I love men’s ties. I secretly wish the 1980s women’s necktie trend would come back in fashion. I openly wish my husband were a necktie kind of guy. But alas, microbiologists dress like college freshmen. This may be some bizarre psychological residue from boarding school (I still wear a blazer every day) but I prefer to think it’s because neckties are amazing.
On that note, I was totally inspired by all-over repeat pattern neckties. Think Vineyard Vines. Think Christmas. Think cookies.
Oh, you love neckties, Christmas, and cookies too? You have come to the right place!
You can pipe these cookies freehand by simply plotting out the spacing with graph paper. I find that once I have started piping the same icon/design over and over again, it becomes pretty easy to do. Or you can create royal icing transfers, as in the tutorial below.
As I discussed last year, I doodle cookie designs on graph paper. Graph paper is great in general, and for this kind of design in particular. To achieve the true repeating pattern effect, the design must be precisely spaced on the cookie. Graph paper allows you to do that.
In this example, I outlined my cookie cutter and created a repeating reindeer pattern.
Notice that the guide lines extend outside the outline of the cookie– that’s because you’ll want to use those guides to plot the spacing on the cookie.
But I get ahead of myself. First, outline and flood your cookie.
To create the reindeer shapes, place a piece of wax paper over your design and pipe directly onto the wax paper. For small shapes like these, I create double or triple the number I need because some will inevitably break.
Once the icing on the cookie has hardened, use the graph paper and a food marker to create a guide on the cookie for where the reindeer will go.
When the reindeer have hardened completely, simply pop the shapes off the wax paper. They really will just pop right off!
Dab a small amount of icing onto the back of the shape and attach it to the cookie over one of the dots.
Done!
Snickerdoodledoo 