Boxing Clever by Buttons

Hi everyone, and welcome to my second GDT piece. My offering this time produced fingers which needed some serious scrubbing but the end results were definitely worth it.

The stamps I used for this one were the small but beautiful Gibson Girls set available from The Artistic Stamper. These elegant ladies were perfect for adding some well needed refinement to my texture-filled boxes as you will see from the following images.

Now the original plan was to decorate a small round paper substrate box to house my bracelet collection. I had an idea in my head about the sort of look I wanted to achieve but it took a fair bit of experimenting to get there.

It all started with embossing metal foil sheets applied to the box. This was then covered roughly in a mix of blue and green alcohol inks to give it a slight verdigris feel.

Next came a layer of Distress Paints - red, yellow and orange all mixed together over the top of the inks (with fingers!!) with particular attention paid to the embossed areas. By then attacking it all with wire wool I finally had a real rusted/verdigris look.

After some extra dabs of alcohol inks I stamped out the Gibson Girls images with Coffee Archival Ink onto tissue paper. They were torn apart carefully and applied to the box with Glue n Seal. It was important to ensure that the more delicate features (in particular the eyes) were placed in areas where the embossing would not distort them. Using these smaller images meant this was far easier to achieve.

To finish a little extra ink and paint were applied over the top to help blend the tissue in further. Next, attention turned to the box rim. I used a mask and white texture paste (with a heat gun - what can I say? I'm impatient!) Finally for the little box I added a small ribbon pull.

As this process worked so well on my bracelet box, attention turned to a larger suitcase housing my (rather large) nail polish collection - well, although it did the job well the purple/black/white/green pattern wasn't the most fetching!

Obviously this involved covering a far larger area, so planning where to place the faces was important. The handle and other metalwork also needed attention. I turned again to the same alcohol ink mix and twisted ribbon around the handle to make it far nicer to use and look at.

And so both boxes were completed, coordinated and could now be proudly displayed here (and in my bedroom!) I hope you like them as much as I now do. I've got one final GDT post for you later this month so I hope you'll join me for that. For now, keep crafting!
Jenny Marples
Pushing The Right Buttons
Stamps used - Small But Beautiful Gibson Girls