Weddingbee Blog

Here’s how I made the custom shape for the Silhouette to cut, and here is the first part of my belly band post.

Here is the mock-up band I made to see how the cunning plan in my brain translated into real, actual paper:

As it was a mock-up, I just stuck some double-sided tape on both short ends of the book paper, then stuck it down. This means it is only attached with two vertical lines, one just past the H and one just past the P. As you can see, everything else is popping up, especially the two flaps that make the H shape.

I knew we’d need to bring out the big guns when we made these for reals. I considered glue stick briefly, but decided against because I always have trouble with glue stick glue drying to the point that it is so brittle whatever you’ve glued pops off. Also, chunks of glue tend to gather in cut-out shapes like this. That meant I was looking at spray adhesive! I thought it would be fast, quick, and easy. Once I figured out what needed to happen, it wasn’t quick, it was a little fiddly, but I still wouldn’t call it hard.

What I didn’t take into account when thinking this would be an easy project was that when you spray something with spray adhesive, if you don’t stick it to something, it will stay sticky. So anything that gets sprayed needs to be stuck to something or else it will forever stick to people and gather fluff. Remember this fact!

I knew I’d have to make a mask out of cardstock (or anything thin and stiff, really) so I just got glue where I wanted it. I could have cut the book paper to 1.5″ by 11″, the same size as the bands. This seemed like a waste of paper, plus to get the print going the right way, I’d need a book that was 11″ wide. I cut my pieces of book paper to 4″ x 1.25″, which was just a little bigger all around than the H <3 P cutout.

I now knew that I needed a mask with a 4″ x 1.25″ cutout in the middle. This was my first attempt:

I used a small piece of spare cardstock, put it down, and sprayed. Notice the long arms of the belly band sticking out on either side of my mask? Yeah, they got stickied, as well as the area I wanted to be sticky. Try again! Here is mask design 2.0:

Now all you can see of the belly is band is literally the area we want stickied. Perfect! Spray, remove mask, stick book paper down, right? WRONG. I did that the first time, and got adhesive all over the book paper that was peeking out of the cutout. The spray adhesive sprays everything you can see: the mask, the belly band, and the freezer paper underneath, so if you press your backing onto the belly band without moving the band, you’re sticking book paper to both the belly band and the freezer paper.

I had covered my table in butcher paper, but I soon realized that I actually wanted to work on newspaper or flyers. Each time you spray, you get this:

P <3 H glue spots (I outlined it so it is easier to see. The area inside the blue is very sticky!). That means you can’t keep putting your bands in the same place to spray adhesive them, because they’d pick up residual sticky. I found that could put out a London Drugs flyer, get about 4 sprays per page (moving slowly down the page, never putting a new band in old glue by accident) and then just flip it over once I’d used up the previous page.

Start at the top of a page. Once I’d used this page 4 times, I’d flip it over and use the other side 4 times.

So this project ended up more fiddly than I envisioned: I went through a lot of junk mail for spraying and a lot of spare scrapbook paper for masks (they gather such a goopy layer of glue that you’ll want to replace it every 10-15 sprays or so) but it turned out great product!

My favourite one so far, because of the prominence of Zero Mostel in the horizontal bar of the H. Zero Mostel starred in one of my favourite funny musicals ever: A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum.

Cheat sheet for this project:

1. Put your mask on top of what you’re spraying.
2. Spray with adhesive of choice.
3. Remove mask (do not accidentally stick mask to table! Keep it sticky side up!)
4. Move article you just sprayed to an area clear of glue.
5. Now you can press your backing (in my case, book paper) onto the band.
6. Put a new band down in a clean space in your work area.
7. Repeat steps 1-6, laying down new workspace paper as needed, and making a new mask as the old one gets too glue-covered.

Did you have any projects that seemed easy in your head, but ended up being much more fiddly?