Old Crafts: Boxes

     Recently, I was doing a bit of reorganising of the photo and art files on my laptop and I found pictures of these boxes I had made. I thought it would be fun to show them to you guys because these are from a good while before I even started this blog, back when I was active on deviantArt.

     This little box was the first I made, not really knowing what I was doing. I started with the lid which was an origami box that I then glued lots of paper to in order to make it stronger – the paper being pages from a damaged copy of The Lord of the Rings that I had. For the container part, I cut pieces of card to fit into the lid and just taped them together before covering them with the map pages from the same book…and out of pure laziness, rather than decorate and clean up the inside of the box, I just shoved some tissue paper in there!

     I like to think I’ve gotten a bit better at crafts over the years since making this box but I’m definitely still as lazy with the finished touches!

     I can’t remember where I learned how to make this next style box because it was so long ago. I have a feeling it was a tutorial someone had posted on devientArt but I can’t be sure.

     It’s a pretty cool style box. Seeing these pictures is making me want to try make some of these again. I remember I gave this to my sister’s then boyfriend, now fiancée, for his birthday and I filled each tier with sweets. Making the box was pretty simple really. All it is four strips of card attached so they close into a square and an origami box attached to each side.

     Here’s another, much more elaborately decorated version of the tiered box. I strengthened and decorated the card base with light green crepe paper, used some brown crepe paper to make a tree and a hell of a lot of dark green crepe paper scrunched up into little balls to make the leaves of the tree.

     Ah, making crepe paper balls – reminds me of doing Junior Cert art!

    I was obviously feeling very fancy when making this box. I don’t even remember how I did it but I rigged up these branches you could twist around each other to close the box – for decorative purposed really because it has a lid.

     The inside of the box had, of course, an equally summer theme with a nice piece of card on the back and each box decorated in a different colour crepe paper.

     Actually, seeing this box, I remember that when I finished it I had an idea of making another similar one with a tree on it but to have each side of the box decorated to represent a different season. I never got around to making that box but it would have been a cool idea. Maybe someday I’ll make that!

     Well, I hope this has been fun for you. I enjoyed reminiscing. I like looking back at things I made or drew years ago, do you? Sometimes I look back and think ‘wow, I was so bad back then!’. Other times I look back at pieces I did and think ‘actually, that’s not so bad’. Still other times I look at something and wonder what was going on in my head to make me do that!

     What do you think when you look back at your old arts and crafts?