Five-sided box 1: my new embroidery project

Now that I’ve finished the Alison Cole stumpwork box, the next project I want to do is a blend of a set of designs from a published book, incorporated into an interestingly shaped five-sided box design that I found online. Unfortunately, in the way of these things, I found the image of the box years ago, and now I don’t know where I found it. But it was a crazy quilting project of some kind, and the box had five curved sides, and a pentagonal lid with a tassel on it.

The motifs that I want to use on the box are from the book ‘Embroidered Flowers for Elizabeth’, by Susan O’Connor, who writes and designs for Inspirations embroidery magazine (published in Australia).

Flowers for Elizabeth book cover

The book features a set of gorgeous designs, put together in panels, to make a blanket embroidered in wools. Although I do love the design of the blanket, I don’t have space in my house for such a large thing, and I want to make something using silks next, not wools. I also want my box to be quite delicate in appearance, and I felt that the bold black and gold of the blanket sort of swamps the flowers, so I won’t be incorporating any of the black and gold elements.

To help me choose which threads to use, the book has a page listing DMC equivalents for each of the shades used for the blanket (as well as Paternayan wool, and Au Ver a Soie silk, too). So, using that as a basis, I chose some DMC and some Anchor threads to do my box in, along with some overdyed threads from Silk ‘n’ Colors from my stash.

It was difficult to choose which five motifs to use, out of all the ones on the original blacket – I had to be very selective! This motif below got rejected, although it was close-run thing  🙂

Here are the threads I eventually chose for all five sides, sorted onto card threadsorters.

I miniaturised the motifs from the book down to the size I needed for my box (about four inches high), and used small versions of the ‘triangular side motifs’ from the blanket for the lid.

This is the shape that the box will be – I’d give a link to the original web page if I could  🙂

[EDIT 14th September 2013: One of the followers of my blog, Carol S, has found where the original image comes from – the page gives instructions for making the box using crazy quilting techniques. She says:

“It’s from CQ Magazine, 2004. Here’s the URL:   http://cqmagonline.com/vol03iss04/articles/362/index.shtml  ” ]

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~