Holiday Baking Boxes!!

Hey everyone I know I have not been posting a lot but the holidays have been so freaking busy.

I was working on a lot of little holiday projects here and there. For the entire staff at my work I wanted to make them cute little character boxes filled with a baked good!! I first hit my sketch book and worked out some sketches and ideas for things that involved Christmas and just the chilly Holiday season!!

I narrowed it down to three characters, a penguin with a bow tie, an angel and an elf. I rendered them digitally in illustrator to sit on top of a cupcake. They came out super!

Next I had to figure out how to make the right type and size box.

Yikes! This took an exceedingly long time!! I was never really great at working with paper, origami or any of that jazz. My folding skills just aren't there. So I went through a lot of different templates and dummys until I found THE one!!

It was a candy box! But I figured I could use the lid of the box as a tray to hold what I was planning on baking. This template is great because there is very little scoring and cutting that you have to do compared to OTHER templates.

I then measured and figured out that I could include 4 on each page. I printed them on 65 lb packs of card stock I purchased at Michael's Arts and Crafts for $2.50 in Christmas colors.

Next was the boring part cutting out all the templates. Luckily I still had the Always Sunny in Philadelphia Christmas episode on DVR and enjoyed watching it with my dad while cutting out all the templates.

The rest of the scoring, folding and gluing was also done in front of the tv. I used tacky glue just because I had a teeny tiny bottle of it I needed to get rid of. My tower of boxes slowly increased.

I was in the home stretch, time to measure the finished pieces and print out my little characters. I could fit six characters on each page on the white card stock that came in the Holiday stack.That was super easy and I reused the Tacky Glue to glue the characters to the front of the boxes.

I deicded to bake everyone muffins. It took me about an hour to make them all, but I was cranking them out like a machine thanks to my cupcake maker. Each batch took about eight minutes and while I was waiting for the next batch to bake, I was busy whipping up another batch. As I waited for that batch to bake, I wrapped the cooled muffins in treat bags I also purchased at Michaels.

Here was the finished the product, sitting on the break room table! They were a complete hit!! I was so glad that everyone enjoyed them (and no one got food poisoning either, go me!!). Merry Christmas everyone!!

New Jersey Trip Take Two

Hey everyone just wanted to make a little post about my trip to New Jersey on the 8th with my brother.

Have you ever heard of Man vs Food? If you haven't you're missing out on something amazing. It is a television series on the Travel Channel with the concept of a guy named Adam who goes around doing food battles from restaurants all over America. The American dream.

Early December or around late November my brother did one of the challenges at Chick and Ruth's Deli. I missed out on the trip since it was just him and his friends with huge appetites, hoping they would prevail like Rocky. Unfortunately it was a day in which food won instead.

BUT the last time I was in New Jersey my brother suggested I check out RU HUNGRY (a restaurant featured on the show), the grease trucks across from Rutger's for one of their tasty sandwiches. The menu consists of sandwiches packed with steak, mozzarella sticks, french fries, chicken tenders, everything bad for you thrown into a sub roll.

I got the Fat Darrel, french fries, marinara sauce, chicken tenders and mozzarella sticks on a roll for 7.50 with a grape soda. It was delicious. But obviously not something to be consumed on a daily basis.

From there we headed to the Bridgewater Mall hoping to find the store, "Pop Culture," which I used Google to find the address from. But they apparently moved out of that mall, so it was a lost cause.

Although the staff was nice enough to answer my Facebook post questioning their location from my mobile phone super quickly and to text me the address we had to skip it. It would have been 15 minutes from our original destination (very convenient) the new address just confused us. I'll save it for another day I suppose.

All in all, another successful and productive trip to New Jersey.

Hope everyone has a great week!!

Holiday Gift Tags!

Hey everyone I have been so busy illustrating and shopping and crafting, etc I still had time for a project I had wanted to do both this year and last, create my own Holiday gift tags!! I could easily pick some up at the dollar stores (last year I bought Disney Princess ones) but then again I am an artist and create my own for free.

I wanted to make Holiday and Winter cupcakes. Cupcakes are of course, one my most favorite things on the planet, so why not??? I did a couple of sketches on a napkin at work:

Hey, I didn't say they would be pretty, they are just sketches :P My sketches are always super rough...

And I came up with this sheet of simple vector illustrations:

I just cut them out with a regular pair of scissors leaving a little bit of a white border around them so they can still POP against the colorful wrapping paper I was using.

Here are some photos of what they look like on my gifts:

This is on a gift for my brother, he loves the penguin one!!

And as a treat, I want to share them with you all!! Feel free to download and print the PDF by clicking here: http://violet-ink.com/VioletInkChristmasTag.pdf

Enjoy!!

Hardee's 50th Anniversary

Quite a while back, in September Hardee's the fast food burger restaurant celebrated it's 50th Anniversary!! Fans of the resturant had an opportunity to create digital 50th Birthday cards!
I whipped one up on the fly and added to their collection!!

I received 5 Hardee's coupons for it and the seal of the Approval from Happy Star himself.

Click here to check it out on Hardee's Fanpage!