Butterfly iced cookies

I made some iced cookies for some people with lots of soul and love as a little thank you for all their kindness.  I really want to be good at iced cookies and need lots of practice as i'm still not 100% happy with my finished efforts as i want to be able to turn out professional looking cookies and the final set icing differs to my just piped finish, as over night the icing shifts and melts into each other, but i think i now may realise where i'm going wrong.  i think i'm to eager to do all the pretty bits and need to let the foundation of the icing set, unless i need a bit of blended icing that is.  But practice makes perfect and in the future i hope to get perfect cookies i'm happy with.  As a novice these are not to bad and i hope they got to their destination in one piece and i'm worried that the slow old royal mail may hold them up making them stale on arrival, which would be awful. i do worry a lot.

I made a vanilla bean cookie dough and used my favourite and very pretty butterfly cookie cutter. I made a few in case of mistakes and the kitchen looked like a production line. Being completely obsessed with the cooking times in case they turned to brown and just a minute or 2 would be to much.  Mixing up the icing choose 3 colours red, blue and yellow and got on with the outline and base and then here's were i went wrong adding the pretty bits.  I think i really should have left the base for about 30 mins to 1 hour then added the top layer.  I also don't think my dragging technique is mastered yet i think i will have to make a lot more cookies to practice.