Boxes

 Back in September I posted about the boxes I'd made (here) with the help of my square. The boxes I made then were finished with matte paint. It occured to me that I could make the same type of boxes look much fancier with a shiny lacquer finish.

The first box was painted burgundy and black, and sized to fit a large perfume bottle. I dotted some red paint in the corners of the lid, but found that the colors were too close to show up well, especially in photos!

Since I found that the dark colored backgrounds were difficult to decorate, I switched to lighter colors for the next boxes, and used a combination of hand-cut Victorian images and painting  to decorate them.

The blue box stayed empty, but the pink box got a surprise!

The lining is padded white silk satin. I love to make jewelry using swarovski crystals! I'm honestly not one for jewels or crystals most of the time, but when I'm doing jewelry, they make the pearls and other bits come to life. I seem to use the pale blue and amethyst colors most frequently. The colors are a bit more interesting than plain diamonds, but not as bright as the reds or greens. It took me a long time to buy the swarovski, they always seemed expensive! Instead I used to hunt through bags of sequins to find the tiny punched circles that fell out of the hole in the sequin centers. Or you can get the smallest plastic jewels available (about 1/16th" across), stick them down with double sided tape, and cut them smaller. Both of these are time consuming methods though, and the results aren't nearly as good.