Create A Lasting Memory With A Shadow Box Display #GiftIdea

 Sometimes finding a perfect gift for that teen or young adult in your life is rather difficult. Preserving special memories is so important, and there are some great digital tools to do it these days! But sometimes a scrapbook or photo album isn't quite enough.  Maybe you know someone who has had an epic sports year or who has had an amazing dance or piano recital. What about a special year, like the year of graduation or the year your son or daughter learned to drive?

For those special moments or capsules in time, make up a special display of not only pictures, but uniforms, shirts, programs, hats, or anything else of significance to make up a special memory collage, capturing that special event.

For example, my son has always been interested in mixed martial arts and is self-taught! On his own he entered the world of MMA by joining a professional gym with a coach and team. He has trained for almost 8 years and is the proud holder of two belts in two separate weight classes. He is now ranked #1 in his weight class in the state and we are very proud of his accomplishment. We all went to see the fight where he won his 2nd belt. It was an amazing night.

We wanted to give him something that would help him remember that night, and also to help him remember the journey to that moment.

We did it with a shadow box display. It brought lots of things together into one fun and attractive case.. Here are some steps to consider when putting together a Shadow Box Display:

1) Collect all of the Memorabilia Collect everything surrounding the specific event or time into one place and choose what is the most important. We decided on an event shirt, an event ticket, the program, the event flyer, some pictures, and a poster. We got it all together and had it available for when we got the shadow box.

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2) Decide How Big You'd Like To Go You can get shadow boxes of all different sizes, from small to very large. We wanted our display to be big enough to include the most important parts of the night, yet not so large you couldn't transport it and so we went with a 28" x 24" size.

3) Make a Mock Set-up After selecting the things we thought would represent the event the best, we set it up against the backing the way we thought it should go. By doing this, we found that we needed to resize some of the items so that they would better fit our board, which we did.

4) Attach Items Permanently After deciding the arrangement, we needed to attach everything to the board. We attached the shirt with simple black straight pins which matched the shirt exactly. You can't see them unless you really look hard. We got double sided crafting tape to attach the pictures, poster, flyer, and ticket. In the final cut, there was a total of 9 items we included in the shadow box display.

After we put it all together, we presented it to our son on his birthday. He was so pleased. When I saw how happy he was, I knew we had done something awesome. I asked him if he liked it, and he said it was the most thoughtful thing anyone had ever done for him. It made me kind of tear up! 

 If you decide to make a Memory Shadow Box, I guarantee it will be a gift that will be treasured for a lifetime!

E Is For Eggshell Art #AtoZChallenge

I don't have a lot of time to do art, but when I do, I'm going to do some eggshell art! It looks so fun, cool, and certainly no two art pieces are ever the same. So I've decided to do a collection of references to some really cool sites that feature eggshell art!

Here is a really great way to make a pendant simply from a domino and eggshells and some clear drying glue! You can 

make some really gorgeous pieces with this technique!

If you have a surface that needs decorating or salvaging, why not do an eggshell surface? It resembles old marble!

If you are searching for a fun and interesting children's craft project, here it is! Use clay as the adhesive for the colored egg shells!

Finally, this looks so fun! An eggshell mosaic! This is actually done as a craft for kids, but this would make anyone feel like a crafty person! 

Now that you've seen some basic ways to use eggshells, take a look at a pro's work, it's not just the novice that works with eggshells! This is some eggshell art by RedHongYi, a Chinese artist living in Shanghai, who creates amazing art out of ordinary things! This is from her '31 Days Of Food Creativity' Series.