Jen Aburrow: inchie cubes

these have been so much fun to make but i havent been able to post til now. I saw the idea and tute on Pattis blog and thought that they'd be ideal little christmas pressies. Each year i give my craft girls a little ornie [i get flowers and choccies!] and last night we had our craft breakup and they loved them.
follow this link too for the box pattern.

I used twinkling h2os [made the boxes a bit soggy and they came a bit battered looking, but i liked that ...] gold paint on the edges and glitter gold and white gel pens. The gel meduim has made them fairly tough but dont know if they will survive os mail [i 'll let you know on that one !!] oh and lots of kindy glitz....
The worst part of these for me was cutting out the tiny images. However i decided not to be too fussy and outlined them with the gel pens ......

I raided my beads and found a pearl Christmas garland that i bought just for the beads. The first ones had these chunky beads. Then when i ran out i used whatever i had on hand mixing them up, glass, plastic, sequins, rusty bells. old ones from the kids necklaces.
I also used different colored wires [all my beading tools have disappeared and i had trouble crimping with the round nose pliers so dont look too closely! i also used a large eyed needle to poke holes in the top and bottom of the box and thread thru the box. Made it heaps quicker but you need to cut your wire longer so you can cut the bent bit off.

I decided that i wanted to package them nicely and used toilet rolls covered with scrap paper , overhung at the top and bottom with slits and glued them down. I added a paper circle to each end to tidy it up and added a loop of ribbon in the top circle. made some labels using leftover glitter stickers.

i imagine that they would be lovely covered in brown paper with laces and ribbon and collage on them too. if you had the time of course!!!

i love these cone beads on the bottom. looks like bells....