An Altered Cheese Box!

Hello and welcome friends and followers to Magpieheaven where I've been lifting my spirits by playing with some altering! Over at Frilly and Funkie they have a challenge to use stencils and texture on a project. You can find out all about the F&F Challenge here. I had so much fun making a textured card a few days ago, I wanted to explore stencils and texture more on an altered box. Here is what I created! I do hope it's OK to enter two projects. I should also like to enter my box for the Fashionable Stamping Challenge where the theme is Anything Goes as long as there's stamping on your project. My focal stamps are from the new Lynne Perrella Collection at PaperArtsy LPC30 and the script stamp is from LPC28. With this challenge there is a maximum of three projects allowed. Then over at Altered Eclectics there is also an Anything Goes Challenge, so I'm setting sail with my altered box in three challenges this week!

I began with a box that my daughter gave Mr Magpie for Christmas - full of delicious cheese! Obviously it was all eaten long ago! I knew that I wanted to use some corrugated cardboard with my stencils and Grunge Paste. I gathered together all kinds of bits and pieces to fill my altered box. You can see here they were threatening to slide off the edge of the table and in the end I had to reject some my favourite textured pieces to keep for another time!

You can see the cheese box at the back of the picture. I loved the star cut-outs along the side and the way that the sunlight beams in through them.

I got so involved with this project there was no time to take step by steps, but I hope these details will help to explain what I did. I painted my piece of corrugated card, having cut it to fit my box. Then I had a wonderful time adding layers of Fresco Paints! I kept mainly to a variety of PaperArtsy Fresco blues and greens, including the new Lin Brown Translucent Chartreuse, but I did also add some Tikka and some Caramel Fresco. I Grunge Pasted through a Prima Flourish Stencil, having coloured my PaperArtsy Grunge Paste first with Bora Bora. I then spray painted with diluted Fresco in Inky Pool. When all this was dry, I sanded lightly with a block and added Treasure Gold in Rose Quartz, Aquamarine and Green Amber. You can see that I went for another kind of texture on the sides of my box by painting them first with Little Black Dress Fresco, then a think layer of Crackle Glaze and finally when this was dry nice thick strokes of Antarctic.

Here you can see the effect in another place higher on my box. I love the effect of Treasure Gold on corrugated cardboard. The beautiful tissue was a gift from a dear crafting friend, Kerry Hickton of Kezzy's Crafty Journey. I painted the back with Bora Bora and die cut pieces to use as flowers with lots of leftover scraps of card and paper I had coloured and stenciled as backgrounds for previous projects. The envelope is from the Funkie Junkie boutique and contained goodies bought from the shop including the lovely little paper heart. I love it so much I had to use it on a project. The tiny cards inside are stamped with script one side and the new Lynne Perrella images for PaperArtsy on the other, which you can also see dotted over the box. The feather is one I found on my wanderings!

I loved creating the layers of texture here, using some Tim Holtz paper from my stash, a decorative corner I had rusted using vinegar and salt and some honey-comb stencils from Crafters' Workshop used with Grunge Paste. The little glass pebbles are stuck over book text, an idea I love and discovered from Alison Bomber aka Butterfly from Words and Pictures. The stamp here is from LP30 stamped in Onyx Black Versafine on painted card. I used the script from LP28 on the sides of my box, my envelope and on the backs of the cards inside the envelope.

I bought these little Tim Holtz tags when I first started crafting and I haven't used them often, but I loved the message of this one. So often we go about with music from ipods and radios to block out the sounds of the world. It's nice sometimes just to listen to the birds singing, water flowing, rain drops on the roof and - of course - on roses! I made lots of roses using card I had painted for backgrounds and did not use for other projects and it was such fun to see how the stenciled and stamped and painted papers transformed into all kinds of extraordinary roses!

I used garden twigs painted gold and some corrugated card twirled around a pencil as a vine!

Tiny punched out leaves made from painted and stenciled card formed a trail along the floor of the box.

I was quite pleased with the peeling look of the textures on the project that echoed the shape of the leaves and petals. the rose in the foreground below is stamped with a Hot Picks steampunk flower.

Thank you dear, patient friends if you've stayed with me for all these photos. It was just so lovely to feel well again yesterday that I crafted to my heart's content and got thoroughly carried away!

I hope that wherever you are you are feeling fit and well and that your week is a creative one!