Travel Shadowbox

In November, for my birthday, my friend Jaime gave me a ton of wood projects to work on for my house. But as usual time got away from me, and I just now starting working on them--although I have had ideas for awhile. One of the projects was a very large wood shadow box, with a glass front.

When I am on a trip somewhere I have a habit of picking up business cards from restaurants and sites we visit, keeping tickets from attractions, and other seemingly useless things, so I decided I wanted somewhere to display them so my keeping them was justified. The giant shadow box Jamie gave me seemed like the perfect place.

I started by staining the shadowbox, this was my first staining project--it actually went pretty well, and I will definitely be doing it again.

I chose a weathered gray color.

(I just realized these are awful pictures) (Good thing this isn't a photography blog!)

Next I mod podged some map paper to the back of the shadow box and painted the inside black.

I wanted to add a travel quote. Lucky for me it takes awhile for mod podge to dry so I had plenty of time to hit the web in search of the perfect quote.

I chose "To travel is to live." --Hans Christian Andersen 

I still need to seal the stain and add a hole/slot on the top to easily add memorabilia in (but I will let someone else do that--I don't want to lose a hand)  but for now it looks great hanging on my wall with some NYC stuff in it!

It looks like a few more weeks of winter for us here in St Louis, and with my spring break next week, hopefully that means more crafting!