Twas The Night Before Christmas

... when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St Nicholas soon would be there.

It was my turn to choose the theme this month at Christmas Crafting! and I chose the poem Twas The Night Before Christmas.  

I tried a new technique with this project.  The stamp is from Magnolia, and I stamped that onto Bristol Board using black Stayz On ink.  I then used Distress Inks and a water brush to colour the main parts of the image.  Once completely dry, I used Prismacolor pencils to deepen the shadows and put in any fine work such as the berries.

I used Bristol Board rather than watercolour paper because it's intended for multimedia, and it takes the addition of the coloured pencils better than traditional watercolour paper does.  I can see where a few watermarks have been left, but overall I was happy with this as a first attempt and can see the potential for a lot of creativity, and I feel I had a lot more control of the inks using the Bristol Board.

The box that I chose to decorate is an upcycled box from Domino's Pizza, they use these for their dippers and sweets.  The manager of my local store was kind enough to give me some brand new ones to play with.

 

These little boxes are great for altering.  They have a lovely parchment colour as the base, the commercial branding is easily covered with paper, and the inside is wax coated, making it ideal for giving food treats.

I hope I have given you some inspiration this month, why not try altering or upcycling a project! 

Chester's Music Box

Technique:  Papercraft

Stamps:
Retro Chester by Pollycraft

Pens & Inks:
Copic Pens
Earth Tone: E31, E33, E35
Flesh: E000, E02
Orange: YR02, YR04
Grey: C0, C3, C5, C7, C9
Mustard: Y23, Y26, Y28
Sakura Gelly Roll pen in silver
Spiced Marmalade Distress Ink

Papers:
Xtron by Kaisercraft

The second challenge at LESS-ology is to make a trinket box, and of course you must upcycle at least one item.  So many choices! I chose a box of tea.

The first thing I did was to re-inforce all the edges with tape, the type that picture framers use.  This also hides all the multi-coloured corners.

Then each panel of the box was covered with paper, the edges inked with a little Spiced Marmalade Distress Ink.

Chester has been coloured with Copic pens. I had a little mishap that turned out quite fortuitously.  When I uncapped one of my markers three blobs of ink flew onto the paper, so I had to cut away the background.  This turned out quite well though I thought.

This box is now proudly being displayed in my son's room who is using it to store his Nintendo DS games.