Treasure Chest for an 8 yr old girl

Little Girl's Big Sister had been admiring my collection of Primark junk jewellery which I buy to pull apart and use as embellishments. She especially liked this key and I asked her if she would like me to make her a treausure box with the key to decorate it. Her eyes lit up, "ooh yes please!" she said :-) That was just before Christmas, and I glimmer misted the box in pink and a bit of purple ........ then put it to one side and promptly forgot about it in all the rush to get Little Girl's album finished.

Yesterday (Sunday) was handover day, and on the Friday before I had remembered the box and realised I had better get on with it, as Big Sister was bound to remember! So I overstamped the box with flourishes in pink stazon and at that point it looked really pretty ........ then I made the fatal mistake of thinking it needed a few darker flourishes. So I over stamped in what I thought would be a slightly darker colour, a purple. Oh dear :-( it was waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too dark, but once I had done one, I had to stamp all over as I had started in the centre, not a nice sensible place like a corner where one dark flourish might have looked OK ..... oh no.

So having ruined it, what to do next??? I had intended to use two or three of the flower cut outs which I had found lurking in a drawer, so instead I decided to cover most of the box with them and hope that the swirly stamping would look like an intentional background LOL. I also punched out some butterflies from some green gingham paper and put a few of those on.

The art of flat decoupage is to make it look as though the printed images are almost painted on, this being achieved by several coats of varnish - the edges of the prints are supposed to disappear ....... well I didn't quite manage the 'perfect' decoupaged surface, but after four coats of varnish I thought ...... that'll do ......!

I put a tiny screw-eye at the end of the box to hang the key on, and that was it! It doesn't look too bad, even though it is so pink and flowery LOL, a shame the light was so bad when I took the photos, it does look better IRL. Big Sister loves it :-)