Two Altered Tin Projects

I love working with various tin boxes and altering them with paper and ribbon! They make terrific gifts, too! Below are some photos of a couple of tins that I created. The first photo is of a snack box that I made for my friend, Jamie, who is an elementary school principal and has to eat on the run most of the time! I made a similar snack box for my boss, Carol, who is the director of our school district's special education department. She, like Jamie, has to eat on the run between the many, many meetings she must attend! I filled their snack boxes with nutritious snacks like nuts, trail mix, craisins, peanut butter crackers, etc.

 To create the snack box, I cut 4 strips of coordinating patterned paper, (two of each paper design - I used paper from the CTMH "Bella" paper pack on the box shown above), 3" wide x 12" long. (Depending on the size of your box you may have to adjust these measurements). I ran these strips of paper through my Xyron adhesive machine to apply repositionable adhesive to the back. On a scrap piece of paper I traced around the lower part of the latch to create a template of the shape. I then centered and traced the template design on the top half of the patterned paper, cut out the area that will go around the latch, and adhered the strip of paper to the box. Match up the paper on the sides and adhere paper to the back side of the box. Repeat the steps with the lower portion of the box, overlapping the paper around the center of the box. Run a piece of rick-rack, cut the length of the diameter of the box, through a Xyron machine to apply adhesive, and adhere on top of the center seam around the box. Stamp the word "Snacks", (or word of your choice!), cut out the letters, and adhere to the box using 3-D dots. (I used the CTMH "Rustic Letters" stamp set). I added some buttons to the letters with glue dots and then cut various ribbons to tie around the handle for a little extra foo-foo. Fill the box with pre-packaged snacks and your project is complete!

The next altered tin that I created is a small recipe box, which houses heirloom recipes passed down to me from my grandmothers, mother, mother-in-law, etc. The same steps are used to create this box, just scaled down due to the smaller size of the tin. The paper I used is from the CTMH "Let's Get Together" paper pack and the stamp set is CTMH's "Recipe Box". I created dividers for the recipe cards using coordinating cardstock and a tab punch that I bought at Hobby Lobby. I created recipe catagories using the stamps from the "Recipe Box" stamp set, and stamped the catagory titles on the tabs. I then adhered the tabs to the cardstock dividers and inserted my recipe cards accordingly. Two photos of this project are shown below:

Try your hand at altering tins! It's a really fun project and I'd love to see what you come up with, so feel free to email pictures of your projects to me!

Have a blessed day!