How to make Button Cookies for a Lalaloopsy party!

Well, it’s more like a sewing party….and what could fit that theme better than some button cookies?!  Button cookies are not my original idea, there are all sorts of button cookies floating around out there in cyberspace and other people’s kitchens and such.  But anyways, this is my version of them.  I gave them a photo shoot this morning.  I needed to see something sweet and colorful to cheer me up!  The ugly photos for the “how to” were taken last night in bad bad light…they are FYI only.  Here are the cute buttons:Here’s the HOW TO:

Make:  cookie dough with real butter, add liquid food coloring.

Tools: rolling pin, small circle and scallop cookie cutters, other round objects, plastic drinking straws, scissors.

First ,mix up some cookie dough.  I used LilaLoa’s recipe (click here) for vanilla rollout cookies and  was very pleased with it!  I followed all her directions and used the full amount of flour and baked them for about 6 to 7 minutes.  I divided the dough into thirds, even before I was finished mixing it, and added a few drops of liquid food coloring to each little batch (they were the neon colors from the grocery store).  The colors didn’t mix in well until I kneaded it…totally looked and felt like playdough!!  The dough is quite stiff.  You can roll out the dough right away with this recipe, which is nice.  I did stick the colors I wasn’t rolling out into the fridge to wait.

Roll out the dough and start cutting circles!  Use 2 slightly different sizes of circles.  I used the 2 smallest cutters that I have from a set of circles that are plain on one end and scalloped on the other end.  You can also use other small circular objects (clean) for making patterns in the buttons.Using a slightly smaller circle, press into one of the cut out cookies…but not hard enough to cut right through!For some of the buttons, I used a plastic communion cup to make an even smaller third circle…

Then use a drinking straw to punch out the holes in the middle of the button, either 2 or 4 for each button.  I cut up a plastic straw into thirds, then used each side to punch out holes, since the straw gets full of dough.  You can squeeze out the dough to reuse it (or eat it), but it flattens out the straw.  I went though a handful of straws with the whole  batch (three colors) of dough.It is quite easy to do, and doesn’t take too much time.  You do have to eye-ball everything to get it centered up.  I suppose you could make a paper pattern with circles punched in, then overlay it to punch the holes through the dough….that just sounds like way to much effort to me, though the results would be practically perfect!!Some of the cookies received a scalloped flower design….I really liked these ones!Bake those babies!  I always use parchment paper to bake cookies, since I only have one cookie pan, so I fill a sheet of parchment while the other batch is baking.  The colors in my photos are weird, I know, the cookies didn’t really change much when they baked…it’s my flash.  Here are the baked cookies, they hardly spread at all and kept their shape very nicely!Hmmm, I forgot to count up how many cookies the batch of dough made….lots though!!  We ate up the deformed ones of course, and some raw dough, and even so that left lots and lots of little buttons.  I re-rolled the scraps several times, so some of the cookies look a bit cracked, but I was trying to get as many as I could from the batch.  You could probably avoid that….

Now back to the “fancy” photos….The colors turned out quite well with minimum effort, I thought.  The right shades of blue and pink can be hard to make, since sometimes the blue looks more aqua since there’s a lot of yellow in the butter and the egg yolks….good thing I wanted aqua!!  I didn’t fuss with the pink, either, and even started dropping in purple food coloring by accident!  I dug most of it out and then tried the pink coloring….it matched my color palette close enough!!

I did make quite a few flower-shaped buttons and poked indents around the edges, but these are some of my favorite designs, the simple ones:

Almost ready for a party….. Mmmmm, good to the last button!

Pingu Penguin Party for a Toddler, or Fiesta Pingüino!

How many of you have been thinking about penguins this week?  January just seems like a good time to think about them and their habitats!  Penguins make very cute themes for birthday parties!!  Especially during a cold, snowy January….  Have you ever seen that cute little claymation penguin named Pingu on TV?  Maybe his catchy little tune is playing inside your brain right now (I know it is in mine!) and how fitting that would be as you glance over this next party!

