Gilded Bee Box with Creative Expressions

Hello readers and welcome to the new followers. I hope that you have had a pleasant week? As usual at the moment my week has been a busy one. A mixture of packing, sorting, crafting and trying to carry on with the usual things us 'housekeepers' do. And it is back to school tomorrow for my son so the traditional cries of  'Mum I need new shoes' came in as expected over the weekend; too late to act on and no time to go shopping given that it is a Bank Holiday here! *sigh* I do love him though!!

Right onto the blog project, a sweet little hexagonal box which fitted perfectly with the bee on the stamp. My mind wandered on to golden honey, the yellow and black of bumble bees, and honeycomb hexagons. Aren't bees interesting? I love the improbability of the flight of a bumble bee, something so tubby shouldn't be able to fly should it? And the fascinating way honey bees tell each other where the best nectar is and how that without them we wouldn't be able to pollinate the crops we need for our foods. VERY interesting. Yet again I have digressed......

Back on track, I started with a new inexpensive wooden box. It needed no preparation or undercoating, but if you are using a pre-used box then you may need to sand off any existing finishes and even give it an undercoat. Next step was to measure the faces and cut a piece of black card to fit each face. 

I stamped onto each of the pieces of card with gilding flake glue using the botanical spray stamp. Be careful to clean the stamp between each impression to avoid the glue from 'drying' onto the stamp. Try to get as much of the image onto each piece, you want to have plenty of gilded areas on each piece. Cover with the flakes and once completely set, give them a rub to buff and remove any excess flake. Stick the pieces onto the box with Cosmic Shimmer glue.

Using my finger I applied flake glue to each of the edges and gilded them to add more interest. I didn't add any flake to the edges where the lid meets the base of the box simply because I was worried it might interfere with the closing of the box. Trust me I wanted to gild almost everything at this point it is such a fab technique!

The top was crying out for a bit of decoration in addition to the gilding and what better than the bee itself! I used a couple more pieces of hexagonal card, one completely gilded the other with the bee stamp and glue as before.

I added some feet, and a closure which came from another box. I covered the screw heads with little black gems as they were ugly!!

Main Ingredients - there aren't that many this week!

• Foundation black card
• Cosmic Shimmer glue
• Cosmic Shimmer flake and glitter glue
• Cosmic Shimmer gilding flakes
• Botanical Spray stamp
• A box

Hope you give it a go, it is a simple way to breathe new life into an old box! I will certainly be doing it again, you know I love boxes and this gilding technique is a breeze to do.

Thanks for dropping in and I hope you make it back next week to see where I went with some denim ink and a bit of brown cardboard......

Kim X