a tale of shaped bokeh

I bought a vintage cookie press from a thirft store some time last year. I thought it was cool, but I never used it and forgot about it completely until I saw THIS when browsing shaped bokeh photos. I immediately tried thinking of where I put the box that housed MY cookie press. In the closet? In a box with my craft stuff? Surely not in my itty bitty kitchen? I put the baby to bed* and then went downstairs, found a flashlight, and looked under the TV stand. There it was, right where I hid it from a just-crawling-baby-who-wants-everything!

Initially, I tried shaped bokeh with some black cardstock. I wanted the lights on my Christmas tree to be hearts in a photo of my kids (collective “Awwwwwwww!”). My Xacto knife was M.I.A. so I used a box cutter and ended up with a pretty crappy heart, but it still worked, as you can see! It got me super pumped and I had dreams of painstakingly cutting out tiny shapes onto cardstock for various filters. Fast forward to the evening when I see someone used their cookie press discs as shaped-bokeh filters and I go on my little hunt.

results:

the little dome has a tiny star shaped tip:

*This is some feat! The past few nights, he has been fighting bedtime with insane sobbing and thrashing for about 4-5 minutes before completely conking out.