Bunny Victorious!

i don’t know about you, but in the course of planning our wedding, i fell madly in love with the love-bird cake toppers from bhldn.

and look at them, who wouldn’t?

but the three hundo pricetag? i liked that a lot less. 

the final details of any wedding are always going to be expensive, but throwing around hundreds here and there for things you honestly will one day relegate to christmas ornament status seems a little bit much, even for me.  and i’m able to rationalize a lot of indulgences.

i bemoaned the whole thing to my mother, and she had the perfect solution.  the same words she regrets saying again and again when i’m knee-deep in another ridiculous project: why don’t you make them?

so i did.

and here’s the best part: it was incredibly easy.

first, you’re going to want to make some paper maiche.  for some people, that means mixing glue and flour, for others it’s cooking water and flour and salt, for others still, it means buying the mix-it kit from michaels.  all are good options, but if you choose the flour and water recipe, as i did, i really want to urge you to add some salt and cinnamon to the mix.  it will make your paste a little flecky, but it the salt will keep it from molding over the years and the cinnamon will keep it smelling good.

once you have your paper maiche ready, you’ll want to cut strips of paper to build your bird (or snowman, or truck, or balloon, or whatever it is you’re making).  newspaper is the best here, especially if you’re painting, but if you want to use a different kind of paper, it really pays to use something thin.  it’ll be the easiest to work with, and if you can work easily with it, you can do more detailing with your paper maiche.

i used marine corps tactical maps.  they weren’t thin, so i was forced to work in very tiny strips.  but i really wanted to use paper that meant something to us, so the maps were of sneads ferry, where we live, and afghanistan, where bill will be.  

you’ll want to build some sort of base you can work around to create your bird, and i did this by balling up paper towels and kleenex and taping them into the shape i wanted.  layer by layer, i added the paper maiche strips to build up.

i used floral wire to support the tail, which i just put under a few layers of paper maiche and then tightly covered with more.

the legs are also floral wire, and i probably should have thought about putting them in the base.  instead, i cut a hole into the bottom of the bird, inserted them, and paper maiched them in place.

while paper maiche dries hard, during the production process, there will be a lot of propping.  just like wet laundry, wet paper is heavy, and i used the knife above to prop up the tail on the bride bird so it wouldn’t flatten out as it dried.

most people choose to paint their paper maiche, but i really wanted to preserve the integrity of the maps, so using prismacolor markers, which are permanent and therefore didn’t bleed when wet with the maiche mix, i colored the strips individually i used for the groom bird’s uniform and then paper maiched them like normal.

i also put bill’s ribbons on groom bird.  

the hat (“cover”) was probably the hardest part, but after an hour’s worth of work, i officially had half of my cake topper.  easy peasy, super personal, and very worth it.

there was a lot less detail work on bride bird because i wanted her to stay white, but i wrapped her in tulle (which i tied in a knot and glued that sequin on top of — the sequin was white too, but you know how sequins change color in different lights? that’s why it looks pink) and gave her a cathedral length tool veil, like the one i wore.

with a total of five dollars’ worth of supplies, an hour and a half of time, and a little ingenuity, our cake toppers were a hit.

not only were they cute on the cake, but they now sit on a table in our living room looking pretty adorable, too.