Collection is a cut above

Edith Robinson-Mitzel had always wanted to be a collector of something. She loved shopping in antique stores during her travels with her husband and always wanted to bring something small and inexpensive home with her.

Robinson-Mitzel said she read about a man who collected cookie cutters and decided she, too, would collect the small pastry shapers.

"I never realized how many people I would meet by collecting cutters," she said.

She started her collection in 1997 and now has 4,000 cookie cutters.

"You just find them everywhere," she said. "I would look through antique stores, and my friends are always on the lookout for me and even find them on the Internet for me."

She joined the national Cookie Cutter Club, which has 400 members. She and various friends attend the club's national conventions, which are held every two years around the country. It's through these club meetings she learns about new cookie cutters and something about the old ones she has.

She keeps a few cookie cutters displayed in her home, but most are stored in boxes in her garage.

"I'm in the process of photographing them and keeping a catalog so I know which ones I already have. I remember them pretty well, but I don't want to get repeats," Robinson-Mitzel said.

Her collection includes Hallmark cutters, cartoons characters like Dagwood and Blondie, Gasoline Alley and the Peanuts gang. She has cutters in the shapes of animals, trains, dinosaurs and in the shape of the states.

"They just come in all different sizes and kinds and I just love collecting them," she said.

Collecting the cutters led to an interest in old family recipes. She produced a family cookbook called "Mother's Recipes Seasoned with Memories" in 1990. The book sold more than 2,500 copies throughout the nation.

"I wanted to preserve some of my mother's recipes," Robinson-Mitzel said. "So many people were interested in the book I had more printed and took them to craft stores to sell. Now I want to do a book on cookie cutters because there just aren't many books about them on the market. But it's a lot of work to photograph each one and write the description."

Her collection includes old cutters made of tin or copper, plastic ones and even special ones she had made by a friend who is a tinsmith. They range in size from half an inch to a foot tall.

Robinson-Mitzel has a special interest in the history of the Orphan Train movement from 1854 to 1929. Under a governmental social experiment, abandoned and homeless children were transferred from the streets of northeast cities on trains to homes in the Midwest as rudimentary foster homes.

"I had a cookie cutter made in the shape of a doll that a little girl from that time period would have held onto," she said. "Those orphan trains just made such an impression on me I wanted to remember it by having a special cookie cutter made."

Robinson-Mitzel has given special presentations on her cookie cutters at the Bloomfield, Mo., and Dexter, Mo., libraries. Sometimes she bakes cookies made from her cutters for the children to eat. She said she also brings along an inedible dough for them to roll out, and they use her cutters to make inedible cookies to take home as decorations.

"As part of the national Cookie Cutter Club, we're required to do something special for our community, and so I do these presentations to make people aware of all these different kinds of cutters," she said.