Cake! magazine by Australian Cake Decorating Network August 2017 | Page 90

Step 1: Step 2: TRACE. First you'll want to trace your snowflake design onto your material. I would suggest taking your downloaded snowflake file to a place like Kinkos or Staples and have it printed on their blueprint printer as large as you want. I wanted a big statement, so I made mine 40" wide. Then you can just cut it out, place it on your piece of wood or foam core, and trace around it to transfer your design. If you are a lucky duck and have access to a projector, you can also print your snowflake on a transparency to trace it with the projector instead. I added the dots on the printout to mark where the lights should be based on where I ended up drilling mine, so make sure to mark those dots when you are tracing as well. CUT. Okay, here's one part of the process where you can go either the less or more time-consuming route. If you want to use foam core for your marquee, you can just use an X-Acto knife and metal ruler to cut out your snowflake. For a thicker foam core sign, cut out more than one and glue them together. If you choose to use wood for this project instead, you'll need a jigsaw, but if you don't already have one the good news is that they are under $50, easy to use, and you'll have a whole new range of wood DIYs you can tackle from now on. Totally worth it. If you choose to use a jigsaw, clamp your wood (or have someone hold it) so that the portion of the wood you are cutting hangs over the side of a table or workbench that's about waist high. Keep the flat metal bottom of the jigsaw close against the top of the wood as you cut into the board, and use the metal guide on the front of the saw to follow your outline. Don't force the saw forward too fast or it won't give you as clean of a cut, so just let the saw go at its own pace. Make all the cuts that you can get to from the outside of the snowflake, and I'll show you how to do the cutouts near the inside.