I made 16 ice skate decorations using the Sizzix Bigz L Ice Skate die. I die cut the elements for 32 skates in total, 16 left sides and 16 right sides. For each 3D skate decoration I die cut 2 whole boots out of thin chipboard to use as the base, then cut 2 each (opposite images) of the boot, heel, blade and swirl decoration. The boot was made from purple glitter paper, the heel from an alligator texture black paper, the blade from shiny silver metallic cardstock, and the swirl decoration from A/B white glitter cardstock. I bought a large sheet of 1/4" Styrofoam for the interior so the skate would be 3 dimensional and there would be something to put the stick into. I used one of the chipboard boots as a pattern to trace the image onto the Styrofoam, then with an exacto knife I hand cut each styro interior slightly smaller than the skate die. (Shortly after this project I discovered the FloraCraft Styro Hot Wire Cutting Tool that literally burns through Styrofoam like butter. Having that nifty little gizmo for this project would have saved me hours of work and kept me from tracking bits of Styrofoam throughout the entire house!)
I painted the inside edges of the chipboard skates purple, black and silver wherever the associated paper would be placed, then ran all of the die cut pieces through my Xyron 9" machine to adhere the layers to the chipboard skates. I used a chipboard base because I wanted the skates to be sturdy enough when I glued them to the Styrofoam intrior. Before gluing the skates to the Styrofoam, I attached the 1/8" silver eyelets to the skates, then glued each of the opposite image skates to the Styrofoam. I didn't want the Styrofoam to be visible, so I cut 3/16" strips of purple glitter paper, black alligator paper, and silver metallic cardstock to cover the Styrofoam in those areas. I marked where I wanted the wooden rod to go and used a regular hole punch (the prefect size for the 1/4" rods) to put a hole in the same place on each of the silver metallic cardstock strips before gluing them down. Then I used a hot glue gun to adhere the strips to the Styrofoam edges. I painted the rest of the exposed Styrofoam black on the underside of the boot and silver on the inside of the blade. I glued a swirl design onto each side of the skate and added 3 Swarovsky crystal rhinestones to each swirl. On special projects like this I prefer using the genuine Swarovski crystals that I can only get in a variety of sizes at the bead store. They have a brilliant sparkle that the craft store rhinestones just don't have.
The stick was a 12" wooden rod that I bought in a pack of 16 from Beverly's. I painted the sticks white, rolled them in glue, then rolled them in A/B glitter. I used a crocheting needle to gently poke a hole through the Styrofoam skate at the base where the hole was punched into the silver cardstock strip, then gentle poked up into the body of skate about 1 inch. I put a bead of regular glue into the hole and gently pushed the wooden through the blade and up into the body of the skate. I finished off the skates by lacing white yarn through the eyelets, tying a bow at the top and attaching little sparkly white pom poms to the laces.
We bought inexpensive square vases from Moskatel's in downtown Los Angeles, and 16 Styrofoam cubes and 16 packages of A/B tinsel from Dollar Tree. I wrapped the tinsel over the bottom of a styro cube and put it into the vase to hold it down without gluing it in. The tinsel flopped over the edges of the vase giving it a neat look. My friend and I and our daughters got together over 3 weekends and made 150 chocolate suckers for the centerpieces as favors for all the kids to take home. The suckers were made from white, milk, dark, black and purple chocolate pieces melted and poured into various sized skate molds, then painted with edible gold and silver dust for the blades. All the candy supplies and molds were purchased from Kake Kreations www.KakeKreations.com. My friend also found some purple swirl lollipops (at the base of the arrangement) and purple rock candy suckers (not shown) from Party City. I stuck the skate into the center of the styro cube, then the chocolate suckers and Party City suckers at various heights on both sides of the arrangement so they would be seen from both sides.
We used 12" wide purple mesh around the centerpieces, scattered a bag of purple stones on the table, and used 4 electric tea lights under the mesh.
