Decorating wooden boxes | DIY Making Life Better

I think I might just start practicing my English writing skills from now on, for how great it is to see that from all over the world people are reading my posts. How nice of you to stop by! It really means a lot to me. Being able to see the ‘statistics’ is one fun part of blogging and it keeps me very motivated ;). Please, do read on, but forgive me for any spelling and grammar mistakes :).

Today I want to share one of my decorated tea boxes. Check it out!

Did I mention that I just love everything wood? There, I’ve said it. Wood is just such a warm and versatile material… I’m addicted. Remember the carved makeup storage box I wrote about last week? It came along with some tea boxes my sister ordered. She asked me to make something that could have been taken “right out of grandma’s cupboard”. A challenge…

Old and vintage and dark, that’s what I was thinking about. To add a little something interesting, I found a very nice image at the Graphics Fairy. Again! It’s always a hit 🙂 Thanks Karen!

I ordered a plain wooden tea box from an online store to start with, along with the blank makeup box and a small jewelry box (which I used for my first wood carving project. Check it out here, unfortunately it’s still in Dutch).

Blank box, before

First, I stained it with just one layer of dark varnish, a ‘reddish’ kind of dark, then transferred the image with Art Medium (Mod Podge). If you want to do this yourself, remember to print a mirror image if the graphic contains text (You can find my ‘how-to-image-tranfer-with-Art-Medium’ here).

I left the Art Medium to dry overnight, then wet the paper and rubbed it off with my fingers. Of course I ran out of varnish right after the first layer, so I bought another can of dark varnish, which had a slightly different color (‘wengé’). I used it to stain the inside of the box, but I guessed that staining the outside with it would make the image disappear completely… That made me apply it just to the edges and corners with a paint roller until the box had just the right ‘touch of grandma’. Well, in my opinion :).