A “Cake” made for Cupcakes

I recently got married.  My (then fiancée, now wife) Meg and I had hoped to make many of the decorations ourselves.  While Meg was busy doing the majority of the decorations (folding lots of paper flowers, creating boutonieres for the groomsmen, and more) I was tasked with a grand cupcake display.  Meg told me since we were planning to serve cupcakes instead of a traditional wedding cake, we should display them similar to a traditional wedding cake.   So I took a little time with Autosketch and my computer and I figured out how big I should make the round layers.

Once I knew what I was going build I started with a trip to Home Depot.  I got some 3/4″ plywood for the circle templates, some 2″ pink foam, a 2″ flush cut router bit, and some liquid nails.

A few years ago I created a circle jig for my router and I used it to create the circles in the plywood.  Once I had the plywood cut, I used those circles to cut the layers of foam.

I then determined which way the circles lined up and used liquid nail to attach the two pieces into a single layer.  I clamped them together and waited for the adhesive to dry.

After the glue cured, I used the sander to make the layers uniform .

After the layers were finished I took them home and Meg and her friend Caitlin used the Sculpt or Coat to decoupage book pages onto each layer.  It’s really easy, just brush on a section of Sculpt or Coat, apply the paper and then apply more Sculpt or Coat making sure it fully saturates the paper(Don’t worry it dries clear.)  We did each layer separately to make the unit easy to transport.  Also this allowed to get the bottom edges of each layer better (rather than dealing with curved inside angles.)

After the first coat of Sculpt or Coat dried, I applied some additional book pages pieces, and then I applied the gold “ribbons”  I used some pale gold bronze powder I had in the garage mixed with some Sculpt or Coat.

I used masking tape to lay out the “ribbon.”  I did have some problems with this process.  In some places the tape pulled part of the paper off when I removed it.  I’m not sure what caused this, I think it was not enough saturation of the paper by the Sculpt or Coat, but I might have been something else.  I would recommend making sure the paper is saturated and letting everything dry well before moving to any step involving tape.

Basically the powder is mixed with the Sculpt or Coat and you brush on the resulting paste.  After it dries, you remove the tape.

Assemble on site and add fun decorations and cupcakes (that was done by our friends Jenny and Gail, and our caterers,) to make it look great [see photo at top of post.]

Click slide show below for more photos.

Leave a comment if you have a question, or want more info.

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