How Did It Get So Late So Soon? Its Night Before Its Afternoon..

My apologies for posting this a day late. As my return to school becomes imminent my need for planning and good time management is rapidly moving from a nicety to a necessity. Adding to the challenges this week was the fact that I was just completely wiped out. I couldn't sit for more then five minutes without dosing off, so I felt it was in my best interest last night to go to bed early, (at least by my standards), and get some much needed rest. Hence my late posting of this blog.

On a side note - I am going to stop prefacing my blog with how busy my week has been. With all the things I have committed to, it really goes without saying. I just have to make a concerted effort to plan out my day and manage my time better.

This week I only had time enough to work on one Craft Adventure Venture, and I had to call in back up to complete it. I've known for awhile that I would be working on a wedding craft/gift for my aunt who is getting married later this month. I just didn't know until last week what that craft/gift would be. Turned out to be cake toppers. My aunt has a very small wedding budget to work with, so some of the things she wanted for her wedding had to be let go. One item on her wish list, was a sparkly, 'blingy' set of monogram cake toppers. If you order them off the internet they cost around $40. Not a bad price, but definitely not in the cards with everything else she still needed to account for. So I offered to make them for her.

Here's my thinking on cake toppers. You only use them for a couple hours and then you put them away somewhere and never see them again (or sell them at a garage sale). Really you just need the cake topper to look pretty for a little while and take a nice photo. Initially, I wanted to find wooden letters, but since I was limited on time, where I could look and transportation, I had to come up with another plan.

My wonderful friend Rebecca has a Cricut machine. I'd briefly seen what it could do when I was working on my own budget wedding invitations. And I have to say that it pretty much rocks. I totally want one of my own. It's big downfalls are they are heavy, they take up a lot of space and they are expensive. (Cricuts come in a couple different sizes/types, so some of them may not be as heavy or big as the one Becca has. And she got hers on a Black Friday deal with a coupon, so you might be able to get around some of my issues.) Other than that, they are really cool. And make crafting so easy, especially this one.

The only description I was given from my aunt on her cake toppers was - 'Bling, I want Bling.' We opted for a thick glitter covered card stock (We had wanted chipboard, but couldn't find it), and picked up some princess cut rhinestone stickers for embellishment. It took us a while to play around with the font and size that we liked, but after about an hour we had the letters all cut out and ready to go.

We were using thick skewers for getting the letters to sit on the cake, so we needed a good way to hide them between the two pieces of card stock. We tried puffy glue dots, but that didn't really work, so I ended up just hot gluing everything together. (Which if we had been using any other type of paper would have ended really badly) Then I used glitter glue in the same color as the card stock to fill in the gaps that were left behind. It wasn't a perfect solution, but then I remembered my theater/stage craft class. When you are building a set or even acting on a stage, (in most cases), the closest person to you in the audience is 30 feet away. In this case, when you are talking about wedding decorations, no one is going to be sitting right up on the cake and when they photograph the cake it will most likely be from the front.

That just left the bling. I rounded up every sparkly rhinestone I had and made a few practice runs on where and how to fix the pieces. I started hot gluing the rhinestones on, but when I got to the smaller pieces all I really was doing was burning my hand, so I changed to glitter glue.

I think the overall result is blingy, sparkly and just right for a wedding.

Craft Adventure Venture #6

Wedding Cake Bling

If I had to change anything I think I would have chosen a different color for the glitter card stock. I knew my aunt was going to put flowers on the top of the cake, so I think it will look lovely when it's all set up, but it's a little hard to see how sparkly they really are. Since I didn't know her wedding colors I was limited, and I thought the silver they had would have over shadowed the rhinestones.

I sent her a text picture of them and she seemed really pleased and I can't wait to see how they looked on her cake. Every bride should feel special on their wedding day and if cake topper bling makes my aunt feel special, well then it was totally worth the burns on my fingers to make these for her.

This was a super simple project. If you don't have a Cricut you can use your printer to either make templates or print directly onto the paper you are using and then use an Exacto knife to cut them out. That will add a lot of time to the project, but it's still easy to do. The nice thing about this Craft Adventure Venture is you can apply it to other party related projects. Scale them down and make cupcake decorations, scale them up and make a yard sign or yard decorations. And you don't have to use just letters, if you are doing a cake for a party and it's a character theme, print, embellish and cut out the character and then use a skewer (one big enough to hold the weight) to create your cake topper.

Even if you are working on a budget you can find a way to get the look or decoration you desire without spending a lot of money or time. You just have to look at things from a different perspective. Kind of like when you are learning to draw and they tell you to look for the simple shapes in more complex objects. Mickey Mouse is three circles and a square, you know that kind of thing.

Coming up this week, organization, organization, and Ebay. I still have a couple of Ms. Bean projects to tackle. But most important I have two birthday presents to make and a baby shower gift to complete. I'm going to be a busy little Do-Bee.

Final Tally for the week - 1 Craft Adventure Venture brings the total to 6 and .5 Bonus Quests.

45.5 Craft Adventure Ventures to go!