Fabric Box

Some personal health issues lately have made it hard for me to summon the energy to write any blog posts. But my doctor thinks it's a good idea to keep it going as much as possible, so I'm going to try.

Not gonna lie, the sheer complexity of the project I most recently did has made the thought of writing it up a little daunting. So I've decided to trim out a lot of the details and show mostly through pictures. Because if you want to try this project yourself, I really have no need to write up any details. There's an excellent book you can buy:

I received this book, the RSN's Embroidered Boxes by Heather Lewis, as a birthday gift from my mom. And I really wanted to try one. But I was held up at first because I had some difficulty determining what was meant by mountboard in the list of supplies. I ended up contacting Heather herself on Facebook, and she kindly informed me (within five minutes, no less — what a gem 😊), that mountboard is a UK term. It's called mat board in the US (like the mat board you use in framing pictures). 

Armed with that knowledge, I made an Amazon purchase and was able to start my project two days later. It took me three weeks to finish, and I didn't actually do any embroidery on this one. The book suggests you try it out first without any embroidery to make sure you have the construction basics down.

So I started by measuring out the squares for the boxes on my newly acquired mat board:

I then cut them out and also cut out some felt padding squares to go on the interior pieces. The last step for this part was to attach the felt padding with some double-sided tape:

I then wrapped each square in the fabric I'd chosen for the interior and again used double-sided tape to secure the backs:

The double-sided tape sometimes works well and other times not so much. I ended up securing a lot of the corners with a few stitches to keep everything together. But here are all the interior pieces complete:

I did all the exterior pieces the same way, albeit in a different fabric, except for the lid. For the lid, I decided to try the other technique Heather describes, which is to mount the fabric using pins and lacing. This is probably the technique I'll use when I start adding embroidery — to make sure it's lined up properly. I started by pinning all the sides, like you do when mounting an embroidered piece:

Then I mitered the corners and, using a curved needle, stitched them down with a ladder stitch:

The last step was to lace the back in both directions:

I hate lacing, but it wasn't quite as arduous for this little piece as it always is for one of my larger embroidery pieces. Still, I will probably only lace in future when embroidery is involved on that particular square, because it's definitely more time-consuming. And here are all the exterior pieces complete:

Next, it was time to start the assembly, which basically involves using a curved needle to ladder stitch the sides together:

This was kind of the fun part for me. It's really exciting to see it start coming together. Here is half the interior box done:

And here is the interior box complete:

The next step was to assemble the exterior pieces around this box and ladder stitch the top edges together:

Then I added the lid and ladder stitched it to the back edge of the box:

And here you can see what it looks like with the lid open:

I was really happy that the lid fit perfectly and snugly in the box, which means it stays neatly closed:

And there it is, complete. I really like it. It's definitely small — just 2.5 inches square on the inside and a little larger than that on the exterior. But I think it's really cute! 😊

I'm working on another one that's a little more ambitious and will involve some embroidery on the lid, but more on that at a later time. At the moment, I need to go rest. But I hope this inspires someone to give this a try. It's a little finnicky/tricky to do at times, but I did enjoy it, and I feel really proud of how it turned out.