National Honor Society

Does anyone have a suggestion on how to evenly sprinkle the edges with sugar?  It was hard to get a consistent sprinkling of sugar and made it hard to pipe.

If I want an even 'sprinkle area', I thin icing until it is almost fluid (e.g. like water), apply it to the respective areas with a soft brush and sprinkle the sprinkle on it immediately. If you have an iced coating below, this should be completely dry before you do the sprinkling. The thinned icicing looks best if it has the same color as the sprinkles.

But I guess there are a lot of different methods

Yes, let the base coat dry; then pipe (or paint, as Laegwen suggested) fresh icing just where you want the border to go. Then use a parchment cone or pastry bag with a tip of the proper-sized opening (to let sugar pass) to funnel the sugar on the fresh icing. You can more precisely/neatly locate sanding sugar if you use the funnel approach, especially if the background is at all tacky.

P.S. Nice job for the challenge! Question: Piped freehand or with the assist of a device?

Thank you both Laegwen and Julia!  I'll experiment. 

Thank you Julia! This is freehand piping with no device.

Well done!  The nice thing about free-handing it is that you can adjust your writing to each different cookie shape, which you were able to do here.  

If you're not too fussed about masking off areas, make sure your fingers are completely dry, and sprinkle pinches of the sugar from really quite high, just slowly rubbing the pinch between your fingers so it falls gradually. Move your hand gently around the area to help even things out, but mainly more height will help the sugar to seperate and fall more evenly.

I've not tried it, but I know some people have tried putting sprinkling sugar in containers with holes in their lids, and sprinkled from those, like a pepper pot.

Thanks for asking this question, lots of good answers.

A question for you, what did you do to make your icing shiny?  Looks like the decorations were piped on satin.

The cookies were iced a few hours prior to taking the photo!  Icing has this pretty sheen the first day, then the second day, it gets more of a dull look.  Wish I knew how to keep them shiny all the time....