A snowy day is the perfect time for little penguins to get together and celebrate a special birthday!And two year olds especially seem to love little Pingu!  His black and white self is a fun graphic image for a penguin party!  I found some pics of him online and changed them a bit for our party.  The rest of the graphics I used were from a digital scrapbooking kit from scrapbookgraphics.com  and I changed some of the colors just a little so they would fit with the party colors of turquoise, red, black and white (with a splash of yellow!).  We printed out some small posters, one of the smaller monogramed ones was just right for taping onto a frame that was already on the wall over the Birthday Boy’s high chair.The small white double-sided plastic frames from Ikea are handy for many party decorations and make great keepsakes afterwards!The tags for the treat bags and the placecards for the table were easily printed on regular paper and cut out, matching the posters.In case you didn’t know, I love polka dots!!  So I already had the polka-dotted tablecloths from Ikea (the kind that are easy to wipe clean, I forget what they are called) and they just happened to be the right colors.  The party palette of colors was very easy to continue in tissue paper, balloons and crepe paper streamers.  We made our own tissue paper balls for hanging on the light fixture.The centerpiece was a toy that we’ve had a for a few years, a penguin habitat that is like a wooden puzzle, you fit the pieces together to form a three-story habitat.  I saw them on sale at Toys R Us a long time ago…it looked like no one was buying them, there were so many boxes of them on for half price, and my party-mind said “cupcake holder!”  It’s been totally worth it.Online I have see a cute goldfish bowl filled with light blue jello, with a few gummy fish swimming around in it…but that seemed like way too much messy work, and I wasn’t even sure if it would work out nicely (I think Martha made it work perfectly of course), so we went for turquoise jelly beans in the fish bowl with some large gummy fish in the sides.  The fish were also used as cupcake toppers along with punched paper penguins.  These cute little penguins are easy to make using an owl shaped paper punch and I’ve posted about how to make them here.  (they are cute on tags, too).  Two of them made a quick cake topper…along with a paper banner which I printed and cut out from the Carnival Time digital kit (link above).  Those old-fashioned cherry stick candies on the cake gave it a “north pole” flavor (what are those candies called again?).  A fuzzy penguin puppet found a spot on the dessert table in the corner  (and more fabric from Ikea in the window).A toddler food that I knew we should serve was…you guessed it….fishy crackers!  Surprise to me, there are also penguin-shaped cheesy crackers.  We served them in these cute ice cube trays (Ikea)…There was one little game at this party….penguin bob!  Color some ping pong balls with a sharpie to make them look like penguins and place in a small tub with a little water…and let the kids play!  There isn’t really a game  involved, but it still was fun for a new-two-year old!(in the video, the ping pong balls hadn’t been colored yet.  I knew someone with sharp eyes would point that out to me!)A fun time was had by all the little penguins!!Here is a fun video of our Birthday Boy and his Pingu Penguin birthday party!!!  (I just love it!)

Josiah’s second birthday from Dustin Siggelkow on Vimeo.

Mermaid Color Palettes

Mermaids have been swimming in my brain.  And not just this past week, for a couple of months!  My girlie had this cute stuffed mermaid doll.  So cute that I took it back and put it in my room where I could see it every day.  (I know that sounds weird, but I just love the colors and seeing something colorful and cute cheers me up.  And gets my brain gears turning).  Mermaids started swimming around…and around…and my girl “somehow” surprisingly asked for a mermaid-themed birthday party.  So this is what inspired me for the colors of the mermaid party:

My own little mermaid would be wearing her “Ariel” mermaid dress to the party, so that’s where I was grabbing the dark blue and the coral color, and then just a splash of pink!  We were going to have a mermaid party (not an Ariel party!), but I just loved that coral/red color of Ariel’s hair….

When I went shopping for paper/cardstock/tissue, these are the colors I found:

Tucked away in my closet, I found a couple yards of this fabric, which went perfectly with our mermaidy colors:

And several months ago, this little mermaid swam into my shopping cart when I was shopping for something else…but I knew it would be the perfect birthday gift so I saved her, hidden away in my closet…..(now my girl has her own perfume, ooo lala).so like I said, I loved the coral color, but in the end there were only small touches of it at the party…it would have been great for party plates, cutlery, something like that.And the birthday cake…..just happened that it was easy to match our mermaid color palettes with the food coloring that I had on hand, without too much hair-pulling.

So I guess this is kind of how my thought processes went, in starting to plan out this mermaid party….kind of like mermaids swimming around and around in circles in a big empty ocean.