Upcycled Box and Last Design Team Project for MMM

Well what a journey this has been. April will be my last month at Mixed Media Mojo as a DT member. The team has been wonderful and I will miss you all! For my last DT project it was all about our April Challenge to Upcycle/Recycle and the Twist is to use a flower. We also have some new DT members joining MMM, please check out their blogs and send them some love.

This box started out life as a pretty blue with some Stenciling on the side and a sentiment. 

Pretty right? Well it was being thrown away and I asked if I could have it. I knew I could make it more my style and put so many die cuts in it! 

I started by painting it in black acrylic paint. One of the drawers was sagging so I fixed the little runner thing that helps slide out the drawer. Easy peasy! 

I knew I wanted to use a paper set I just got-Tattered Times! So many lovely papers to choose from! 

I applied my gear paper with TomBow Multi and left the center bare. I added some script paper to the front of the drawers and to add some interest I used the leftover papers from the top of the box for the middle section of each drawer. 

I edged all papers used with black Archival Ink. 

Now for the more fun part! I grabbed some chipboard gears from my stash (love me some CE chippies!) and die cut some gears as well. I then layered all the gears to my liking, took a picture so I would remember what went where, and then started making my gears look different. 

I used embossing powder, rusting powder, inks, sprays, mists, and Rub-n-buff on the different layers of gears. Each layer was treated differently and I do enjoy the final result. This chest will be my storage drawers for most of my Steampunk items! 

The finals results of the gears. 

I do hope you can join in and recycle/upcycle! Enjoy your crafting! Carpe Diem! ~Niki

This project will be share with the following: 

Altered Eclectics-Anything Goes HERE

Rhedds Creative Spirit-Anything Goes HERE