New online class

I'm really excited about The very talented Kate Crane's new online class: Marvellous Miniatures: The Art of Altered matchboxes, which I purchased yesterday. You can find this in her etsy shop: The KathrynWheel.  Kate is a great teacher and I've enjoyed many of her workshops at Art From The Heart in Harrogate, Yorkshire, as well as her online class: Journal Soup and her various DVDs.  This new class is great fun, making up little mini matchboxes, filling them with mini cards and journals and decorating them beautifully. I've learned a lot from Kate and am very influenced by her techniques. This class is great value for money and I can see lots of ways I can 'spin' off from the basic match box to making other little mini works of art.
Having watched each of the videos already I'm itching to begin. Fortunately, I already had a mini matchbox kit that I'd purchased from 'Which Craft' last Christmas hoping to make an Advent Calendar with them. I'm so glad I didn't now as I have 24 little matchbox layouts that just need gluing together.  However, I didn't have the larger size that also feature in this class. So the logical thing to do was to work out how to expand the size of the little ones in the kit. After a little bit of fiddling, that's exactly what I did.  So here are my first little boxes waiting to be decorated and made into little works of art.

The little Advent kit matchboxes, when assembled, measure 7cms x 5 cms. With a depth of 2.5 cms. To make the larger matchbox I maintained the 2.5 cms depth but extended the length by 4 cms (to 11cms) and the width by 2 cms (to 7cms). So, assembled, my boxes measure: 11 x 7 x 2.5 cms. However, for the lid I allowed a couple of millimetres to the 7cm widths to allow for the fold. Otherwise the base won't fit neatly into the folded lid sleeve. The resulting measurement for the top sleeve only then was 11 x 7.2 x 2.5 cms. Sounds confusing but actually it really isn't. Here are some photos of the process. Hope they show up as I'm using white 250gms card. It's actually the Gelli card from Clarity Stamps.

A final photo to see the resources I started with. Hope a lot more of you will have a go at making your own. I don't think they will be the exact same size as Kate Crane's but it's easy to adapt her instructions to fit. 

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