fresh from the Makery: homage to Mother's Cookies

More felt, more embroidery, more stationery.


This week's project - a set of two 3 1/2 by 5 inch folded note-cards with matching envelopes - is a sort of homage to Oakland-based Mother's Cookies, which I learned a couple of weeks ago went out of business last fall, meaning their frosted Circus Animal cookies are no more (except on eBay, of course).


For now at least. Shortly after learning that the company went out of business I came across a few more articles that explained how Kellogg's, I believe it is, bought up the rights and recipes and plans to resume making the popular - and addictive - little cookies sometime this year. The closest thing I've found are Keebler's "animals cookies frosted" (that's what it says on the bag, just like that, in that order), which are okay but not nearly as good as Mother's. Even the color of the frosting is kind of dull and there are very few sprinkles (or jimmies, if you're on the east coast). Too bad for Mother's (not to mention all the folks who worked there) but probably not so bad for my diet.

So I wanted to do something to celebrate these little cookies. I knew I wanted to use some of the pink felt left over from that re-purposed Valentine's Day gift bag I've gotten quite a bit of life out of, but I wasn't sure what. I've got a lot of paper products on hand so, as they say, when all else fails, make stationery (actually, no one says that, but that's what I did).


I cut out shapes from the felt scraps that vaguely resemble rhino and lion blobs and created the sprinkles by embroidering French knots in white, blue, red, and yellow (which, oddly, is loads of fun...I'm trying to think of what I can do next with this little trick...crafty pointillism perhaps?). The French knots do double duty to adhere the animals to the white cards below. I mounted those to blue paper that matches the color of the envelopes, and then attached the whole thing to a folded note that matches the pink felt.


I even have little plastic sleeves and a matching blue ribbon to protect and nicely package this stationery duo. Want a diet-friendly alternative to Mother's addictive little cookies? Have a fellow Mother's Cookies enthusiast with whom you'd like to correspond? If so, leave me a comment on this post and these little notes could be yours by the end of the week.