Silk paper box

When I belonged to the Fibre Fever Group, we had a birthday group who exchanged fabric birthday cards.  My collection has been languishing in a box in my workroom until now.  I have finally made a box for them.
 As usual, I forgot to take progressive photos - tut, tut.  I made some silk paper by the easy and quick method - laying out my fibres on some baking paper, spraying liberally with spray starch and ironing them dry - under another layer of baking paper of course!  I backed that with pelmet vilene and cut the pieces to size  before embroidering all over them.

 Blogger has done strange things with uploading these photos and I cannot manage to get them right, but you can scroll up and down.  Oh, I just managed to move one photo down to the bottom, I am not going to trust my luck to make any more changes.  The colours are wrong, but my camera doesn't seem to like purply blue shades and always makes them much more of a puce shade, so use your imagination.
The decoration on the top of the box is a piece of silk velvet with beads and cords over the top.  The beads I made from paper rolls on a knitting needle (thinner than a satay stick), then rolled on a glycerine pad and dipped in Opalettes embossing enamel and heated.  I really love those embossing powders, they have some scrumptious colours.  The cord in machine wrapped, then twisted around and hand stitched in place

 After I had sewn all the sides together - this time sewing each side to the base before sewing up the sides - much easier - I glued some gold braid to the edges as a finishing touch.  If you double click you should be able to enlarge the photos.

 Can't separate this photo from the above, but it is a small purse made for part of my Canberra grand daughter's birthday present.  She happened to see my little makeup bag while I was visiting last year and greatly admired it, so now she can have one of her own, not that she is into makeup yet - or she wasn't last year, but who knows with a 12 year old high school girl!!  She loves glitzy stuff so I have foiled some hearts on the fabric which is not showing up very well in the photo, nor is the glitzy spray all over the fabric.  I am not sure how long that will last with handling, but it looks pretty just now!  The base fabric is evolon again, I am in love with the feel of that fabric.

A grey day up here, but we have done very well out of the weather - we have had three lots of 250 ml (10 inches) or a bit more, with a couple of weeks in between each to let the ground start to dry out.  We haven't had any wind damage either - not like the poor souls down south who are going through all the gales and flooding yet again.  Amazingly Western Queensland is still in drought, and Victoria still has fires burning....crazy.