How to Use Silkscreen Stencils

Hello faithful cookie lovers!

I know the last few weeks have been filled with posts about how to start a business. But today’s topic is actually related to cookies. I’m going to teach you how to use a silk screen stencil.

About Silk Screen Stenciling

Silk screen stenciling is very different than your average airbrush stenciling. This is because instead of just using an airbrush machine with airbrush colors, with silk screens you use royal icing as the "ink".

Some people do a variation of this with regular airbrush stencils however the problem with using airbrush stencils is that when you apply the icing, the image does not always come out very clean. Airbrush stencils also have breaks in them because the material used to make them is a plastic that doesn’t have anything to be able to connect the letters if a full circle or shape is cut out of them. Silk screen stencils do not require the breaks because the stencil is made out of a layer of adhesive vinyl and silk screen mesh that stick together therefore the entire stencil of the words on it are one joint stencil the technique that you use to apply the icing when you’re using a regular airbrush stencil vs a silk screen stencil is very different.

With airbrush stencils, you'll want to leave a good layer of icing on the stencil so that when you lift it up there’s enough on it to see the image. With silk screen stenciling, you'll want to pull up as much of the excess icing as possible in order to force it through the silkscreen mesh.

Overall, silk screening is cleaner look because you don’t have any under bleed of ink from your stencil. However silk screen stencils are a little bit more difficult to make, they do tend to be a little bit more expensive. I happen to make my own and I'll post that tutorial at a later time but really, if you have silkscreen mesh, a cutting machine and clear vinyl, you can easily make your own at home. There are also some silk screen holders that you can buy such as the Three Sweet Chicks Silk Screen Holder that fits a genie stencil holder and a regular airbrush stencil so it gives the effect of silk screening without the under bleed from the airbrush ink.

How to Use a Silkscreen Stencil

You will need the following items in order to silkscreen on a cookie.

• Your silkscreen stencil or an airbrush stencil in a silkscreen holder* *A stencil holder such as the genie holder or the sweet sugar bell holder must be used when using a silkscreen holder. Loose magnets will not work.

• A silicon scraper preferably the genie one

• A cookie that has been already base frosted for at least 8 hours

• Icing that is slightly wetter piping consistency icing. Think almost 20-30 second icing or thin toothpaste

About the materials

In order to silkscreen on a cookie, you need to make sure that your base layer of the cookie has at least had eight hours to dry if not longer. You will be applying a lot of pressure onto the cookie so just putting it in a dehydrator for a bit will not work.

You also want to make sure that your base color on your cookie is a light color such as white. When you silkscreen, the color does not come through very darkly. If you use a light color on a dark base you might not even see it. Also take into consideration that the color of your base will impact the silkscreen image that you put on top so if you have a yellow base and your silk screening blue, the image that you silkscreen onto your cookie may come out slightly green. The same goes with airbrushing.

Next make sure that you have some sort of silk screen holder. I don’t mean magnets, I mean an actual holder such as the genie holder. The reason magnets don’t work very well is because you need to apply pressure on all edges of the holder so that your stencil does not move around as your silk screening. Magnets on the corners are just not strong enough for silk screening. Trust me I’ve tried.

You’ll also need a silicon scraper such as the genie scraper. You can also use the end of a silicon spatula, but the plastic scrapers that you see in some stores won’t work it needs to be silicon because you need to be able to kind of squeegee the residual color off the stencil in order for the image to come out clearly and only a silicon tool can get into the little grooves

On with the Actual Silk Screening

1. When you put your silkscreen in the holder, you want to make sure that the Shiny part is face down on top of your cookie and the mesh part is facing up.

2. Before you even get on your cookie, you can practice silk screening on a piece of paper towel. I highly recommend doing this just so that you get a feel for how much pressure you need to put on the silkscreen. It’ll also give you an idea if your consistency is right. If the image is pulling up a lot when you practice on the paper towel, you may need to add just a touch more water to your icing. If it looks like the icing is bleeding through the design on your paper towel, then your icing is probably too wet and you can add a little bit of powdered sugar to thicken it up a bit. In the course of doing this if you get icing on the mesh part of your stencil, you will need to clean off your stencil before you get onto the cookie otherwise the residual icing will transfer to the nice clean base layer of the icing.*

*note: In order to clean your stencil, you will want to run it in lukewarm water and then use two paper towels to pat it dry. The stencil must be 100% dry in order for you to use it. Do not under any circumstance rub the stencil. It will remove the adhesive vinyl and ruin it.

