Thursday, January 7, 2016

Christmas Selfie Station Tutorial

David and I got assigned to help out with our ward Christmas party. Our jobs were to set up the Santa station, be Santa, and make the Christmas photo booth. 


The Santa Station was easy. We just put up a fake Christmas tree with decorations and some stockings in the back.

David as Santa

For the photo booth station, I went to the dollar store and got Santa hats and elf hats and tinsel and glasses and stuff, but I also wanted to make some props. I went to Etsy to find some props to copy, and I chose to copy this one:


The seller is selling it for $70 and says the material is cardstock. Obviously I can make it for way cheaper, so I did. I thought the props would be handled by a lot of children, so I wanted to make them sturdier. Also, I already bought dollar store things so I didn't want to make ALL of the props pictured. 

To make sturdy props I bought foam board, which was my backing. I freehand sketched all the shapes I wanted onto paper until I was satisfied that it looked good, then traced the paper onto the foam board. I cut out the shapes with an X-Acto knife.

The shapes I cut out. (Note: the upper right square corner was just the material I cut out to save for future projects. It wasn't a prop.)

The edge was a little rough, so I cut the foam maybe 1/8" smaller on all sides than I had traced it. This way I could glue cardstock paper on top of the prop without the foam sticking out from the back and looking ugly. I didn't take pictures of the process. Also, the mistletoe I made solely out of cardstock because it was a complex shape and harder to hide the foam board behind.

I used skewers as the handles. I just poked the skewer into the foam board, but if I did this again I would use dowels that are a little thicker than a skewer to provide sturdiness and I would hot glue the dowel to the foam board. One of my skewers fell out of a mustache and wouldn't stick any more because it wasn't glued in. Also, one mustache broke right in the middle where it is really thin. I would reinforce that with a skewer by sticking it horizontally through the entire mustache and clipping off whatever wood sticks out the sides.

Here is the result of a few of the props (I didn't get pics of them all). The background is just wrapping paper.


This was the mustache that the skewer fell out of. Also, I traced "Jingle Bells" from a google images picture.

I'm wearing some dollar store items I got.



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