cigar box makeovers

I have neglected my blog since October, but one of my 2 New Year's resolutions is to blog every day.  Don't know whether I will follow through on the resolution, but I am doing a blog for January 1, 2016.

Who can believe it is 2016!  I remember years ago thinking that 1984 was far in the future, after I read a book by the same title, and here we are, in 2016.
My husband Ron has been ill for most of 2015, first with an aneurysm surgery in April that he never really recovered from.  He spent 10 days in the hospital and another 10 days in rehab.  He is better, but not back to where he was in March.  We are hoping that he continues to improve.  Due to his health, I have been unable to travel to see Wendy, my daughter, in Overland Park Kansas or my son Scott in Castle Rock Colorado.  Luckily both of my children and their spouses and children came here for Christmas.  It was great fun to see Ellie and Sean.  They had been here for Thanksgiving. I hadn't seen them for a long time before Thanksgiving.

I made my grandchildren decorated boxes for Christmas.  One of my art quilt friends owns a high end cigar shop, and she share some of the boxes with me.  They were beautiful wooden boxes. I scanned images from a book published in 1923 and printed the images in fabric.  I back the fabric with batting and embroider the pictures. I framed the pictures with fabric and glued them onto the top of the box.  I glued fabric onto the sides of the box.  I lined the interior with more fabric. I used a handkerchief in the bottom of Rosie's box since it had an embroidered rose.







I used a handkerchief with daisies on it for the interior of Caroline's box, since daisies are her favorite flower.

I made another box for Ellie: 

I had to think hard on how to do a box for my grandson Sean.  I made a steam punk box with my friend Karen.  I used a cropped picture of Sean in his Halloween custom for the lid, and put scanned pictures of Power Rangers inside the box. I was going to use Transformers, but Scott told me he was done with transformers and now into power rangers.  Good thing I checked.


 That's all for now--Happy New Year!