St. Patrick’s Day Shadow Box

Okay, I admit I am not Irish, but I do consider green to be my “lucky,” favorite color of choice and I will use any excuse to dress in or decorate with any shade of green!  That’s why this month I got to work and created this perfectly green shadow box to display in my home for this St. Patrick’s Day.  Of course I couldn’t forget the gold too!

This was a fun project to work on and if you have children who enjoy crafting, this would be an ideal hands on project for them to help you with, too.

Supplies:

• A Shadow Box Frame or a Tray. (I used a pre-painted tray that I found at my local Target dollar spot).
• 2.5″ Wood Hearts  (I used 6 of the 12).
• Jumbo Wood Craft Sticks, Natural, 5 3/4″
• Retro Mod Vintage Core’dinations Cardstock Pack
• Core’dinations Glitter Silk Paper Pack
• K & Co. 12×12 Paper Pad in Designer Brights
• Nestabilities Classic Scalloped Hearts
• Sew Easy Fancy Floss Bakers Twine, Secondary 
• Krylon Glitter Spray- Glistening Gold
• Cricut Sophisticated Cartridge
• Dual Temp Mini Glue Sticks
• Mini Glue Gun
• Queen & Co. Bling Pearls, Sunflower Yellow
• Queen & Co. Bling Pearls, Green Grass
• Queen & Co. Bling Pearls, Shamrock Green
• Queen & Co. Bling Pearls, Chocolate Delight
• Martha Stewart Crafts Fringe Scissors
• Mono Multi Liquid Glue
• Darice Permanent Glue Dots Roll
• Zots Clear Adhesive Glue Dots

The very first step I did was to take the 2.5″ wood heart shapes and arrange them in two groups of three hearts each, to look like a shamrock.  I then used my hot glue gun to secure the shapes together as shown below.

To embellish these shapes, I sprayed each shamrock  with a liberal coating of gold glitter spray finish from Krylon.

I used my classic scalloped shaped heart Nestabilities dies to diecut some heart shapes from Core’dinations Vintage cardstock.  I used two shades of green cardstock and cut out the hearts using the 3rd smallest die of the set of 6.

The next step is to take the smaller  heart shape that has been diecut from each larger heart, and place that smaller heart into the opposite color’s window center as I have shown here…

Make sure to use some type of double-sided adhesive on the backs of these to hold them together.   You will now be ready to adhere them onto the wood shamrock pieces.  To further embellish the shamrocks, I have outlined each heart diecut with some bling pearl accents from Queen & Co.  Next, I have diecut some small hearts using the smallest of the 6 Nestabilities dies and some Glitter Silk Core’dinations cardstock in gold.  These gold hearts are to accent the centers of all the green and pearl embellished hearts.

The next step will be to create the shamrock stems.  I went really textural here and used some jumbo craft sticks and wrapped them with some Wintergreen Bakers Twine from the We R Memory Keepers Sew Easy collection.  First you will want to cover the craft sticks with some adhesive.  I used Darice’s glue dot roller.  Then all you need to do is start wrapping the stick with the twine, making sure to press onto the adhesive to secure.

 After the craft sticks have been wrapped with the twine, attach one stick to each of the shamrocks, again using glue sticks and a glue gun.

To create the fun fringed dimensional grass across the bottom of my tray, I used a sheet of green K & Co. brights patterned paper and I cut a section with Martha Stewart Crafts Fringe Scissors as shown…

Once the fringe is cut, cut the portion of the patterned paper allowing about 2″ below the fringe.

You will want this extra allowance of paper to be able to fold an edge for attachment to the tray.  Once folded, adhere some double-sided adhesive to the edge and  attach it to the bottom of the tray.  Before you attach the grass section you will want to cut some of the fringe tops off here and there so that the fringes are different lengths, as with actual grass.

Using my Cricut Expression 2 and the Cricut Sophisticated cartridge, I cut out the “LUCKY” title to add to my tray display.  This was cut out at 1.25″ for both layers.  Once they were adhered together, I also gave the piece a shimmering layer of the gold glitter spray from Krylon.

I simply added the title to the front of the grass fringe to complete.  I hope you’ve enjoyed my gloriously green project today and that it has put you in a lucky spirit!

AndreaA

Scrapbooking has been one of Andrea’s biggest obsessions since 1997 and she has recently caught the card making and home décor bugs, too! When Andrea’s not busy being crafty, she can be found working part-time as a substitute Preschool teacher, shopping at craft and antique shops, and collecting Old World stoneware and unique pieces of jewelry. Visit Andrea’s personal blog at: imlivinonscraps.blogspot.com