what i love this week....

this week, i love shrines! the one above can be found at Milliande.com along with tutorials. it's a common theme amongst modern altered artists, and i have taught it as a lesson to some of my students before. but i never get tired of it. there's something nice about taking the mundane and turning it into something special just by giving it a home.

so i started with an old box i got at a consignment shop, which happened to be originally from dollar tree ( i knew there was a reason i loved it). actually, it was originally pretty hideous. it was a weird bluey purple color with a cliche snowman on the front. but it was 49 cents, so i figured i would make something out of it. and after housing miscellaneous materials for a while, then becoming 2 different incomplete and bad projects, it finally turned into this!

inspired by Lindsey Heath's hollow books, i added text to the back first. then i punch a hole through the front, almost literally, i didn't exactly have the right tools for the job, so it was a lot of cutting and punching. next i added some fake moss, the first time i've used it! and i love it. after that, i had to find a subject to be a jumping point for the rest of the project, so i chose the ceramic egg with the hole and glued it to the back of the inside. for the outside, i spray painted it copper and then used another first time material for me, spray glitter glue. i like the effect it had in some places where it bubbled up from not letting the copper dry first.

next i added the feathers to the top with hot glue, set in beads. to make it more unified, i added some glitter around the base of the feathers that matched the paint. for the inside, i added more feathers and a rubber frog to create a little more scenery, and a flower on the opposite side.
i also stamped a small birdcage in the corner and added a gear and some wire mesh.

for the rest of the outside, i used some more text to connect it all, a chipboard frame around that, and a key that i painted copper and embellished with gold glitter. the little feet on the bottom are made from painted bottle caps, but maybe i'll go back and fashion some bird feet for it instead. i also think that i would want to have a way for it to hang on the wall as well.

the piece is finished with some copper watch wire wrapped around the outside to give it more of a caged feeling and the egg has feathers and moss stuffed into it.

overall i am very happy with this piece, and i don't feel that the pictures do it justice. there's a wonderful "secret garden" feeling you get when you look through the outside window into the nook where the egg lies.