3. When you’re ready to get on the cookie, place the stencil on the cookie and put a line of frosting right above the stencil.

4. Scrape down with even pressure over the entire image. Once completely covered, scrape off all excess icing off the image as best you can.

5.Then gently lift off the stencil from the corner up.

You'll want to do steps 4 and 5 relatively quickly because if the icing starts drying too fast, your image will come out patchy when you lift the stencil up.

Hopefully if you’ve done everything right, you will have a really nice clean silkscreened image on your cookie. Silk screening it’s very difficult to learn in the beginning but once you get it down it makes cookie decorating so much easier. I can silkscreen 200 cookies in about 45 minutes.

Lastly, regarding the longevity of a stencil, I would say it can last about 100 cookies if not a little bit more depending on how well you care for your stencils. You may have to clean your stencil off every 20 cookies or so. I do recommend if you are doing a 100 cookie order to have a second one made if it’s a custom order just as back up if anything happens to the first one.

I hope this helped and happy stenciling cookie lovers! Let me know if you’re having any issues

-A

Starting a business: Where to do it

As we are approaching my three year anniversary, I want to go back and explain some of the things that have helped me start my business. Today specifically I want to talk about where is the best place to start or host an online business.

There are several different platforms out there to help you host an online business. But it’s really important to find the right one for your business model and what you’re trying to accomplish. Etsy, Facebook marketplace and websites are the most common.

There are pros and cons to all these options and we’ll go over that here in a little bit but the first thing that you should do before you even decide which platform to use is to figure out how you want to sell your goods. Now this goes for anything whether it’s baking, crafts, whatever it is that you do.

What I mean is are you going to sell custom items, are you going to pre-sell already created items, or are you going to do a mix of both?

Selling Custom Items

I sell mostly custom items. That’s because I get more enjoyment out of the different themes and concepts that come to me from my customers. It allows me to be creative within certain boundaries and that’s the model that works for me.

The difficulty with custom orders is that you need to have a platform for your customers that’s able to track customer requests. These are thinks like how many cookies they need, what themes they want, when they need them by, and so on. The unfortunate thing is that business providers don’t offer such customizable listings without pre-paying for them.

Selling Pre-Made or Pre-Sale Items

Pre-made items are products that you've already made that you are listing for sale. This differs slightly from Pre-sale items that are being sold but that are not yet made.

Selling Pre-made items is an easy way to create whatever you want and people buy what’s there. If you’re selling goods and are just starting out, it may be challenging with this model because you have to keep inventory of items which takes of space.

Pre-sale is nice and is what many people including myself do for big events such as the holidays. I pre-make one set of cookies, photograph it and list it for pre-sale and people can purchase the listing. This lets me control the quantity and the items I’m making. You will still have to build a customer base to get your items seen which can mean paying advertising costs. A great example of a Baker with pre-sale or premade goods is my good friend, Charlee at Confections by Charlee (ig: @confectionsbycharlee).

Regardless if you go pre-made or pre-sale. there are a lot of options when it comes to business platforms just because they’re easy to list and sell.

I strongly caution against doing both custom and pre-made orders. Especially if you’re in your first year or two of business. The reason being is that it can get very overwhelming as you are trying to deal with custom orders for people as well as trying to for fill the orders that are either supposed be pre-made. I struggle with this for the holidays every single year and now block out the entire month of December from any custom orders in order to be able to have enough time to fulfill everything.

Selling Online

So let’s get into the actual platform discussion. Each platform has its own pros and cons and I’ll talk about the main ones that I know of or that I have used as both a customer and a business owner.

Email

Email is a very powerful way of interacting with your customers that people don’t always realize. You should always have a business email set up regardless of the way that you take orders because it looks professional and it’s a easy way for people to call you that separated from your personal email. I recommend using Google because Google comes with a lot of helpful apps to help you interact with your customers.

Pros

• If you do use Google, it comes with Google forms. This a form maker that is free that you can use for customers to put in quote requests. How it works is they would email you for a quote, you’d send them the quote form link, and go from there. You may also be able to have customers make purchases but I'm not sure

• Gmail also comes with Google drive to help you keep your business files up to date across mobile devices. This means I can put photos from my phone and files from my computer in one location

Cons

• The bad part of using email for all of your orders is the fact that customers don’t have a landing page to view your work or other information about you or see pictures of previous work that you’ve done.

• It can be also be difficult to build up a client base with somebody that you’re just emailing. It’s kind of like online dating. You’re not really sure what you’re going to get. If you do end up going to email route, I do recommend setting up an Instagram page or a Facebook so that people can view other photos of your work. Just remember that not everybody has Facebook or Instagram. You can see as I’m discussing it that the problems emails get longer and longer and longer.

