Simple box by tanjaak

Hello and good day to everyone! I'm here today to show you how I made a simple yet cute/cool storage box for my crafting supplies. This box also doubles as a perfect gift box.

The materials needed for this project are:

a box

distress crackle paint (picket fence and weathered wood)

distress ink (weathered wood and tea dye)

pearl brads (white and pink basics from WoJ)

hinge/clasp (Tim Holtz grungeboard)

paper

ink

image stamp

colouring medium of you choice

adhesive

I started my project by adding some white distress crackle paint onto my box.

After the paint had dryed I went on and added some blue distres ink and a hint of tea dye distress ink onto the box.

The next step was to make the clasp. Mine was a ready hinge piece from a Tim Holtz Idea-ology grungeboard set and I have covered it with Distress crackle paint in blue (weathered wood).

Now attach the clasp to the box with some pearl brads. These totally gorgeous ones I've used are from the WoJ store. It might be a bit difficult to punch holes to the edge of the box but I found that the easiest was to do it with a big sharp needle and twist a around in the hole to make it bigger.

Now that the box part in covered let's start on with the image to go on top. I was in a springy mood and chose this cute little gnome by Norma Fickel...the image is actually called Spring Joy. First step is to stamp the image and then go on with the background. To mkae the clouds you'll need some distres ink and a cloud template. You can draw your own cloud onto some thick paper and cut it out, it's as easy as that, but the one I always use is actually a tag from my little daughter's winter jacket. So it's always good to keep your eyes open when you buy new clothes as the tags might be worth saving for LOL. So again you need your image, template, ink and a sponge off course...and as you can see in the next picture a mask to go over the image if you want to make sure you don't smudge the image itself.

And here's how I go about it...starting from the top. Place your mask (cut from photo copier paper) over your image and your cloud template on top of that and start sponging away.

Now that the background is finished it's time to add some colour...

I did the colouring with Promarkers bu you can choose what ever colouring medium you like...and it's not set in stone that you need to make the background first and then add colour to the image, this is just the order in which I like to do things.

Here's a picture of the finished box...

...and a close-up of the image again.

Here's a small pic of my crafting table ( my "jewellery making station" and not the messy paper crafts side of it) with some finished and unfinished boxes.

Hope you enjoyed this time with me and have fun crafting!

xxxTanja