Florida Life with Laura

As I wrote in my last blog post, I had the idea this week to create a race track cupcake display for Noah’s Mario birthday party. I was pretty excited about this idea so I got started right away.

The process was kind of tedious, very Photoshop heavy, and hard to explain, but I’ll do my best. First I created a racetrack shape in Photoshop and enlarged it to fit well on a 20×30 foam board. Then I cropped the track into paper sized pieces, printed it, cut it out, and attached it back together with tape to create a stencil. Next I taped together 6 pieces of sturdy gray card stock to make one large sheet, and I traced the track shape using my stencil onto the card stock. Then I cut the track out.

After this I went back to my photoshop track shape and created a thin border around it just on the curved sections. Then I printed out the curvy borders and used a red marker to draw stripes on them. I attached them to the track with tape on the underside. I’m sure this entire process could have been done without Photoshop, but it’s just what I’m comfortable with.

Next I glued a piece of brown posterboard to the white foam board using spray adhesive, and then glued the track to the brown posterboard with white glue. After this I created a rainbow border by hot gluing together a bunch of off-brand legos I found on Amazon. I used this border to measure out the shape of the grass, and cut the “grass” border out of green posterboard. I hot glued the grass to the board, and then hot glued the lego border on top of all of that. I also glued a little checkered finish line to the track.

The last step was to make the checkpoints. These were made completely in photoshop, printed on card stock, glued together, and then glued to the board. I started by using a piece of scrap paper and scissors to roughly design the shape, then I measured my prototype shape to be able to recreated it in Photoshop. I used a mixture of graphics I made myself and graphics from the Nintendo website to decorate the checkpoints. They turned out so cute!

The other piece to this project was to make cupcake picks. I bought a set of Mario Kart character graphics on Etsy, resized them to the scale of my racetrack and print and cut them with my Cricut. Then I print and cut them again as a mirror image. I hot glued the 2 pieces together with a toothpick between them and that was it!

All I need now is some cupcakes to stick them in. To avoid getting grease on the display, I’ll add additional foil cupcake wrappers to the outside of whatever cupcakes I get.