Alphabet Sewing Box Tutorial

Hello friends!! This month the Eileen Hull Inspiration Team are showcasing Eileen's new Sizzix Paper Flower Party collection. 

I just found out that emails haven't been sent out for my posts lately. I am so sorry about that, and I don't know how I missed it. I think I have fixed it now and there should be an email coming soon, if anyone is still not getting emails, please let me know. 

The flower dies in this collection are wonderful and you'll be able to make a large variety of flowers, and even more so if you mix the dies. 

I made an alphabet sewing box for my son. Since I made my Vintage Cantilever Sewing Box earlier this year, Anton has been asking me to make him a blue one. To give it a different twist, I turned it into an alphabet box. He walked in on me when I was busy putting it together, before I had glued on the flowers and added anything to the boxes, and thought it looked pretty, but 'needed something more'. Funny. If you want to see another example of flower-making using a different Eileen Hull die, check out my Yellow Flower card. 

These are the pieces you need for one sewing box. They were die cut from white Little Sizzles Mat Board. 

I painted all the pieces with Stormy Sky Distress Paint. This is one of my least used blue shades of Distress Paint and I was wondering why I use it so rarely, since it is a great neutral blue.

When the paint was dry, I stamped the pieces with three different alphabet stamps by Tim Holtz. I love alphabet stamps, the School Desk one is my most used stamp and the new Typo background stamp is awesome and if you use just one row of it, it looks like many different stamps.

Sand all the edges. I ended up not using the piece at the bottom left - which is die cut from the Recipe Card Box. I used it on my Vintage Sewing Box as a divider between the two upper compartments and if you want to, check that post out for how to use it.

A piece of ordinary tissue was stamped with the Newsprint and Typo stamps and Jet Black ink and then I die cut flowers from it using the Romance Flower die. There are four differently sized flowers on the die. You can die cut quite a lot of flowers in one go, since the tissue is so thin. I die cut a lot more flowers than what you see here.

Layer the flowers together and add a brad to the middle. You need quite a lot of layers to make the flowers look full. Crumble up and then separate the sheets.

Mist two of the flowers with Tumbled Glass and two with Weathered Wood.

Die cut leaves from color-core cardstock. The Spring Leaves die has four great leaf shapes, making it a very versatile die, and since it is a Bigz die, you can die cut the leaves from thick materials too.

Emboss in the Daisy Wreath folder, and then sand.

To fill the boxes, I die cut a lot of different letters and numbers, so that he can write words and practice. Some of them were die cut from fun foam, and some were die cut from mat board which was first painted with Distress Paint. I used Tim Holtz: Alphabet Typo Upper, Vintage Market XL, Billboard, Word Play and Block Talk Lowercase dies. That way, he can practice on how letters and numbers look in different fonts, capital and lowercase.

It is easy to assemble the box and since I showed all the steps in my Vintage Sewing Box tutorial, I won't repeat them here, but if you aren't sure, just check out that post.

The flowers and leaves were glued to the top of the box.

I was really happy with the look of these text tissue flowers and they are easy to make.

Layer the leaves under the flowers.

Here's the smaller of the Newsprint flowers, you could also mix the two stamped patterns, or use something like a polka dot stamp instead. I used the same Newsprint stamp on the background of yesterday's mixed media layout.

I used Tim Holtz Alpha Dies as handles, from the front, you see the letters 'A' and 'B'.

I used some matte blue brads that I found in my stash. I have a lot of coloured brads that I got years ago.

This is what it looks like open, although you can of course open it even more.

The boxes are filled with the letters and numbers.

I need to die cut some more of the common letters, because he already ran out of a's.

To make the top lid close, I did the same thing that I did on my Vintage Sewing Box, namely to die cut the back part of the lid one more time, and use that as a closing mechanism.

And there is is done. Mat board projects last real well, even with pretty heavy use. Anton has boxes and containers that I made over three years ago, and which he uses for storage of little things. They are all still in perfect order even though they are handled a lot.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial! Thank you so much for stopping by!

Happy crafting!

Anna-Karin

Supplies: 

Sizzix Bigz Die Flower, Romance	Sizzix Bigz Die - Leaves, Spring	Sizzix LEAVES SPRING	Sizzix Embossing Folder - Daisy Wreath	Sizzix ScoreBoards XL Die - Box, Cantilever Sewing Box
Sizzix Little Sizzles - 6" x 13" Mat Board Pack, 6 White Sheets	Sizzix Bigz XL Typo Upper	Tim Holtz Sizzix ALPHABET TYPO UPPER	Tim Holtz Sizzix BILLBOARD ALPHABET	Sizzix Bigz XL Alphabet Die - Billboard
Tim Holtz Sizzix BLOCK TALK LOWERCASE	Sizzix Bigz XL Word Play	Tim Holtz Sizzix WORD PLAY	Tim Holtz Sizzix VINTAGE MARKET	Sizzix Bigz XL Vintage Market
Tim Holtz NEWSPRINT AND TYPE	Tim Holtz TYPOGRAPHY	Tim Holtz SCHOOL DESK Stampers Anonymous	Ranger Wendy Vecchi Archival CORNFLOWER BLUE	Ranger Archival Ink Pad JET BLACK
Tim Holtz Distress Paint STORMY SKY	Tim Holtz Distress Spray Stain TUMBLED GLASS	Tim Holtz Distress Spray Stain WEATHERED WOOD	Tim Holtz ALPHA DICE	Sizzix BIG SHOT MACHINE Gray And White
Big Shot Machine	Sizzix CUTTING PAD XL Pair	Sizzix Accessory Cutting Pads, Extended	Cutting Pads, Standard, 1 Pair (Grape)	Sizzix MINT Standard Cutting Pads
Ranger Inkssentials Non Stick CRAFT SHEET	Ranger Inkssentials GLOSSY ACCENTS	Tim Holtz SANDING GRIP

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