That's Crafty!: A New Desk Tidy! by Amanda Pink

Hi Everyone

I have a 'useful' project to share with you today that I have created using some of That's Crafty's fabulous MDF surfaces and stamps.

The project itself is a desk tidy that could be used to hold brushes crayons, pens or crafting tools to keep them close to hand while you are creating.

Alternately, it could be used to keep any 'bits and bobs' tidy in one place that maybe lying around the home.

If you are a creative of course the best part is that you can 'make it your own'- painting, altering, decorating however you choose.

The desk tidy box/cube is a That's Crafty! MDF ATB. I used the 3 x 3 inch. The ATB's come flat packed so can be assembled to suit whatever it is you are creating. As I was making a desk tidy I wanted the ATB to be 'open topped' so I only used 5 of the ATB panels. The panels interlock together as you can see in the photo below so assembling is easy and That's Crafty! Multi-Purpose Adhesive makes for strong adhesion in no time at all.

I painted the interior and exterior walls of my open ATB with a couple of coats of black acrylic paint and set aside to dry while I created the panels I used to cover the exterior walls.

For these I painted a piece of A4 mixed media paper with Dina Wakley Heavy Body Acrylics: Ruby, Cheddar, Lemon. I applied the colours one at a time using both brushes and sponge to gradually build up layers, depth and variation of colour.

The painted paper was then cut into 4 panels to fit the 4 walls of the desk tidy.

Each of the panels was stamped and embossed using a stamp from That's Crafty's 'Texture 2' stamp set with Seth Apter's 'Eclipse' Baked Velvet Embossing powders.

Here's a close up of the embossed stamping!!

To finish the 4 panels I frame the stamped embossing with some Tim Holtz 'Halloween Trim Tapes.'

The 4 panels were adhered to the exterior walls of my painted desk tidy and each panel was embellished with a mounted butterfly.

The butterflies are from That's Crafty's 'Arty Wings' stamp set. There are 2 designs of butterfly, with 3 sizes of each design included in the set. I stamped and embossed 4 medium sized butterflies, 2 of each design so I could feature one of each design on adjacent sides of the desk tidy.

The butterflies were set on geometric mounts made up of a painted That's Crafty! MDF inchie and a wood chip circle caught with Dina's Ruby and Cheddar heavy body acrylic.

Their thoraces were embellished with a black gem bead.