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Victorian Seed Box Reproduction
© Stephie McCarthy
See the video tutorial on HomeTalk!
We made a colorful Victorian-style seed box. It's a very realistic reproduction, if we do say so ourselves!
The box started as a cast-off cigar box. By painting the outside with many layers and gluing a collage of Victorian art inside the lid, we now have a beautiful place to store our seeds.
Download free artwork for this project here!
We've resized the graphic to fit inside this unfinished box from KingCraft.
Click on the image below to buy this unfinished box from Amazon that you can use to make a Victorian-style seed box.
Here's our cigar box as it started, heavily varnished with lots of scratches.
We cut a piece of art board to cover the frames inside the lid.
Then we gave it a good sanding to rough up the varnish.
We covered the hardware with masking tape to make them easier to paint around.
Our first coat was brown chalk paint. Click to see a chart of our favorite chalk paint colors, here. We used Waverly Inspirations Truffle brown, with a few patches of orange acyrlic paint to make the surface color uneven.
When the surface was dry, we streaked the box with white glue and rubbed the edges and around the hardware with Burt's Bees Jelly. Petroleum Jelly will work as well. This will allow the next coat of paint to come off easily, revealing a bit of the brown chalk paint to create a chippy varnish effect. Apply the jelly only where you want the next layers of paint to rub off.
We covered both the glue and the jelly with dark rose-red and orange multi-surface craft paint. The glue causes the bumps and wrinkles as it dries. We were able to wipe away the paint on the jelly to reveal some of the chalk paint. See the photo below for closeup details.
Rather than stencil the box, we drew an initial and some sprigs with chalk …
… then we painted over the chalk with acrylic paints. When dry, we brushed any remaining chalk away.
The graphic for the inside of the lid was made in Photoshop, using pieces from vintage seed catalogs found on Archive.org. Type "seed catalog" into the search engine and scans from vintage catalogs will appear. Copy the artwork you like into new Photoshop windows.
We used the Photoshop 'pen' tool to create outlines around the elements we wanted to cut out for our collage. Each outline was saved in the 'Path' window. Our video will explain this technique in more detail. Using the pen and path controls in Photoshop are the most professional way to make clean cut-out, selections that can be used over and over again, as needed.
We made the text for the collage one letter at a time so that there would be a wavy baseline. Each letter was placed individually on its own layer. We used fancy fonts like 'Harrington'. We also used a 'stroke' filter to outline the letters in white.
Photoshop is a fantastic program for crafting. However, if it's not your cup of tea, use our free graphic here to create your own box.
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