Ellie has been wanting to make a pretend felt cake for awhile and I kept thinking we would get to it. When the 100 days project came up to mark her and her brother's 100 days of school, we decided now was the time to go for it. Nothing real complicated to this project, but when I was looking for inspiration, I found one example, but had no idea what the fake cake was made of.
Here is how we made ours!
I went shopping at the craft store and bought some assorted styrofoam items, wreaths and circles. We used regular craft glue, scrap booking paper, tooth picks/wooden skewers, washi tape, candles and embellishments.
We chose which paper we wanted for the various layers and then started tracing the wreath shaped
parts. Then cut them out.
We pieced the two round circles for each tier together by using skewers.
We measured how tall they were and then cut strips of paper, mine were 2 inches wide and I had to cute three 2" x 12" pieces. We secured them with toothpicks and glued the overlap to keep them secure.
We then assembled it, doing each layer this way. We got a little lazy on the bottom outside layer and used washi tape around the circle, it was even easier and I love the black and white polka dot tape we had.
Once you have the layers how you want, then Miss Ellie, counted out the candles and we got to town inserting them into the cake. On the bottom layer I used a seam ripper and made an x shape for each candle to be inserted through. On the middle ring, we used a whole punch after gently folding the wreath circle in half. Decorate any way you want, this was where we almost got too carried away and lucky Ellie got bored and wanted to finish!
We used huge skewers to secure the final top layer to the rest of the cake, so it wouldn't shift around. We also used tooth picks to secure a row of flowers around the cake.
We added some fun with a banner made of washi tape over baker's twine and strung onto skewers to spell out "congrats". Ellie wrote her name and also "Days of School" on notebook paper to give it a school flair. We love how it turned out and she is thrilled to bring it into school on her 100th day!
