Happy 50th Anniversary

Today is Diversion Showcase's 50th post (Can you believe that? I certainly find it incredible.) This milestone has coincidentally coincided with a very special craft.

At the end of August, some close family friends celebrated their 50th Anniversary. For their 25th anniversary, my grandfather had made them a display with the '25' put together out of quarters. 25 years later, my beloved grandfather has passed away but my mother thought it would be a wonderful idea to do our own version of that display. However, we encountered a number of challenges along the way. My grandfather had had access to an art studio and far more sophisticated tools than my sister and I did so we knew right away that several aspects would have to be modified.

We decided to make the bulk of it with cardstock, instead of wood like my grandfather did, and we would put it in a frame.

All ready to start!

Gathering the materials alone took several days. My sister and I spent an hour at Micheals debating the use of linen gold cardstock vs. gold foil sticker sheets (I know, I know...artists :P ). In the end, we chose the cardstock because it would be easier to manipulate once the delicate letters were cut. The beautiful Bordeaux cardstock we bought from Wallacks; the photo I got printed from Black's photography; and the twenty loonies we got from the bank (sadly, the teller would not deliberately pick out shiny ones for us).

We had considered using 50 cents coins instead of loonies (yes, Canada does still have 50 cents coins although there aren't many in general circulation - bet you didn't know that!) but in the end, we decided to go with loonies for two reasons:
1) Loonies are as close to gold as you can get with coins and since the 50th anniversary is the golden anniversary, it seemed appropriate
2) 50 cents coins are hard to find - we called a number of banks and none of them had any

The first step was to give the loonies a bath. My father plopped all the coins in a bowl of baking soda water and scrubbed them down with a toothbrush.

All clean :)

Next came the cutting of the letters. I am proud to say that I was the one who thought up the genius idea of printing out the stencils backwards and gluing them to the back of the gold cardstock so that when the letters were cut out, they would be gold the right way around. (Originally, I had this complicated idea of printing out the letters the usual way, cutting them out, tracing them out backwards on the back of the cardstock and then cutting the cardstock. It would have been a redundant, overly complicated process.)

Two hours of Bon Jovi and 80s music later...Ta da!

The cardstock we bought at Wallacks was so large, we could easily have made two. We measured and cut it down to size.

Next came the second most time consuming step (the first was cutting the letters). We had to trace the loonies onto the bordeaux card so that we could cut fitted holes for them. After that, we cut a heart shape on top in order to frame the photograph of the couple.

I was surprised to find that gluing everything down was actually the most challenging part of the whole process. Cardstock has this annoying tendency to wrinkle with glue. It took several attempts to get it right. For the loonies, we used rubber cement to ensure a good stick whereas for everything else, we just used gluestick or white glue.

One week from the start of this project later: Voila!

We framed it and hung the beautiful finished product to test the strength of the hook my father nailed to the back of the frame.

This craft was definitely a family effort and we wish the happy couple many more blessed years to come! Happy 50th Anniversary!