A Work in Progress: Jewellery Box

Over the past week I've spent some time organizing and uploading photos of all my projects to the website. Staring at all those pretty jewellery boxes gave me the itch to paint again. So I grabbed what I thought would be an easy one off the shelf and got to work.

I picked this one up at the thrift shop, thinking that it would be the perfect shape for a dresser in a dollhouse. I've had this dream for a few years to put together a Barbie dollhouse furnished with found items, and I've slowly been picking up things for it as I find them. For instance, I may have bought a necklace holder that looks like a coat tree.

I got these Barbie-sized hoodies at a craft sale last year and I couldn't resist hanging them up. Unfortunately, the little coat rack has nowhere to live at the moment, so it keeps getting moved around my very messy desk. Sign of a creative mind?

So far for the dollhouse I have a ceramic tea set or two, tiny clocks, dressers, a screwdriver, and probably other things tucked away that I've forgotten about. Last week at the thrift store I almost bought a tealight holder shaped like a stone fireplace. The only thing that stopped me (of course, besides where would I keep it, and trying not to spend money on silly things) was that the tealight part stuck out the back and I wouldn't want to cut a hole in the side of the not-yet-existent dollhouse, so it went back on the shelf. Very responsible of me. Hmm.

Anyway, back to the painting project. First thing was to remove the drawer handles, since I'm not quite digging the fish shape. They weren't attached with a screw, so I was a little nervous about how I would get them off. I tried prying them off with my hands, and then a pair of tweezers. Then I took out my trusty utility knife and they sliced right off. Turns out that they were just glued on and so once I cut the paper cover of the drawer front they came off easily.

Then I picked a colour. Gray. I started painting the back, and of course once that was done I decided that the gray just wasn't working. So I let that dry and picked out a purple instead. I felt a little silly going from purple to another shade of purple, but at least the new purple isn't decorated with flecks of green (ick). As a contrasting colour I've chosen classic white.

And that's how far I've gotten.

You can't see it, but it still needs a few more coats. A few touch-ups on the purple, and a lot more on the white. I'm painting white on white so it looks better in the photo than it really is. The trick here is to cover up the dingy white with enough coats without making it hard to get the drawer back in. That's the trouble with painting the inside of drawers. There's always a chance that if you overdo it that the drawers won't fit, or they'll stick.

My plan is to dress up the front with a stencil, but I'm not quite there yet. And of course I have to figure out something about the drawer pulls. Knobs are not so hard, but I've tried to replace handles on jewellery boxes before and the people at the hobby store (and the hardware store) look at you like you're speaking a different language when you ask. Even then, finding knobs that are small enough is a challenge. Hopefully this time I'll have more luck. :)