How It Started

I had just accomplished what I had been trying to do for so long. I had justified buying an old jewellery box from a thrift store. How? By committing to giving it a makeover. I can't remember how I got the idea, but it seems like a safe bet to blame Pinterest.

Here's what I started with:

A pretty basic wooden jewellery box. It has three drawers and a lift top compartment. When I got it it had a lot of dust I wiped off with a damp cloth. There was some wear on the lid where the finish had rubbed off. Pretty sad overall. I paid $3.

Hidden treasure inside! A lovely blue lining to the drawers, and the top compartment divided into cubes to store little things. It even had a mirror, which thrift store jewellery boxes often are missing.

I took the mirror off, which wasn't hard to do since it was only held on with an old piece of foam tape. I wiped down the interior, discovering more scratches.

Following that, I painstakingly taped off the hardware and the inside of the box using pieces of cardboard and masking tape. Nowadays I would take the lid off for painting, but here I just put tape over the hinges. I also covered up the inside of the drawers after I took this picture. Then I took it out to the backyard and put it on a large sheet of cardboard to protect the grass. It took a lot of light coats with pauses in between until I was satisfied with it.

Here's what they looked like after they dried:

Then I got to peel off all the masking tape, which felt like unwrapping a present on Christmas morning.

I think this is the only jewellery box I have that isn't painted on the inside. But as it's a musical box I couldn't very well spray paint onto the mechanism. You can just see it peeking out between the shelves.

All finished! Or is it? It seemed a little plain. I took it upstairs to my desk and started looking up images of vines with leaves. I printed out a couple and held them up to it to see what I could do. Then I took my silver paint pen and went to town, trying to mimic the vines on the paper as best I could.

I'd say it turned out pretty nice! I was pretty pleased with myself that it turned out pretty much how I imagined it would.

I continued the design down the side, still drawing freehand with the paint pen. The only mistake I made was continuing the vine a little bit on the underside of the lid. I only realized later that when you open the lid it's just a short silver line totally out of context. But oh well.

So there's the whole process I go through to redesign jewellery boxes, more or less. Mostly I hand paint them with acrylic paint now, but sometimes I use spray paint. I've used stencils, contrasting colours, and sometimes I put new linings on the insides (but that's not as fun as painting). Each box takes multiple hours, and some are in rougher shape than others. But I love seeing the difference.