Boxing day !

If the brain is a mysterious organ then mine is even more so! One night late ( again ) I suddenly had the desire to make small boxes. I had just received a most amazing product ( AliExpress ) in 350 grm Kraft Card. 50 sheets about 12 euros, incredibly cheap. I sat by the fire and made some patterns and began assembly.

 In this second photo you can see that I have assembled the corners with Japanese Tape which will be covered up.

 In this photo I reinforced the structure with a second layer of card. This I realised was overkill, you could almost stand on the finished box it was so rigid.

 Here I had covered the box and lid with a scaled down wall paper sample found on the net. I sanded the photocopy ( as it was a bit shiny ) and all the corners and edges and then waxed the whole box with dark antique wax and polished it up. I was quite pleased with the result and instead of going to bed happy I began to make more!

 I tried several shapes and once the patterns ready began sorting through my stock of miniature photocopies, mostly taken from old sales catalogues scaled down.

 Here is another finished box, same method but just one layer of card. I chose this pretty antique print as it reminded me of those old chocolat boxes you sometime find ( always empty! ) For the underside I chose this tiny newsprint.

 The scale of the newsprint is of course wrong as that would make it a huge box ! but its artistic licence, so there !

 Here is one of the other shapes covered in a Toile de Jouy Hunting print. The box is hinged. I later painted the Inside green.

 Here is a small group of three, the smaller one is covered in a 'Domino paper', companies like Antoinette Poisson in Paris still make these 18 th century style papers as well as boxes and textiles.

https://www.antoinettepoisson.com/

 More of the finished boxes in different sizes . Most of them I painted inside with F&B, either off
white or green .

 Views of the Inside and undersides.

 Before moving on to a new project I thought that I would see just how small I could make these without going mad. This one is about 12 mm by 9 mm. I sneezed and spent ten minutes under the table looking for it. I gave it the same finish with wax and painted the inside green.

 I made the underside in the same paper this time.

 My collection of miniature images came from a mistake originally in scale when 'saving' and photocopying. I couldn't imagine what I was going to do with such small images but here we are !

 This is the second smallest one covered in a 'Chinoiserie' style paper with 'Florentine ' paper underside.