Last week my husband and I went to Chicago for his nephew’s wedding. We were in Chicago for 6 days and had a fantastic time. We stayed at the Hotel Lincoln, which is right across from Lincoln park, on the 12th floor with a view of Lincoln Park and Lake Michigan. I highly recommend staying there.

This was my Mother-in-law’s first grandchild to be married and because of health reasons she was unable to attend. His niece, who attended the wedding with us, suggested that an explosion photo box would be a nice gift for her grandmother. I thought this would be a great project for my upcycled/altered project for AECP. I searched online how to make one and enjoyed doing it very much.

The first thing I did was cut cardstock to the specified size. Because I wanted 3 layers inside the explosion box I cut out 3 sizes of cardstock. The largest size was 12 x 12 inches, then 10.5 x 10.5 and the smallest 9 x 9. I scored and folded to created 9 squares on each of the pieces. For the largest piece, I cut each corner into a heart shape. You can see where I drew the hearts in the left photo above. For the smaller two pieces, I simply cut the corners off which you can see that in the middle photo. The right photo shows how the three layers will look when assembled.

The next thing I did was to color what would be the outside of the largest piece. See right photo above. I used pink for the hearts and blue for the rest. I later colored the hearts red to match the roses I was going to use, and stenciled green ink and cut out white squares to cover the sides. You can see that in the right two photos below. For the two smaller layers,I stenciled right on the cardstock, so as not to add an additional layer. See right photo below.

Next I started stamping and die cutting the roses from the Vintage Flowers stamp and die set. I wanted a set of flowers on each of the four sides of the box. Once the flowers and leaves were all die cut out, I glued them together in an arrangement and pressed Versamark ink onto them and heat embossed with clear embossing powder. I did 3 or 4 layers of heat embossing, then I glued them to the box and added a sentiment to each side.

The next thing I wanted to do was decorate the inside of the heart shapes. For this I used the Painted Flowers stamp set. First, I cut out heart shapes from white cardstock and then stamped the Painted Flowers randomly to make my own patterned paper, then glued them to the inside of the hearts.

The final thing for the box was to choose my photos and print them out in appropriate sizes to fit on the inside flaps.

Once the box was completed, I just needed to make the top.

Here is the final piece. This is the my first video attempt. Thanks so much for visiting.