Steam Punk Upcycled Box

This is a box I've recently finished that will house my creative journey projects for 2013. It's quite big so I can get plenty of tags and cards in there! It started life containing some yummy bath products that my brother bought me for Christmas. I was as excited about the box as I was for it's contents!
Here is the inside of the box, it is actually a rather nice plum colour, so I've only covered the inside of the lid where there was some writing.

Here is the original box before I covered it with embossed metal foil tape. It was very easy to cover with sticky backed strips of tape, which I ran through my Cuttlebug first, using Tim Holtz's Riveted Metal Texture Fades embossing folder. I placed a thin piece of card under each piece of tape before putting it through the machine. This stopped it from being too deeply embossed and prevented the foil from ripping when the backing paper was removed.

Once I'd completely covered the box, I applied alcohol inks in black, ginger and gold.

I then 'sanded' the surface with wire wool to remove some of the ink and reveal a kind of aged metal surface. This is fast becoming  one of my favourite techniques. The little handle was bought from a company called Sky Blue and Pink. I love it.

I cut out the cogs from thin copper using the Tim Holtz cogs die. I heated the copper with a cooks blow torch to age the surface. I then stuck these onto chip board cogs cut from the same die. The wings were from a set of 'Art Parts' I bought from the Artful Splodger when they were having a sale. They've been embossed with Stampendous frantage, sanded and distressed with Black Soot DI.

The corner pieces are grunge paper circles that have been given a rust treatment with Vintage photo distress embossing powder mixed with a little gold frantage. The studs around the edges are actually the tops off paper fasteners. I cut the butterfly bits off and stuck the heads on using a glue gun. I've really loved 'upcycling' this box and I'm sure I am going to enjoy using it. I am going to enter this into the Happy Daze ' Recycle it' challenge and also the Eclectic Paperie challenge which is 'Altered Boxes'. Just got word of another challenge I can enter my box into, it's the Frillie and Funkie 'Spruce it Up', I think that just about sums up what I've done with this. x