Who says elegant can’t also be adorable?! These tiny paper gift boxes are a beautiful addition to wedding tabletop décor. Set one at each place, then fill it with groom’s cake, candies or birdseed for the honeymoon send off. Today’s project in our DIY Wedding Sparkle series is designed to show you how the Artistic integrated system of crystals, software, cutters and presses has uses beyond fabric.
For all the projects in our Series, we used the Silhouette Cameo electronic cutting tool. Similar to a home printer, it plugs into your PC via USB, but instead of printing, it uses a small blade to cut template material, paper, cardstock, vinyl, fabric and more up to 12″ wide and 10′ long. The cutting blade is precision ground to produce extremely accurate cuts, even in very small areas, such as the delicate scallops on our wedding dress box.
Templates for all kinds of specialty flat and 3-D shapes are readily available online. Since we were using the Silhouette cutter, we turned to the Silhouette shopping site to find our adorable wedding gown template. It was only 99 cents! When you purchase a Cameo digital cutter from an authorized Artistic dealer, it comes with a free $25 download card to the Silhouette shopping site. That’s a lot of .99 templates!
Once all the pieces were cut, we simply folded along the dashed lines, then folded in the tabs. There were 12 tabs along the sides and two at the top of the dress. Our box held its shape quite nicely with just folding, however, you can also glue down the tabs inside the dress.
As purchased, the 3-D dress box was quite small. We re-sized it within the software to fit a full size 8½” x 11 sheet of pale aqua cardstock. We inserted vellum into our digital cutter to cut out the overskirt/apron rather than using the piece of matching aqua cardstock. Since this overskirt was the piece onto which we wanted to adhere the crystals, we felt the sheer vellum was much prettier and mimicked the look of our pretty Flower Girl Overskirt.
We also added a thin (⅛”) white ribbon tied into a bow as the gown’s mini sash.
In the “you-can-use-these-things-over-and-over” category, this project uses the same crystal clusters designed originally for our Bejeweled Buttons. No need to create another template!
Finally, even resized to the larger format, the dress box was too small to warrant much decoration. In the “Business of Bling,” we feel moderation should be your watch word. A little bit can go a long way. Like just the right dash of spice in a recipe, a pinch of sparkle can make a project fantastic. Go too heavy, and you risk ruining the entire endeavor.
Coco Chanel summed it up quite succinctly: “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and remove one accessory. Less is always more.”
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Thank you for your great work
Hi Souad – Thank you!