Crafty Cardmakers - Use a Food Container

It was my turn this week over at Crafty Cardmakers to set the challenge and I had a think about it and then decided to take my inspiration from something I love... FOOD!  Hehe!  Food is fab, we need it to survive and it comes in packaging of all shapes and sizes and how often do you end up dumping it in the bin when it could be used for something else?  So why not have a challenge to make something else out of a food container?  It could be a jar, a tin, anything at all which once contained food.  I am a bit of a hoarder when it comes to that sort of thing, and my craft room is packed with lots of things which I think might come in useful for something at some point.  I just pity my poor fella who has to share the room with the tiny little computer desk I have allowed him to have in the corner lol

My inspiration this time came from a combo box from a well-known pizza chain.  I really love their food and especially like the combos that they do with chicken strips and potato wedges.  It just seem such a shame to throw the box away and I decided to have a go at making it into something else.  It already folds up to make a funky shape, and has holes in it to contain the dips and that set me thinking.  Why not make it into a funky gift type box to hold something else?

I set about painting it with white acrylic paint to start with as the company logo is emblazoned on the box in strong colours so it took a few coats to white it out to give me a nice base to work on.  It was only after having a chat with the manager of the shop who let me have a new unused one that I realised that if I had folded it the other way it was white to begin with and I wouldn't have needed to use so much paint.  Doh! Never mind eh? I had gone this far already so decided to plow on.  What's the point in getting this far with a recycling project to only go and throw it away?

Once the paint had dried, I sprayed it all over with some Adirondack color wash and let it dry then stamped with some stazon using a swooshy stamp and let that dry too.  The dip holes are a perfect size for putting a tealight into.  I wouldn't recommend using real tealights unless you want to set your box (and probably your house too) on fire, instead use battery operated tealights which you can usually pick up quite cheaply from the likes of Hobbycraft.

I shredded some tissue paper to make the packaging inside.  Now, you really could put anything inside this.  I have put an outdoor tealight holder which you can hang from the branch of a tree, or even your washing line to add a bit of mood lighting to your bbq.  You could use it to put make-up or even jewellery in and if you added one of the stick on mirror panels which you can generally get for a quid or so, it would provide a nice gentle light to put your jewellery on by.  Tidy.