Paper Dolls Altered Jewelry Box

I found an old black jewelry box at a yard sale a few months ago for 25 cents.  The exterior was scratched and faded and the inside had very old, yucky padding where it had most likely once held a necklace.  I wasn't sure what to use the box for at the time but felt inspired to renovate it and then hope an idea came later.

Started out painting the outside with a fresh coat of black acrylic craft paint. After that was dry, I used a stencil and applied molding paste to both the front and back cover.  Allowed that to dry and then painted the molding paste design with various colors of Golden acrylic paints.  Added a large Prima flower and some ribbon and called it done.

I removed the old insides and cut some Tim Holtz paper to size for the background and also a front pocket.  Added some machine stitching for decor.

Once the box was done, I just stuck a few Tim Holtz tags inside and sat it on display in my craft room.

Recently while looking through some clip art on the internet I came across some cute vintage paper dolls.  This brought back a flood of memories as I had quite a paper doll collection when I was young. I wondered how well the Cricut Explore would do with the print then cut feature and gave it a try.  I started by upping the resolution to 300 dpi in Photoshop Elements and making color adjustments.  This made the clip art a bit less grainy and more vibrant.  I imported into Design Space as a jpg and used the clean up tool to remove the background then proceeded with the print then cut.  It worked fairly well except for some jagged cuts around the images.  I am looking into ways to eliminate that from future attempts as I plan on cutting out lots of different paper dolls. 

The banner along the bottom is a Tim Holz die and the lettering was cut on the Explore using the Lyrical Letters 2 Slab font.  A bit of gel pen work was added to create stitches and highlights.

Lastly, I glued dresses on some Tim Holtz hanger clips and hung them from a piece of jute strung across the top left of the box.  Used a high pop up dot to keep the dresses from falling off or swinging around.

This project was fun because it was an original idea (with borrowed clip art) for an enjoyable process of trial and error with no idea how it would all turn out.