Shell Box

I didn't get a card made today, but I made this box for my gift shop.

To make it, I sanded an unfinished box, and painted it brown. Then I traced around a JustRite By the Sea oval stamp and painted the oval a cream color. After that, I stamped the shell image on the stamp with a dark Brown Anna Griffin stamp.

Next, I used the border from the stamp and stamped it outside the oval using Memory Box Frost. Big mistake. I'll tell you why when I get to that part. :-P

Well, it seem that neither of these inks dry on top of acrylic paint, so I had to dry them with a heat gun.

Once dry, I painted them with acrylic paint and a gel medium so they would be more blended and translucent. Then I painted over the oval's border with cream paint, and added little swirly things around the box with the same cream.

Next, I began to varnish the box with acrylic varnish. That's when disaster struck. The frost ink around the oval didn't like my varnish and smeared all over the darker brown paint. Anyway, since it was only on the dark brown, and the brown ink on the stamp in the middle didn't smear, I decided I could save it. In order to have it all match without redoing the box, I had to varnish the whole top. I varnished from the inside out so the white would only smear outside the oval, then I let it dry and put a couple of coats of the dark brown paint around the oval to cover up the stamping and smears. Since I hadn't really liked the stamped border anyway, (it looked a bit heavy for the design after I painted it), I just added little swirls to match the ones on the outside of the box. After this I added more varnish to the outside of the box, and everything worked out fine.