A Box of Affirmations by Astrid

Hello lovely visitors and thank you for dropping in here today. This is Astrid sharing a little ATC sized trinket box and mini booklet full of affirmations to fit inside.

These boxes come in a kit and are very easy to put together (you can download assembly instructions from the shop). They even have optional little feet, and are perfect for ATCs, Playing cards or indeed little trinkets, jewelery or whatever you wish.

I started by adding some texture crackle paste through a stencil on the lid of the box and just in random patches on the sides, using a palette knife. I then covered it with a layer of gesso.

The lid has a little handle and fits perfectly on the box. I like the jagged edge, it adds some character I think, but you can get one with a plain lid too.

Next I coloured it with various blue and white tones of acrylic paints, blending with a baby wipe and then highlighted the raised bits with some treasure gold. I chose to decorate the box with two of the butterflies from one of the mini butterfly woodshapes. There are several styles of butterflies to choose from, these came from set 6.

Made from super strong MDF, these boxes are very sturdy and perfect for altering with texture paste or crackle.

I decided to make a little accordion fold booklet to fit inside. The base was made from a piece of 3.5 by 10" Kraft card, accordion folded every 2.5 inches and then decorated with papers, inks, stamps and affirmations. And of course I decorated the pages with more awesome craft part shapes.

This is the front cover, I adhered a ribbon under the covering paper on both the front and the back to close the booklet. The front was decorated with one of the wonderful flourish wood shapes. There are many different shapes to choose from, this one is the Baroque Fancy Leaf Flourish

For this double page I chose  one of the lovely Birds of the World wood shapes. This one is from the Humming Bird Duo. I carefully broke it apart and used one for this side and the other on the following page. For the facing page I used one of the Little Heart wood shapes, that I had ready rusted up and left over from a previous project.

I think many of the wood shapes look perfect left just as they are, but for these more figurative shapes it can be lovely to colour them too. This one was coloured with water colour markers.

This is the next double page, I used some star mini mdf wood shapes on the left and the other half of the humming bird duo on the right.

One of the great things about so many of the wood shapes is that they are so versatile and can be used in parts to suit your project.

Here you can see the back page still and below you can see how the little book fits perfectly into the box.

Well, that's it from me today, hope I have inspired you to take a look at some of the wonderful craft parts that are available, and there are new ones appearing almost every week!

Thanks for visiting and hope you will have a creative weekend!!