Another upcycled shoe box

Right after I re-purposed my first shoe box I realized  I needed another one for the fabric scraps left over from updating the navy blue dress, from the wall art in the bedroom…

And since I didn’t want to make it identical to the first one, and because it was going to store pieces of fabric…I covered it in fabric, specifically in two tank tops long lost in the wardrobe.  

Good idea…but where do I start from?

I literally dressed the box in one of the tops and started thinking how and from where to start cutting….how do I cover as much of the box as possible in one single piece of the fabric …

I got rid of the  straps…I stretched the tank top all over the box…I was going to cover almost the whole box at once, only one side was going to remain uncovered. 

I cut the tank top in such a way to have a big piece of fabric. Here, too, just like when I made the other box, I marked down on the fabric the exact spot of the box, I glued the bottom of the box (not the fabric), and placed the fabric on the glue covered box bottom. 

With the wrapping paper box I had some air bubbles, some wrinkles…here, the cotton glued perfectly even to the box.

The sides of the box were next: glue, fabric stretched as much as possible, pressed hard with my palms, fixed the fabric with some clothes pins and wherever needed, I added some more glue. Cut and fold the corners. 

Everything went smoothly up to this point…

I had planned to cover this side of the box with a part of the top that I had cut off earlier. Just that this piece of fabric wasn’t exactly rectangular and no matter how clean I would’ve tried to cut around the edges, it would’ve still looked sloppy. So I decided to glue some seams…at least to the three sides of the fabric that were going to be visible, not the bottom part as well.  

From here onwards I could’ve used a third hand, as the stripe of fabric I was determined to use to cover the side of the box, was sensibly smaller than what I needed…

So I glued one side of the fabric to the bottom of the box…and since I only have two hands used to stretch the heck out of the fabric to go around the corners of the box…a third hand would’ve helped me to fix the glued fabric onto the rest of the box side…thanks God I have a chin!

I had eventually made it…

The lid of the box…the lid of the box was a bit tore apart….

So I cut off from the white top the bottom part, with the seam as I planned to wrap and glue it around the edges of the lid to sort of keep it together.

The top of the lid was going to be covered in khaki fabric…I didn’t want to use the white one, as the box lid had a print on top and the white fabric was sort of see through. I thought to myself that I would glue the khaki fabric to the top of the lid, trim the excess fabric on the edges and cover the that part with the edges with the straps…like a border. 

Only that the straps weren’t long enough for the whole lid and they didn’t look as pretty either…So I was stuck...’cause I had already glued the fabric and trimmed it …

So I had to rethink the design…I got some twine and glued it around the edge to cover the trim cut…I wrapped it around three times…but then I got bored , I had glue all over my fingers…no more fun, although there still were some parts where the cardboard was visible and needed to be covered. SO I made some twine swirls and glued them on the exact spots that needed covering…”the artist’s vision”…Being in the “artist’s vision” mood, I forgot to take pictures of the process…

I snapped out of it when I had thought of adding a fabric flower to the lid. And since I had some irregular stripes of both the white and khaki fabric and the big seam of the khaki top…

… I sew them one after another, swirled them all together sewing the flower as I went along….

The decoupage glue was too delicate to glue the flower with so I took out the Moment Fix glue (which is  used to glue heavy stuff around the house…but…I had it laying around the house since I had renovated the bedroom…) and fixed the fabric flower to the lid. 

I like the final result…and it goes pretty well with the other box…