box – A Smith of All Trades

Indoor Window Box

April 1, 2015April 1, 2015 Jessica Smith

IT’S APRIL FOOLS! No jokes in today’s blog posts (promise!), but big jokes at work today. I had the pleasure of creating an April Fools poster and web story to hopefully give our students a chuckle or two. We had such a fun time brainstorming ideas and I was tickled to design and write a joke-riddled poster and story. It’s not often we get to be super funny at the business school, so this was quite the treat for me.

Do you play any pranks on April Fools? When I was younger I remember my dad calling me to tell me he had just seen an elephant run by his office at work. I totally bought it! A few years ago, my officemate (now one of my best friends and a great craft night buddy) decided to tape the receiver of my phone down. I’m dense and couldn’t figure out why my phone wouldn’t answer when people called me. She had to tell me because one of our colleagues kept calling and I kept accidentally hanging up on her. Whoops. I am very easy to prank.

So who knows how many times I will publicly demonstrate my gullibility today. Too many for sure.

Anywho, I had some fabulous thrift store luck recently that enabled me to do a quirky floral project for my bay window. We’ll call it an indoor window box.

I have been holding onto this teak box for a while, wanting to do a floral project with it. I couldn’t decide what to do though. I thought of doing glass jars with flowers, but mason jars were too wide. So I prowled thrift stores and found a bunch of pretty white vases to fill the box.

The funny thing was the vases I found were all from different thrift stores. They must be a standard florist vase because of how common they are:

You can see one is more opaque than the others. Meh, perfection is overrated.

The vases fit perfectly in my indoor window box, so I happily skipped off to Michaels with a birthday gift card from my god momma to buy paper flowers for the project.

I came away with these beauties:

All that was left to do was put all of the items together. Not that hard, huh?

I think if I stumble upon one more vase I’ll snatch it up and add it to the box. There’s definitely room for one more. Couldn’t hurt, right?

My indoor window box looks really great in the bay window. It fills the space nicely without blocking the view. Plus, I am really digging the pink, wood and white combo! Looks pretty sweet with the gray and mint combo I’ve got going on in the living room.

Happy April Fools! … do people say that?

Craft Projects, Furniture, Jewelry

Jewelry Box reveal… finally!

November 27, 2013November 26, 2013 Jessica Smith

How sad is it that I’ve had this project complete for months and still haven’t shared it!? Very sad.

Oh well! The time has come to share my jewelry box project that took me months to do because I couldn’t decide what the heck I wanted.

I found this jewelry box in an antique store for 50% off, so I got it for a steal of $20-some bucks. Some of the jewelry boxes I was looking into buying cost more than $100, so that seemed like a great price.

I wanted to get rid of the gold tone to the wood and the stinky smell in the drawers so I decided to paint the whole think and rip out the fabric liner.

Jewelry box drawers

It’s not that the liner wasn’t nice… it just was horrendous haha. And scratchy! The only really nice piece of jewelry I own is a strand of pearls that my hubby gave me at our wedding, and it would be ruined resting on that. So yeah, it had to go.

Once the drawers were cleaned out, I started to paint. And paint. And paint. And paint.

Sometimes I forget how many coats white paint takes to cover. Holy cow. When I was pleased with the coverage, I added a stencil.

Turns out, I am god awful at stenciling, so I messed up the paint job pretty badly. Once it dried, I decided to just distress the whole thing. Good choice!

I stained over the paint and gave the whole thing a coat of polyurethane.

For the knobs, I reused the same knobs that came on the jewelry box. They fit perfectly and I thought they looked nice with the distressed vibe. For the drawers, I lined each with jewelry making mat (after I botched lining it with velvet. That was just terrible).

After months of working on it off and on, I finally finished the darn thing.

I am in love.

So it took me forever to show you, but was it worth the wait?!

I hope so 🙂

Craft Projects, Dollar Store Crafts, Holiday, Valentine's Day

Hot Pink Valentine’s Day Boa Tree

January 18, 2013 Jessica Smith

Valentines Day Boa Tree

Need an inexpensive, cute Valentine’s Day decoration for the upcoming holiday? Why not make a Valentine’s Day tree!?

OK, I know trees are usually just for Christmas, but just follow along with this one because the end result is pretty darn cute.

Supplies:

1-2 boas from the dollar store
1 cereal box
Hot glue
Tape
Embellishments (ribbon, chain, etc.)

Step 1: Cut your cereal box down to one panel.

Step 2: Fold your cereal box panel into a cone shape and tape the heck out of it so it keeps the shape. This becomes the base for your tree. You can’t see the tape through the boa, so feel free to use however much you need.

Step 3: Trim the edge of the cone to be flat. You will have a lot of excess from the cereal box, so it is OK to cut a lot off. Cut it to the size that you would like your tree. I only had one boa, so I made a small tree. If you have additional boas, your tree can be taller.

Step 4: Starting at the top of your tree, hot glue your boa to the cardboard. Boas usually have small finger holes at each end that are made of rope. I put this little ring around the top of the tree and glued that on first.

Step 5: Start winding down the tree with hot glue and boa. When you get to the bottom, cut a small slit into the bottom of the cardboard base and place the other knotted finger loop in the slot. Hot glue it in place to secure the boa on the tree.

Step 6: I stuffed the base of my cone so it was a little sturdier. To do so, I spiraled hot glue in the cone and put two crumpled up paper towels in the cone.

Step 7: Embellish. I added a silver chain, black ribbon and a black bow to my tree.

Step 8: Display in your house for everyone to see. Mine’s on our mantel right now and I love it. It looks half tree, half little pink monster hiding behind our wedding photos.

Come Christmas time next year, I want to make several of these trees using white boas. I’ll probably make them in varying heights. How pretty would that be?

Happy friday and have a great weekend! Got any good plans for the holiday weekend? It’ll be visiting with family and lots of football at our house.

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