, here is the book for 2022.  I make 25 of these things.  It takes me all year.  Not one of them is exactly like any other.  So, like I said, it keeps me in my craft room, happy and making stuff.  Fifteen for the bakers, my sisters each get one, and then some longtime friends who are far away get theirs too.  

Here they are ready for final cover decoration.  You can see all the colors of the felt I used.  Some are whole pieces of felt and others are scraps sewn together.  There are three ring binders holding the pages to the felt. The gold brads at the back of the book are screwed into the ring binders.  

Here is the cover, all wrapped and ready to give.  I started putting a bell on the books each year because I just like the sound of those things while I'm crafting the books.  A little jingle as they get their final touches is never a bad thing. 

Unwrap the leather tie and open the book to reveal the cover page.  We're Back and Baking! was this year's theme.  

Each page was cut and folded into a pocket.  There is a bit of dimension to them.  The paper is all two-sided card stock, so I folded down a lip on each page to show both sides.  I had a GIANT pack of dimensional gift tags I picked up from Costco maybe 8-10 years ago that got used for decorating the right-hand pages. Even after 25 books I still have not used up that whole pack. Gads.  

You can kind of see the dimension on the left-hand page here.  

Each page is numbered behind the recipe to correspond to the table of contents at the beginning of the book. I tried to make the page numbers look like a frosted cookie.  Not sure if I pulled that off, really.  But it worked either way. 

So that's it!  Now we are just sitting around waiting for the fat man to fly over and then on to the new year.  My shoe box of happiness (the place where I keep my finished cards) is absolutely empty.  I have nothing prepped and ready for any holiday next year.  I guess I better get busy.  

Happy Christmas, one and all!

Catching Up at Christmas - 2022

Its Christmas time once again, readers.  The end of 2022 is upon us.  A recovery year.  I spent a lot of time going through my craft cave and reorganizing. There was too much duplication. For example, if I was looking for stuff to make a Christmas card, I had stuff in drawers, stuff hanging over head, stuff on shelves, etc.  I took all the stuff that was hanging and on shelves, reorganized the drawers into themes, and got it all into its proper drawer.  Now I have one drawer with all the wreath making things in it, one with all Santa, one for Christmas Critters, one for candy, snowflakes, trees, ornaments, words get two drawers, and then the dreaded miscellaneous for anything that doesn't quite fit into one of the other themes. I like it so much I kept on going.  Flowers, circles, ovals, squares, land animals, birds, sea creatures, words again, birthday, valentines, 4th of july, St Pats, Thanksgiving, bees and hexagons, bugs, baby, chick stuff, ribbons and lines, etc they all have a drawer or two dedicated to everything that works for that holiday or theme. Halloween is themed out into words, pumpkins, houses, witches, cats, skeletons, mixed monsters etc.   

To be sure, some things work for more than one holiday.  When that's the case, I made a little folder to keep in the drawer that says "see also..." to point me to the drawers where something else in the theme of what I'm building might be found.  I know, I'm a little obsessive.  But finding something when you want it is key to happiness in the craft cave.  I had not done this since moving to this house in Brookfield, so it's been 8 years, maybe?  Definitely time for a cleanse and shuffle.  Rene, a fellow crafter, who has a posse of gal pals she crafts with was the beneficiary of the purge.  Perfect.  

Ok - so now that we are all organized, I found a bunch of stuff I've been hanging onto for YEARS waiting to make good use of it.  I save all my scraps.  Years of saving scraps gives you a heap of scraps.  When I'm bored in front of the TV or just in general, I pull out my scraps and start making them into tags.  I must have had 45+ Christmas tags started in a box that I finally decided it was time to use.  I added a brad to the top, stamped and embossed something Christmassy on the front and tucked it into the front of a whole pile of cards. I had a lot of printed Kraft paper, which if you don't know, is kind of like brown butcher paper, but heavier, like cardstock.  It's the perfect brown for gingerbread so these cards are all about cookies and gingerbread people, with a little tag tucked in for use as a bookmark when you find that recipe you need to mark.  

Some of the photos are a little blurry.  Sorry, my bad, they are all in the mail so I can't retake them.  Woops.  I was still short some cards for the full Christmas delivery so down there at the bottom are a couple more I whipped up after the sort-of-annual cookie exchange was over.  I had the backgrounds laying around since 2019, so used those up too.  Sweet.  That sweater weather card makes me happy.  Not sure why.  Maybe it's the Christmas tree wearing a sweater that does it.