Starry Night Friends Shadow Box!

My best friend Kendra, who I’ve known since we were 16 years old, has been going through some personal things of late and felt like she didn’t have many of her old friends left so I took it to mind and decided to make her a gift. I have recently gotten into making shadow boxes as you have seen and will continue to see. These aren’t like actual store bought shadow boxes as they are not one solid piece of wood all around but rather frames glued together to make a sort of shadow box.

For this one I bought three 5 x 7 white with gold inner and outer trim frames and thought they would look perfect. I took them apart and cleaned one of the panes of glass. Two of the frames, the top and middle one, I removed the back prongs but left the prongs intact on the back frame. I then took some hot glue and applied to the corners of the first frame inside and then put the pane of glass there. I then took the middle and last frames and using Aleene’s tacky glue I glued them together, but neither will have a pane of glass. Take some wet Q-tips and clean off any glue that seeps out of the sides of the frames.

Next you use tacky glue and glue the now dry middle and last frame to the first glass pane frame. Now either at this point or before they are glued together, which ever is easiest, you take the sticker and in this case I used a sticker that said, “Good Friends are like Stars you don’t need to see them to know they are there” and apply to the outside of the glass. Now I like using removable stickers which are easier but this one wasn’t one of those and I made two mistakes, one a portion of my finger print is on the sticky side of the sticker and two I wasn’t able to rid a small portion of an air bubble but even with it I think it turned out pretty well.

Now using the backs of the frame that has the stand you take the scrapbook paper and line it up to the back of the frames and trace it and cut it out and using hot glue you glue it to the backs of the frame or at least the portion that will face inward.

Now came the 3D element I intended to use. I was going to use these cool small wooden pieces from Dollar Tree but they just didn’t look right and didn’t fit well. I initially thought they would because of the silhouette of the trees in the background picture but it didn’t go. So I was looking around for what to do and I remembered I had bought a few copper wire LED string lights at Dollar Tree in the spring so I thought it would look cool if I could put them in there at the top to look like the actual stars that are on the background picture. I didn’t want to glue the wire to the background so I played around with it until I got just the right look, the bending of the wires and positioning it inside the frame and then running the wire out of the back of the frame. Using Velcro fasteners I attached the battery pack to the back of the stand for the frame and had the wire kind of string by the hanging hook on the back.

My husband Anthony who is a much better wrapper wrapped the gift for me and I mailed it to my friend and when she called me she said when she got it she started crying and her husband was like why are you crying lol but none the less she said it made her feel like someone cared and she keeps this frame by her favorite chair in her house. Of course when I mentioned I made it she didn’t realize and thought I had bought it but when I said I made it she was even more appreciative of the work it took and said she loves it even more. I think this is one of my favorite shadow boxes to date!

• 5x7 Frames- $1 a piece at Dollar Tree
• Friends Sticker- $3.49 at Jo-Ann’s
• Copper Wire LED String Lights- $1 at Dollar Tree
• Tree Silhouette Starry Night Scrap Book Paper- $1 at a local scrapbook store