Friendly Plastic Box

Picked up a couple of little wooden boxes from the Works in the Metro Centre the other day, I think they were £1.99 and thought 'I could do something with these'. Just what had not occurred to me at that time. I decided instead of using clay I would cover the whole thing in Friendly Plastic.

So I painted my box using the Precious Metal Blackberry paint, (my favourite), and preceded to cut and shape the plastic. I wasn't sure if it would stick to the box and in hindsight I did not need to paint the box in it's entirety as I ended up covering the whole thing.

I cut out a border of red and laid it around the edge of the box and melted it into place just to give a firm edging to place the smaller tiles against and used a metal skewer to put in the markings.

I laid the small tiles in the middle and blasted them with the heat gun and smoothed them over with my finger covered in Badgers Balm which is excellent as both a healing balm for dry hands and can act as a lubricant when used for clay etc. I always put a coating of this on my tools when working it helps minimise the drag when pulling the plastic or clay.

I then did the sides of the lid covering the edges with silver foil before melting them onto the box and continued the markings for the border onto the sides. Decision time now. Do I cover the whole box or leave it at that. My enjoyment of playing with the plastic won over and I went for the whole box.

I cut the sides to shape and again covered the edges with silver foil, melted them with the gun and then stamped into the soft plastic. The only difficulty with this is when moving onto another part you can melt the adjacent bits. I ended up covering other exposed bits with an old heat resistant mat cut into bits. It gave a little protection from the gun.

I added the little Tim Holtz lock to the front, just pushing it into the melted plastic and the key to the top.

Quite a colourful little box. I will line the inside with felt and I may put feet on, not decided as yet.

This is the start of my New York Skyline Box.

The pieces have just been cut out and placed on the top of the box then melted.

Then the indents to look like windows.

I will add more details of how it develops at a later date.





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