A Little Box of Dreams and Wishes - First DT piece for Rhedd's Creative Spirit

Hi there - today I'm sharing my first ever make as part of a Design Team - so I'm feeling a little nervous!!  Please do pop over to Rhedd's Creative Spirit to see the wonderful makes that my teamies have shared.

This is a little altered wooden box that I have blinged up a little. You may realise looking through earlier posts that 'Bling' is a totally new concept for me, slightly out of my comfort zone, so I hope you like it :o)

This is what it looked like to begin with, just plain wood, I had bought it because I really liked the fretwork on the lid, originally though it was just a cut-away so you could see into the box - which would have been good for holding potpourri or similar - but I wanted to try something different.

My first step was to paint the box inside and outside with gesso as I always find that plain wood like this really soaks up paint otherwise.  The gesso puts down a surface layer that sort of seals the wood so that you can then paint as you wish.  I mixed up some of my paint; a metallic pearl and some deep violet; to make a lighter purple with a slight sheen.  Once dry I added some metal filigree corners to lower corners of the box - I really like the way they look.

I then glued a piece of purple card to the underside of the lid to create a base to the fretwork.  I mixed some clear texture paste with some glass glitter and then pushed this into all of the scrolls.

Not very easy to show the glitter, hope you can see it in the photo below.

I was really pleased with this but still felt it needed a little more so I set to thinking about what I would use the box for.  As I say, it is quite small about 3 inches wide and 2.5 inches deep.  Last year I kept a Gratitude Jar (although I didn't keep up with it as much as I should have done) and I intend to do this again for 2015, but I wanted something else to go alongside it.  I decided that this could be a lovely little holder for my secret wishes over the year to come, and so it is a 'Little Box of Dreams and Wishes' and it is now labelled as such.

I used a set of alphabet stamps in a fancy font to stamp out the labels and simply glued them in place, they were just the final touch I think the box needed.

Thanks for reading :o)

Steffi

I would like to enter this into the current challenge, #8 at The Mixed Media Monthly Challenge - Something New for the New Year (as I said above Bling is totally new to me!) - here:  http://mixedmediamc.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/mixed-media-monthly-challenge-8.html