Bring on the Bling!

I wanted one of those monogram toppers for our cake. You know, the ones that are just your single initial? I couldn't seem to find what it was exactly that I was looking for. I knew I wanted to have one that was blinged out with our colors(turquoise and pink). The only ones I could find came in clear bling, which would have been fine, if that is what I wanted.. but I didn't. I wanted color, and bling, and lots of it.

I decided in order to get what I wanted, I was going to have to make it myself.


I searched online for the cheapest brushed silver 5" cake topper I could find in the letter "R."
I found a site that had the letter I needed on clearance for $10, so I decided to get it. I originally bought the R from a site called chickweddingescentuals.com. It took about a MONTH for it to get to me, and after several e-mails got returned to me (I had to hung down their customer service e-mail and there was no number, which I didn't notice before), I finally found an e-mail address that worked. The chick said to me they had a "catastrophic" computer failure and that is why it took so long. I'm not really sure if I believe her or not, but all in all, I DID receive it finally.


I searched online for the cheapest swarovski flatbacks in Aquamarine and decided e-bay was the way to go for these. I promptly ordered 144 5ss Flatback crystals in aqua and 144 in fuschia.
I grossly misjudged the size and quantity I needed. The 5ss were perfectly sized, but because they were SOOOOOOOOOOOO small I needed a ton of them. And. I had to order more, a lot more. I ended up buying 10 gross (1 gross=144 crystals) from a seller on ebay for $40 and I used most of them.


I used a small paintbrush and brushed on glue and then took my crystals and placed them on the glue using the tweezers. I worked in small sections at a time and it didn't really matter if the glue dried before i got to it because it dried clear, so I'd just re-glue it when I got there again. I spent probably about 10 hrs on the whole project.


Here is a small section, this is after the first 144 crystals, about when I realized I would need about 10 more gross to complete the project:




here is another crapy pic.


I think my blinged out topper came out pretty nicely. Unfortunately, My camera taking skills suck and i can't figure out how to turn the flash off to take pics. But this is my finished product- all blinged out.





Although I like the result, I'm not sure if I would do this again as it was a very slow and painstaking process and after everything is said and done, i'm not sure how much I really "saved" by doing this myself.