This year, New Year’s Day fell on a Sunday. For some reason, the Rose Bowl won’t have their parade or game on a Sunday, so Monday the 2nd became New Year’s Day Plus.
I woke up realizing that I absolutely, positively needed a Rose Bowl crown.
Easy enough.
I searched the internet and came up with a google image for both a crown and a rose.
I traced those in Illustrator and then sized them to fit my paper size of 12 x 9. I added two holes to thread my yarn, and then because my paper was pretty thin, I set up two circles of reinforcements (like those things you buy to reinforce 3-hole-drilled paper.
To make them easier to line up later, make the inside of your reinforcement holes larger than the holes in the crown (so if the holes in the crown are .25″ wide, make the holes in the reinforcements .375″ wide).
Once I was happy with what I had, I exported the file as a DXF, and then opened it in Silhouette Studio. I needed to rotate the art 90 degrees and scoot it around so to fit the grid, and I made sure all the cutlines were set to on.
And then I sent it to cut on some 9 x 12 red construction paper. Once it was done cutting, I weeded it and was left with my parts to work with.
See those little dots to the right of the reinforcement pieces? Those are the weeded centers, and I save them, as well as any other interesting pieces from when I weed. You never know when they will come in handy as eyeballs or noses or whatever. And before Christmas, Pier One had a little bag of snowflakes and polka dots packaged as “Table Scatter” for $5.95. Seriously.
I glued the reinforcements to the back side of the crown, and then tied yarn to each side. You don’t want to tie the yarn so tight as to rip the edges – my trick is to put the tip of the scissors between the yarn and the crown and knot up tight against that. Then when you remove the scissors you have that safety wiggle room.
And once it was all done, I had myself a super awesome Rose Bowl Crown. That I wore all day, thank you very much!