Websites

Websites are my personal favorite and that’s only because I have a degree in graphic and website design. There are several website hosting sites such as WIX (what's used for this site). Squarespace, Wordpress, and Shopify to name a few. Below is a list of pros and cons for websites as a platform. Just know they are usually best suited for custom orders or once you have an established customer base though I started my website before I had a customer base which took a lot of work but worked out for me.

Pros

• Websites are extremely powerful in the fact that you have your own branding and your own products and no one else is on your site.

• You can format it the way that you want to and you can sync it to your Square or other payment methods.

• You can also set up a quote page like the one I have on my site so that you can direct all customers whether they’re contacting you via social media on the phone or via email go to your website and fill out one quote form so that you have them all organized. My “forms all come back to my email so I got an email notification every time somebody fills out a new quote form.

• You also have the power to stop excepting quotes which is very important. I have learned especially in my second and third years of business that I have to only take orders in three month increments otherwise people will try to book out for the entire year and it throws off how my revenue comes in and customers tend to get a little angry with the fact that I’m already booked up for the rest of the year.

Cons

• Websites are the most difficult out of all platforms. This is because they require you to create and customize everything on your site as well as keep it up to date. You can pay somebody to do this for you and to maintain the site however that can get expensive. There are several website providers that will help you set up your website and it’s very easy to do so however you can always pay someone to initially set it up then maintain it yourself.

• There are fees associated with hosting your own website. You’ll have to pay an annual domain fee that’s for your actual web address (www.yourewebsite.com) you might also have to pay a site fee to the provider that you’re creating the site on. Depending on which features that you use you may have to pay for premium features.

Etsy

Etsy can be a great starting place for owning a business. It works especially well if you already have a premade product or pre-orders. Just know as you grow if you want your own website, you'll have to steer your customers that direction otherwise Etsy gets grouchy if you start putting URLs to other websites in your store.

Pros

• Etsy is widely known and excepted by makers and customers everywhere. Therefore you can usually start selling right away without much effort

• Etsy offers deeply discounted shipping rates and they create all of the labels for you. This means all you have to do is print it out the order form and label with your printer at home and stick it to the box and you’re good to go.

• You can set your store on Vacation mode when you're unavailable

Cons

• Since there are so many people using Etsy, your listings can get a little bit lost if they’re not tagged right or set up correctly.

• Many sellers on Etsy tend to undercharge for some of their goods while others charge accurately. Unfortunately, many people are often looking for the better deal and since there are so many people on Etsy selling the same thing, you're either forced to bring down your prices or risk lower orders because other people are less expensive. I highly recommend against lowering your prices if possible and instead you can update your store page to explain that you offer quality goods with premium ingredients.

• Etsy is NOT great for custom orders. it was not made for this purpose so if you have a listing out there then it must have a dollar amount attached to it. This means unless someone messages you directly to ask, there’s not a easy way for you to do a quote. Some people offer "generic" custom order listings at a set price but depending on what the customer wants, the order may actually cost more than the original price on the listing.
  

Facebook and Social Media Marketplaces

Lastly, let’s talk about Facebook marketplace and other social media market places. I know that Facebook as well as Instagram both have their own market places I’m not sure if any other social media does. These spaces have come a long way since they were first created.

Pros

• You can set up a listing and it runs very similarly to Etsy.

Cons

• Not everybody has Facebook, and not everybody wants to pay for things on a social media platform. I for one don’t mind buying household goods such as a new printer or something like that from Facebook marketplace but as a consumer I would not want to buy some thing that was baked on Facebook because I have no clue who that person is and it doesn’t seem as professional. But I do know a lot of people who have gone that route and if that’s what works for them, that’s great. It’s just not my provider of choice

In the end we’ve talked about a lot of different options. We talked about how you’re going to take orders in terms of custom or pre-made/presale. We talked about several different providers and pros and cons of each of them. I’m not going to say that you should do one or the other because each provider works best for different people for different reasons but I hope this at least give you a foundational understanding of what providers are out there and if you need help with Etsy or website design please let me know.

I hope you all have a wonderful rest your day!

-A

Saying No

When you’re a new cookie decorator every order is super special. Every customer is a gift so you want to accommodate everyone. But it’s really important to find a balance between the cookie decorating and other responsibilities/important things in your life. Often times, and this is true even for me. We get so wrapped up in the cookies that we let our personal lives slip past us and then the people around us start feeling that we are not giving them the love and attention that they need from us as a mother, wife, or a family member. That’s why it’s really important to learn when to say "NO".

