Movie Stub Shadow Box

For years, I’ve been saving up all of the stubs from my movie theater trips. After a while, they start to scatter, create clutter, etc. I had saved them with the good intentions of making something to put them in, and never really got around to it. But then, while taking a trip to the local thrift store, I found exactly what I needed. A 6x8 shadow box. It wasn’t too big, didn’t have any scratches, and the frame was flawlessly black. At a whopping $.75, I made the purchase.

I’ll admit, it sat around for a while. At the time, I had a full-time job, which meant that I was momming and cleaning when I wasn’t at work or sleeping. This ended up being a great thing. I always peruse the (teeny tiny) fabric section at my local Wal-Mart, and on one of my visits, I saw the perfect silky red fabric. Since the shadow box was on the smaller side, a thin fabric, in my opinion, wouldn’t over-power or cause things to be too bulky. If I had purchased a larger box, I would have searched for the velvet. I bought a yard, which I believe came to about $1.50, and headed home.

I finally made the time to put all of this together, the project really only taking about an hour. First, I took apart the shadow box, removing the glass and setting everything aside. I had to decide whether or not I wanted the frame to be portrait or landscape when I had it on the wall, and chose for portrait as I thought it would handle dropping in new stubs better. Using a ruler, I found the center on the top and measured out an inch on each side, this ended up being too big so I just used one of the stubs laying around and drew a rough sketch around that. Since I am extremely clumsy with any sort of power tools, I had my husband drill the slot within the sketch.

In the meantime, I took the back piece and started figuring out how I wanted to glue my fabric. I attempted to do pleating, to better replicate being in a movie theater, but I really sucked at that. So I used some spray adhesive, and pressed the fabric on flat, leaving a few “bumpy” spots to keep it from being too perfect. I trimmed the fabric, leaving about a ¼ inch around the edges as the fabric was beginning to fray. After cleaning the glass piece, I put all the pieces back together, found it a home on the wall, then dropped all of my stubs inside. It’s place on the wall is close to my front door, that way when I return home from a movie, I can just drop the stub right inside!

You can use any shadow box size, any fabric you’d like inside, and you can even use scrapbook paper instead. I made another box for my polaroid photos, using scrapbook paper instead of fabric, and it turned out really nice.

Happy Crafting!

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