How to Make a Decorative Tissue Box Part 1

How to Make a Decorative Tissue Box Part 1 Before you throw away this tissue paper box, there are really some fun things you can do to make it last a lot longer. For instance, you can take a colored tissue paper that you received inside of gift bags often and decorate it that way. You could cover it with paper mache painted. There are a lot of things that you can do to make this a permanent item that you can actually keep your tissue in. So we’re going to go ahead and I’m going to show you how you can decorate this tissue paper box. What I need is some kind of paper to cover this. We’re going to be doing a paper mache over this tissue box. You could use computer paper, if you’ve got it lying around which a lot of people do. You can use just regular old paper towels or if you’ve got the industrial kind of paper towels, you can use these. Any kind of paper to do paper mache is fine. You could even use a newspaper if you wanted to. You’re going to need some kind of glue to actually hold the paper together. There are a couple of options. There is something that you can buy at an art supply store called gloss medium and this is great stuff to have around because you can do a lot of different things with it. It’s a glue. It’s a glaze, it’s great for doing paper mache work and it will go a long way to do a lot of paper mache kinds of projects. If you don’t have that, you can pick up some what they call medium mixer and this is a great material because you can use it as a glue. You can also mix it with powdered paints to create a liquid kind of paint. If you don’t want to go to the art store and spend a lot of money, you can also use wallpaper paste and that you can get in the hardware store and I like the liquid because then you don’t have to mess around with powder and water and mixing bowls and all that kind of stuff. You can just use it directly out of the container. So, we’re going to go ahead and get started and I’m just going to use some computer paper, I’m just going to tear it into little pieces. And we’re just going to cover this entire box with white because whites have good surface. You can paint on it. You can put tissue paper over it. I just want a white surface because if I went ahead and I started to put the tissue paper directly on the box, the designs are going to show through. So that’s why I want to put a layer of white over this entire surface. So you can tear or you can cut the paper, it really doesn’t matter. I chose to tear and I’m just going to go ahead and start and I’m going to use my gloss medium and I’m just going to paint it on the surface and what you have to make sure you’re doing is that you’re creating a little sandwich so to speak of the polymer, the paper and then the polymer again. It’s really important because otherwise, you’re going to get bubbles underneath your paper and it’s not going to lay flat on the surface of the tissue box. So I’m just going to go ahead here and lay these pieces down and each time, you know I have to make sure I have glue under it and on top of it. You’ll notice you start seeing what you can do with things that you have at home. You may start saving more things that normally you would throw away. For instance, the next time you get a present, a lot of people give those little gift bags that have real pretty colored tissue paper in it; don’t throw the tissue paper away, save it because you’ll never know when you could use it to make an art project. Okay, when you get to your sides, your edges, it’s a good idea to overlap the piece on the edge so that you get a smooth edge. You’ll notice that I take the pieces and I actually wrap them around the edge. You also want to do that at the bottom. If you want to be real particular about it, you could actually paper mache the entire bottom of the box like I did. Here I even did the bottom of it with a tissue paper so it just gives it a more finished look, kind of more professional look to it. So my suggestion is that you paper mache the entire box. I’m going to go ahead and show you how to finish off the top because you’re going to be pulling the tissue out through this opening so you want it to be nice and sturdy and you also want it to look nice and neatly done so I’ve actually torn some strips about. I’ve torn narrow strips so that I can easily wrap them underneath over the edge and then underneath here. So I’m putting one down like this and then I’m going to put a little bit of glue right under here so that it sticks to the underside of the opening of the box. And then of course, I go over it with the glaze and actually just put your fingers under here and kind of make sure that it has glue on it and that it’s sticking to the underside and that it’s all smooth here on this edge. I’m just going to go ahead and put on this last piece and then I’m going to take my finger and kind of run it along the edge here just to make sure that that my opening is relatively even and the next thing to do would be to set this aside and let it dry a little bit. If you’re going to put tissue paper on it next, you could actually start working on it right away but if you intended to maybe spray paint this or paint it with a brush, you really need to let it dry really well so you know, maybe an hour or so, a couple hours, make sure it’s really dry to the touch before you start painting. So I’m going to set this aside and let it dry a little bit before I actually start with the tissue paper. I’ve chosen to do a color scheme with two different shades of yellow. If you don’t have tissue paper at home from all those presents, it’s not expensive. You can pick up tissue paper in any department where they have wrapping papers. So I’m going to go ahead and just cut this into a bunch of random shapes and if you don’t want to cut, you can tear or you can do a combination. It’s totally up to you. You can do small pieces, big pieces, medium size pieces, whatever you think is going to look best or whatever effect you want. I’m just going to do the same thing I did with the computer paper. I’m just going to put down polymer and you just want to overlap it because you get really need effects when you let the tissue overlap and you can even do it in one solid color or you can use every color you want or pick a color scheme, it’s totally up to you. Now don’t forget when you get to the opening of the tissue box, basically you’re going to do the same thing you did when you were putting the pieces of paper on. Use small pieces and you want to make sure that you put glue on the underside of the tissue paper so it’s going to stick to the underside of the opening so you have a nice, clean edge. You want to go back and double check and make certain that you don’t have areas that are too thick with polymer because sometimes it loses its gloss if it’s too thick so just make certain that it’s kind of thin even coating over the entire surface. And then I think we’ve go it all covered. We even did the bottom and we’re going to set it aside carefully and wait for it to dry before we do our final decorating. The box is now dry enough to decorate and I kind of keep boxes filled with stuff that’s left over from different projects. I’ve got ribbons. I’ve got bead, I have buttons and sparklies and I even bought out my paint markers in case I decided to do some drawing on here. So we’re going to go ahead and see what we can come up with and I’ve got my hot glue gun which is great for gluing things down and I think I’m going to use this rickrack here and I’m just going to start by placing it along the edge here. One thing that you probably know is that once you’ve finished these boxes, they’re going to last quite a while especially if you use the polymer medium because it is a plastic product and it finishes things off really nicely and they’re pretty well preserved because they’re actually coated with plastic. They tend to be waterproof but I wouldn’t go in and put my projects in a sink full of water but definitely they will hold up for quite some time. When you’re using the hot glue gun, remember that the glue dries fairly fast so you’ll notice that I’m just putting down a little bit and then pushing my fabric into the hot glue and then moving to the next area. So now, I think what I’m going to do possibly is put something on these sides, I’m trying to stay with my color scheme of yellows and oranges. I finished my last side with the orange stripes and I want to do something on the top here so I was thinking maybe with this curling ribbon, I would do something, so we’ll go ahead and curl these. And then maybe I’ll do something, I’m going to hot glue this to the corner and now I’ve got this little sparkly gems that I found in my box; left over from other projects. I’ll jus put one those sparklies there for the center and let’s see. I could do something with this and there we have our tissue boxes. And all you’d have to do is take your tissue and put it in there and there we have it. There are some other ideas, other things that you can do just with these boxes. I went ahead and I painted this box and on the inside and the outside and then I got some old magazines and I cut out pictures that I like and words and using my polymer medium again, just adhere it everything to the background painted areas and then put a coat of the gloss medium over the entire box. Other things you could do, you could paint the box without doing the collage on top. You could put fabric on the inside of it and line in it. You could also do the collage method on your tissue boxes. So there are lots of ways to decorate these and these boxes can become kind of special places to put things that are important to you, your treasure box. So don’t throw any boxes away because you’ll never know when you can make something really special out of them.