Atishooo, Atishoooo, We Bind It All

Hello again,

I have had a lovely day off today messing about with paints, inks and stamps.
Here in the UK it is Mother's Day on Sunday. I wanted to make something for my dear Mum-in-Law as a keepsake. She is fairly difficult to buy for so I came up with a novel idea :O)) I decided to buy her a box of tissues, you know the type that come in a cube? And then make a box, big enough to hold the tissues, as a fancy dressing table piece.



I started off by cutting some mountboard to 5" x 5", making six pieces in total and then a little 5" x 2" piece. I painted both sides of all the pieces, using Pink Sherbert Adirondack Acrylic paint. I used a small brush so I didn't get too many brush marks in the paint. Once the painted sides were dry, I took some Cut & Dry foam and edged all the pieces with Walnut Stain Distress Ink. I used my Bind It All machine to punch holes in the edges of the mountboard pieces. I decided to do the punching now as I didn't really want to handle the sides once the stamping had been done.



I then chose some stamps, in particular my old faithful Brush Butterfly (Penny Black), another butterfly (PSX) and some script (Artistic Stamper). I wanted to add some sentiments to the sides, so I painted a piece of thick card using the Pink Sherbert and then stamped a few sentiments by Penny Black. For the stamping I used Walnut Stain ink. Because the paint is not very porous, I embossed all the images with clear embossing powder to set them. The "lid" was a little more complex. I had to make the leap of faith and cut a hole in it! Being mountboard and therefore really thick, I had to be very careful with my Stanley knife and managed to cut the hole without cutting myself (usually, I am notoriously clumsy with sharp things :O))



For the sides, I stamped the butterflies and then masked them, stamping over the top with the Script stamp, again, using clear embossing ink on the butterflies. I wanted to decorate the inside of the box too, just in case MIL decides to use the box for something else. For this I just inked up some butterfly stamps and randomly stamped the reverse sides of the pieces.






The little 2" piece was to be used as a flap for a closure. I picked up some little metal clasps last year, not quite sure where from though :O)) They are silver, and I thought that they would look better in gold, so out came the old Krylon pen and I changed the colour of the clasp. To make the clasp shut properly, I used a small piece of mountboard on the front of the box to make a "step" so it married up with the main part of the clasp which is attached to the flap.





The fun bit is the stamping and getting messy. The next step is not so easy though. I used some string to bind the sides together. To make this process easier, I used a bodkin to thread the string through the holes. Once threaded, I tied individual knots in the string, tying them tightly to make sure the box holds up.





I then had a mini panic cos I realised I hadn't actually got a spare box of tissues. So off I went to the Supermarket, braving the wild weather and silly Friday night motorists :O)) Luckily, I got a box that has decorated tissues in it - and they have pink butterflies on them!! Cool!

Thanks for looking and I would love some comments about this!!

Hels xx