For the summer, I thought I’d go with a patriotic theme and stitch up a few stars to display in it.
I prefer my stars to be a little on the wonky side. I found a template here and printed it out.
I traced the templates onto newspaper…
cut the stars out….
… and then stitched them into pairs like I was sewing a pillow together…
…except that I wasn’t going to turn the seam to the inside with these.
I left one small section of each star unstitched so I could stuff some shredded paper in to give the stars a little dimension.
I sewed seven stars altogether (but in the end, I only had room for five in the shadow box).
I used a seam ripper to separate the two layers and to push the paper down into the points.
Once the stuffing was done…
… I sewed the last section closed.
Next, I dug a piece of black scrapbook paper out of my stash.
The backer board for the shadow box is Styrofoam, so I attached the paper with a few old brads that I just pushed into the foam.
Then I pulled out my thrift store sign letters to see what kind of patriotic phrase I could spell out. (These are all the letters I have, so it’s a challenge to make complete words, let alone phrases.)
In the end, I decided to use “e pluribus unum,” because what’s more all-American than ancient Latin? I used a big popsicle stick as a straight edge to line the letters up on, then attached them with rubber cement.
I also used rubber cement to attach the center of each star onto the back of the shadow box. Then I pushed small brads in at each of the points.
And there you have it: my Wonky, Neutral Patriotic Shadow Box.
(If you want to see what the shadow box looked like in the winter, I blogged about it here.)