This USPS postmark has been doing a good job at fitting in with the various designs. I like Jessica's choice of gold with the stamp and who doesn't love leaves. I'm writing this on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. There were a bumper crop of leafy designs in November. It's snowing with a prediction of 8"-14". Perhaps I will have a marathon of loading posts. Perhaps I will fill December. Maybe the next few days of posts will be a cliffhanger.
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This is absolutely the final ofrenda post. Maybe I had to drag it out until I had some new topics swirling around in my head.
At the very beginning of my ofrenda project when I needed an idea for something that looked like a shadow box but would have to be made out of cardboard and the first attempts to recycle cardboard boxes were disappointing I had to come up with an alternative.
Here we are (Keith and Jean) in 2003 on the original plywood ofrenda.
Below is 2025 version - much larger. Not taller - but the footprint is at least twice the size.
This following part is too long - but, I am determined to wrap up this topic so I can resume the purge project and the style/tool project.
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The materials took a good chunk of the budget, but it made sense to invest in this structure to provide future committees with something more exciting than stacks of banquet tables. When I asked Keith how much I could use for supplies he said I could start with $100. Most people would have pitched a fit at that number. I took it as an opportunity to get creative and see how many recycled materials I could use.
After the disappointing results reusing random cardboard boxes I figured out a way to make a shadow box out of a piece of railroad board. That's a popular material for kid's classes because it can be cut with scissors but is sturdier than card stock. One carton of railroad board was all I needed. I think it was $25. Then there was a $30 roll of Tyvek tape - the best tape ever. I also had a $10 variety pack of double face tape. The tissue paper for the 1,000 flowers was $175. The print out for the big skull was $35. I spent about $10 on my own at the Dollar Store. It's hard to tell how much I donated from my stockpile.
I knew that my 12 artist-friends would all have a stockpile of art supplies and none of them even asked if I was going to provide any materials. I did provide a basic railroad board shadow box for about twelve of the nichos. None of the helpers asked to be reimbursed so I'm guessing they didn't spend much and were OK with sharing things from their stockpiles.
One helper asked me for a pattern to build a shadowbox which I will provide at some point and post somewhere. Maybe we can make a video of me showing how to make one and then see how good the instructions are. I do have a YouTube channel....
Figuring out the shadowbox construction was the very first time that I felt like I put my one amazing gift to use. I did fine in school but there were always a lot of people who I could tell were way more gifted that I was. There was one skill that I was really good at when it came to testing and that was spacial reasoning. People would admire my scores but it annoyed the heck out of me because I could not see any practical use for skills that were basically puzzles.
Fast forward to 2025 and I finally found a use for spacial reasoning. If you do not know what spatial reasoning is, there is a link to a test below. If you score 100% feel free to email me and I will note that I have kindred spirits on the blog. Or perhaps everyone can score 100% - in which case we can be happy that we found each other and have a common skill.
The questions that apply to my shadow box design are the ones where you look at a 3D shape and then have to discern which of the flattened out shapes would fold together to make the 3D shape.
