Travel Cookie Set: Luggage Label tutorial

You wait ages for a tutorial and then two arrive at once!

In this post I shall be showing you how I made these 'embossed leather' luggage labels and in the next, the vintage maps with three dimensional topography.

The brief for this set was to combine the elements of a Pacific island cruise, vintage map hobby and 50th Wedding Anniversary celebration. I threw in a few hibiscus flowers and, of course, plenty of gold lustre. But I wanted to create a contrast with the aged leather luggage labels making use of these great 'leather' tutorials by Yankee Girl Yummies and LilaLoa.

You will need:

Label shaped cookies with hole 

Brown royal icing in piping and flood consistencies

Piping bags with PME tips 1.5 and 2 or equivalent

Dark brown and black gel or paste food colouring and dusts

Water

Both fat and fine food use only paintbrushes

Gold lustre edible paint, or lustre dust with a little essence to dilute

String (edible or not, your choice!)

A note on the cookies: I don't have a cutter for these, I simply cut out rectangles with a scalpel and ruler, chopped off two corners, and poked a hole using a large bore tip, or a straw. 

1.  In order to create a twist on the leather idea, I decided to see if I could 'emboss' the lettering into the surface. I considered using the royal icing embossing effect I created for my first 'What's New, Honeycat?' tutorial, Coffee and Cookies, for Cookie Connection, but that technique needs a bit of speed before the flood layer crusts over and I wasn't sure I could get the lettering to be neat enough. So I chose to pipe the letters first and flood around them. 

2. Once the lettering had thoroughly dried, I piped brown flood around the rest of the cookie (piping a small ring around the hole first to act as a dam). It was a little tricky piping around the letters. I used a PME tip 2, and a scribe tool to ensure all the crevices and corners were filled. I let this dry overnight.

3. To get the general leather effect, I used a mixture of the methods mentioned above by Yankee Girl Yummies and LilaLoa, painting and dusting  in blotches, using fat soft brushes and mixtures of browns and black. When it came to the letters though, I used a paintbrush and darker paint around each section of each letter, to create more depth. I wanted these letters to look like they'd really been stamped into the leather.

4. Once the paint was dry (really just a matter of a few minutes in the deyhdrator) I used edible metallic paint in gold to highlight the lettering. Gold lustre dust mixed with a little essence would have worked fine here too, but I'm finding the ready made paint by Rainbow Dust (similar or the same as what's in their Click and Twist pens) to be really bright, as well as drying without leaving a dusty surface, even if you paint it on quite thickly. 

The metallic paint dries quickly too, so all that remains is to pop a piece of string in the tops and tie them to your luggage.

Now your luggage is sorted, you'll need to make sure you've got your maps ready. Remember to subscribe so you don't miss the next installment!