Crafting | Turkey shadow box

turkey and nuts in shadow box
Here’s a Thanksgiving shadow box I (somewhat accidentally) put together the other day.

turkey cookie cutter
It started with this plastic turkey-shaped cookie cutter that I found. It looked so sad and orange, I decided I’d give it a 10-minute makeover by wrapping jute twine around it.

turkey cookie cutter

After 10 minutes of searching for — and not finding — my roll of twine, I moved on to plan B: wrapping it in string. Then after 10 minutes of attempting to wrap an orange cookie cutter in white string — and seeing lots of orange plastic peeking out in between the strands, I moved on to plan C: spray painting the cookie cutter white first.

turkey cookie cutter

Thirty minutes into my 10-minute makeover, I discovered wrapping a cookie cutter with string is not as easy as it sounds …

turkey cookie cutter

… at least not if your cookie cutter has lots of wonky indents and corners. If you use too much string on those spots, you get a weird bulge in the silhouette. If you don’t use enough string, there are obvious gaps in the coverage. And unfortunately, the more I handled the cutter, the more the white spray paint wore off.

turkey cookie cutter covered in string

When I finally had the whole cutter wrapped in string, I touched up the orange spots that were peeking through with off-white craft paint.

shadow box backer board

At this point, I decided I had invested so much time in the cookie cutter that I should showcase it in a shadow box. But my shadow box had been used many times before, and this is what the backer board of it looked like. All the pin holes and glue spots needed to be covered up.

old dictionary

I pulled out an, old falling-apart dictionary, and thought maybe I could use a couple pages from it to cover the mess. I looked on the “turkey” page and the “Thanksgiving” page, hoping to find a definition with a picture, but I struck out. So I started flipping through, looking for a good random page to use …

old dictionary page
… and look what I found in the F’s.

turkey shadow box

I rubber cemented the pages to the backer board and popped it into place.

turkey shadow box

Here’s the full shadow box. It has a hinged cover, so it’s really easy to work with.

turkey shadow box

I positioned my turkey so the picture of the turkey was inside him. But the shadow box looked a little empty.

old suitcase

I knew I had some great fall filler inside an old battered, tattered mini suitcase.

nuts and acorns

I picked out the nuts I wanted to use…

turkey shadow box
… and filled in the open space around the turkey with them.

turkey shadow box

Then I put the cover on the shadow box and stood it upright. The nuts were packed around the cookie cutter tightly enough to hold it in place.

My 10-minute craft ended up taking a little more than 10 minutes, but I’m happy with how it turned out.

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