Lazelle is a middle school art teacher, and she sent me goodies from her smock pockets and desk drawer. There were all sorts of arty things—enough to fill a small box. With this many items, a little sorting was in order, just to give me a clear direction. Sometimes, too many things just clutter up the decision making process. After making piles all over my work table, I decided that the best way to sort was by color. My first pile was red, yellow and orange, and contained almost-empty paint pans, pieces of crayons and wrappers, tissue paper (which was really packing material—but hey, anything in the box is fair game), colored pencils, and a fabulous piece of cardstock that looked like it had been monoprinted. (More about monoprinting is coming soon, thanks to Lazzelle’s inspiration.)

At the same time I put my piles in order, I hit a half off wood sale at Hobby Lobby. In amongst their new spring wood offerings were narrow boxes with lids, and I bought an armload in various sizes, thinking they’d make lovely shrines. I decided to try a couple of them out with Lazzelle’s goodies.

First, I basecoated the box in a color taken from the monoprinted piece. In this case, it was a beautiful vivid yellow. Pine boxes tend to suck paint like crazy. Some people choose to do a light sealer over the wood before painting, but I tend to just do two coats of cheap paint, and let some of the wood grain and texture show through. I set the box aside to dry completely while I worked on other things.

I decided to line the interior of the box with some of the monoprinted piece. I’m not big on measuring things like this, because no matter how careful I am, I always get the size wrong. Instead, I just placed the piece on top of the open box, and marked the size of the piece I’d need. I cut this with a paper cutter to make a straight, clean cut.

I glued the piece in with gluestick. Don’t be shy with the glue when working on a wood surface. It takes a liberal application to get paper to stick permanently.

I had enough of the monoprint left to do a piece on the front of the box. It looked a little bland against the yellow cover by itself, so I used a piece of red tissue to create a narrow border around the piece, then glued the whole thing to the front using plenty of gluestick.

I loved the little empty paint pans for size and shape. I cleaned them up, and then added a little color back to them with watercolors.

Once the watercolors set up, I glued them to the cover of the shrine.

I sealed the box inside and out with some Diamond Glaze. This is a quick way to give anything a glossy surface, and adds a layer of protection to a piece that will probably be handled a bit. On the front cover, I just painted glaze over the papers and around the paint pans.

When the glaze dried, I started gluing things inside. I wandered around my workroom and picked up a few things that were in the right color palette—a red block, and a bottle I could fill with red glitter glue—and added them to the pencils, crayons and paint pans I already had. Everything was glued in with E6000.

I didn’t want to do too much on the inside front cover, since the interior of the shrine was already so busy. I simply printed out the words red, yellow and orange on white cardstock, cut them up and attached them with three tiny clothespins Lazzelle included in her package.

Here’s the finished result of the red, orange and yellow pile:

What happens if the pile of goodies is another color combination—say, black, white and grey?

I decided to do a similar shrine in a slightly smaller box, and started off the same way: painting the box, cutting up the monoprint to line the box and decorate the cover.

The cover of this shrine was slightly different: three blocks from the monoprint frame three items from my pile.

Here’s the finished result of my black, white and grey pile: