Lunchbox Tins!

Plain white lunchbox tins are available at a lot of craft stores. They can be turned into beautiful treasure boxes with just a little bit of designer paper! They are fun to decorate and make great recipe card holders, greeting card holders, jewelry boxes...

My daughter (Cecilia) has been wanting one of the decorated lunchboxes to keep her treasures in for almost a year! Bad mom that I am, I kept saying yes I will make one for you and she picked out the papers, etc but then I would forget or postpone! Well, then she asked if I could make her friend (who loves pink) a decorated box to put some jewelry and trinkets in that she was giving her for her birthday. So then I had a deadline and made the box right away!

That of course led my daughter to complain (rightfully so) that I could make her friend one in just a few days but she has been asking for almost a year and hasn't gotten one! That was enough guilt - she now finally has one (see the green one below) well except for figuring out some decorative stuff on the front since she is so picky (or I should say she has definite opinions that are usually the opposite of mine)!


These lunchboxes are very easy to decorate and there are many different methods. Most are covered with patterned paper (i.e., Stampin' Up! Designer Series papers) and ribbon. If you are local in MN you can even trace a pattern I made for the top and for the paper around the latch. Some people attach the paper using sticky strip while others glue the paper down with mod podge and then coat the decorated box with mod podge to give it a protective coating. I use the mod podge. A useful hint on using the mod podge - make sure you use a generous coating on the box to glue the paper to the box if you want to apply the protective coating over the paper later. If you don't have a good coating under the paper, it will bubble up when you coat the paper afterwards. But even if you see some bubbling of the paper as you coat it afterwards, don't panic because most of the bubbling goes away as the mod podge dries! Also, you can get mod podge that is glossy or it comes in matte finish also. I used the glossy on all the ones shown here except Cecilia's (the green one). The glossy gives you a shiny (glossy) finish and the brush marks show up more. I think I kinda like the matte finish better and will probably use that from now on.

All the boxes shown here are fairly simply decorated with just two coordinating designer papers. The double-sided designer papers make picking coordinating patterns really simple! The Headline Alphabet was used for the lettering on these boxes (and I covered the stamped letters layered on cardstock all in modge podge also). Use your imagination! You could apply punched flowers, cut out stamped images, brads and eyelets (the new Crop-a-dile punch and eyelet setter punches through these boxes)!