I used to run a craft and homewares blog and my lovely mum created this fab tutorial for it. I thought it should have another day in the sun, so here it is.
Vintage china cake stand
Do you wander around your local charity stores picking up
the odd pretty, but mismatched, china plate? Beautiful ceramics and bone
china are so enticing, but what do you do with them? It’s not sense to
keep them stashed away in a cupboard, and an entire un-matching dinner service
takes some chutzpah to carry off, but what about a pretty cake-stand?
It is, just as it seems,
a pile of three plates of decreasing size and two sherry or liqueur glasses,
preferably one of each so they are of decreasing size also.
The other thing you need is Araldite – that’s the glue that
comes in two tubes, an adhesive and a hardener. Trust me – no other glue will
do.
Unless you are VERY good at finding the centre of things by
eye, you need to draw round each plate on a piece of paper and cut out each
resulting circle. Fold the circle in quarters to find the centre, then using a
pair of compasses (go on, raid your old school geometry set) draw a little
circle in the middle of each paper “plate” about the circumference of the
sherry/liqueur glass. Cut this inner circle out and put the paper template back
onto the china plate. Mark the cut-out circle with pencil. This is where you
will glue the glass. You need to mark this point on the under and top sides of
the middle plate and on the top side of the bottom plate and the under side of
the top plate. Are you with me so far?
Make sure your glasses and plates are absolutely clean and
dry. Mix up some adhesive and hardener and glue the larger of your glasses rim-side
down to the centre of the largest plate, and the smaller glass to the centre of
the medium sized plate. Plonk some kind of weight (a book for example) carefully
on top of the base of each glass to keep it in close contact with the plate and
walk away.
Do not fiddle with it – leave it to dry overnight. Next morning, try
picking the glass up and the plate should come too. If it doesn’t you need to
start all over again with more glue.
All being well, then you mix up more adhesive and hardener
and glue the base of each glass to the underside of the relevant plate. Place a
weight on top of the whole structure and leave for twelve hours again.
After that – arrange the cup-cakes and call the girls round!