What to do with all those pretty little bits

In my post here, I talked about the great way the punch board envelope maker could also make boxes.  I went a little nuts making these cute handpainted boxes from 12"x12"scrapbook paper that I had scraped paint on backsides creating textures, etc. I was thinking they would be cute boxes to put the ceramic earrings I had been making ---BUT now I was left with all those bits punched out by the punch board. Here is a video showing how I am using them--

Messing around with techniques---ceramic pottery

I had this piece laying around and decided to try the bubble technique after I had drawn the cat with black underglaze, then I put a small amount of blue underglaze in a very small container, added a bit of water and a bit of Dawn dishwashing soap, inserted a straw and proceeded to blow bubble onto the piece, after drying, I clear glazed, then fired at 04 (white earthenware clay), here is the result

I like the effect and will try it again.

video on how I use a gift/key card to paint textured backgrounds

made this video on how I like to paint the white back of scrapbook papers to use for boxes.

Painted scrapbook papers making boxes with the envelope maker

Ok, I have been wanting to make cards for gifts, but wanted unique papers, I also wanted to experiment with boxes made using my Envelope Punch Board (which I love) (by We R Memory Keepers.  I could use my Silhouette Cameo, but sometimes using this inexpensive tool is quicker.  I saw this great You Tube Video which explained how to easily make boxes instead of envelopes to hold several cards to make as gifts.  Easy, just find the card size, and decide how thick you want the box, 1" seems about right and you can quickly make a box for sets of cards, or a box for cards that are thick.  She used scrapbook paper that was printed on both sides, I do not have any, but thought, I could make this much more interesting if I painted the back side of the cheap 12x12 paper I bought ages ago on clearance sale at Michaels.  I have been wanting to do some anyway.  This is the pack of paper I have:

Pretty boring papers, but I am concentrating on the white backsides here:

So I quickly grabbed some old craft paint, a gift/key card and a handful of texture sheets

Then, placing the plastic canvas under the paper squirted paint onto paper and swiped paint with the gift card, then slid some of the texture plates underneath again and did it some more until I was satisfied with the look.  Paint dries very quickly because it is so thin.  One distinct advantage to this method is it is quick and easy with very little cleanup.  I do have gelli plates and love to work with them, but it is a little more work and with more things to clean up, brayer, stencils, masks,, etc.  This method gives great results in a very short time.  Since my work table was near a window, the two sheets I did dried in minutes.

Then using the You Tube video linked above proceeded to make two boxes:

Here is another couple of shots showing the side view thickness of the boxes:

I almost had looked at ordering plain white 12 x 12 cardstock to paint like this, then to use in my Cameo, or as envelopes, didn't realize I could just repurpose the pack of that cheap scrapbook paper to do the same thing.  This is a very inexpensive and quick way to get nice background lightweight cardstock which can be embellished further, I could also run through my wide format printer and print on top of the painted side, see some of my previous experiments doing this with my painted gelli papers here.

One tip I learned making the boxes is not to score to hard on this cheap scrapbook paper, a gentle scoring works better,