Feminine doesn't have to be pink

I was making a Christmas present for somebody the other day and I got an email from That's Crafty for their latest challenge, which is feminine, so I decided to enter it into it. I'm also going to enter it into Finnabairs denim journal challenge using blue as my inspiration.

I started off with a plain wooden chest of drawers, coating it with white gesso then with tissue paper. After it was dry I inked it with distress pads and coated it with crackle texture paste. The interesting thing here is that I then had to take away the wooden lines between the drawers as the glue had swelled them so they wouldn't fit!! Lesson learned.

This is one side. I used some Docraft Parisienne blue paper for the 'blue' of the box, using a thinlits mixed media die to make a negative image and allow the tissue to shine through. The panel was inked with walnut stain on the side. Finally I cut some flowers and butterflies out, adding a gem in the middle of each flower.

This is the top. Same patterned paper on the bottom, with a wallpaper type paper on the other half, a die cut shape in the dark blue and the name Nat, and a blue ribbon to separate it.

Here is the back. I loved the tissue tape dragonfly and really wanted it mainly untouched, so to keep a bit of the blue I added some vellum. It bubbled up a little but I think it adds to it.

Here is the third side. I've torn the top of the paper so that the tissue paper is showing, and added a die cut branch and some butterflies. You'll see that some of the butterflies are double layered, the lower layer being dark blue.

This is my favourite bit! I used texture paste and perfect pearls with a floral stencil, then painted a few wooden shapes with more perfect pearls. I glued the butterfly onto a cage before I attached it to the drawers. What I like here is that the drawers have to be in a certain order for the pattern to work.