If you’re like me, you want to please everybody under the sun and the prospect of saying, "No" and potentially losing a customer is very very scary. However, in my experience saying, "no" can actually be a very good thing. To help with this, I learned to set a cookie limit and a series of polite but firm ways of saying I cannot accommodate anymore orders.

Set a Cookie Limit

First off, before I even think of saying no, I have to understand my baking ability and what I can reasonably accomplish in a given week. Therefore, I set myself a cookie limit per week. This is the amount of cookies that I can do in a typical week between Monday and Wednesday (sometimes Thursday mornings) and still have enough time in the week to dedicate to my family, my own personal interests, and work because I do actually have a full time job on top of all this. My soft cookie limit is 50 but my hard limit is 75. What I mean by soft and hard is I like to take about 50 cookies a week which is 4 dozen however I will take up to 75 depending on the order. With this limit in mind, every single week that I block out in my calendar is based on this number. Once I hit that limit I no longer take any more orders for that week.

Learn a Different Approach

When I’ve hit my limit, that’s when I say, "No". While this sounds all good and dandy in theory, in practice it can still be hard to do. Luckily, there are ways around it. such as offer another option, refer a friend, or find a polite way to say you're booked.

Offering another option

There are times where I will look at my calendar and somebody wants a quote for two dozen cookies but I only have availability for one dozen. So I am honest with the customer about the situation and explain I can only accommodate the dozen that week.

Another option is always mini cookies. I can push out 2 dozen minis for every dozen regular sized cookies so often I've suggested 1 dozen regular and 1 dozen minis if they truely want 2 dozen cookies total

Refer a Friend

While it's rare a customer does not want my suggested option, it is always possible they will ask for a referral to another baker if you cannot accommodate them. While you may feel that this will discourage people from ordering from you in the future, in all actuality, if you're professional, courteous and helpful, they will return to you. This has happened to me on several occasions. I also happen to be very very lucky and live in the state of Colorado which has this wonderful cookie community that I CAN confidently recommend other people and I do so. If you don't have this luxury, look for a FB group in your state or city and see if you can make friends with a baker or two. Offer a cookie swap so you can try their product and become referral buddies. Fingers crossed they'll feel comfortable referring back to you as well.

Find a Polite Way of Saying You're Booked

In the event you don't want to refer customers (which is totally okay) or don't know anyone to refer, you can resort to actually saying, "No" but in a way that is firm, polite, and professional. To do this, I use the formula, Positive, Negative, Positive. What I mean by this is start by saying something positive, then tell them no, then say something positive again.

An example of this is:

Positive: Thank you so much for Reaching out! We appreciate your willingness to fill out our quote form!

Negative: We are currently already booked for your date at this time.

Positive: Please check in with us in the future as we would love to help make your cookie dreams a reality.

In this case, the positives will outweigh the negatives and as people, we recognize that we ourselves cannot do everything under the sun so if you’re asking a service of somebody and you really cannot accommodate it, most of the time they’re going to be understanding especially if you've phrased it the right way.

In fact, most of the time customers feel that by you saying no, you are in higher demand which means they are more interested in coming back and working with you. And they feel like you're a respectable business that understands your limits.

Don't Apologize

Lastly, It's important that you do not apologize for being booked. This is something I still struggle with but that my good friend, Sara (ig: @sugarandspoonbakingco) taught me. You should not apologize for not being able to take an order. This indicates that you are doing something wrong and you are not. It's often the root of our guilt when using the , "No" word to begin with. There are several ways you can say no without apologizing such as the examples below: (P.S. You're totally allowed to use the following examples)

"Thank you so much for reaching out, we are currently booked for your date. We do hope you keep us in mind as we would love to work with you in the future".

"Due to ______ (holiday or event), we are no longer taking additional orders at this time. Please check back with us for your next event as we’d love to work with you"!

"We currently have several quotes out and until they come back I will not officially quote you as I cannot guarantee that I will have availability for your order at this time. I will reach out to you in the next 24 to 48 hours to let you know if I can accommodate your order".

In the end, saying no is hard however the more you do it, the more you will feel confident in yourself and your capabilities. Make sure to set your limits so you don't overwhelm yourself and know there are several ways of expressing that you cannot help someone that are less scary than that little 2-letter word we all hate. Hopefully this helps and I wish you luck on your No-Saying endeavors!

Until next time cookie lovers!

-A